The Republic of Dissent

Evolved taste and snobbery

Sugary excerpt of the day from Roger Ebert whose blog is a must-read:

I ruffled some feathers after "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" was released in 2009. It was so stupid it was almost criminal. Noting that some of its fans considered it one of the greatest films ever made, I suggested perhaps they were not "sufficiently evolved." Oh, did that make people angry. What snobbery! Who did I think I was?

I was indeed a snob, if you agree with this definition: "A person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people." I do believe that. Not superior to all other people, but to some, most probably including those who think "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a great film. That is not simply ego on my part. It is a faith that after writing and teaching about films for more than 40 years, my tastes are more evolved than those of a fanboy. It is quite possible to devise a defense of "T2RF," as its fans affectionately call it. One persuasive critic likened it to pop art. Well, okay. He had an argument, he had his reasons, he considered it in a particular context. But to argue I am a snob for not liking T2RF as much as "everybody does" devalues thought and experience.

What am I getting at here? The way to know more about anything is to deepen your experience of it.

The bad side of fluff

Sugary excerpt of the best review I have read of Sex and the City 2 written by Lynne Miles  (h/t), which I hope convinces the right people to stop beating a dead and decomposed horse:

(...) it hasn’t gone unnoticed that SATC has never been great on race issues. Women of colour have been noticeably absent from the series, something which the first film tried to correct with the inclusion of Jennifer Hudson (not especially well). But SATC2 is breathtaking in its attitude towards the Middle East, and to Muslim women in general. The treatment of Abu Dhabi as a kind of Arabian-nights style theme park raises an eyebrow. The cultural appropriation is cringe-worthy. The portrayal of anyone brown there as either Qu’ran-wielding fundamentalist, cowering wife, or a some sort of ‘poor but wise’ character to allow Carrie to demonstrate her benevolence made me wince. By the time the four Manhattanites are staring at a Muslim women wearing a niquab, first slack-jawed then openly sniggering as she eats a plate of fries, I had my head in my hands with mortification.

Fashionable ennui

Just for fun, an excerpt of Roger Ebert's review of Sex and the City 2:

Some of these people make my skin crawl. The characters of "Sex and the City 2" are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row. Their defining quality is consuming things. They gobble food, fashion, houses, husbands, children, vitamins and freebies. They must plan their wardrobes on the phone, so often do they appear in different basic colors, like the plugs you pound into a Playskool workbench.(...)Then it's back to the humdrum married life of our gal Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) and the loathsome Mr. Big (Chris Noth). Carrie, honey, how can you endure life with this purring, narcissistic, soft-velvet idiot? He speaks loudly enough to be heard mostly by himself, his most appreciative audience. And he never wants to leave the house at night, preferring to watch classic black-and-white movies on TV. This leads to a marital crisis. Carrie thinks they should talk more. But sweetheart, Mr. Big has nothing to say. At least he's provided you with a Manhattan apartment that looks like an Architectural Digest wet dream.

Robin Hood as an anti-tax Reaganite

Interesting take from Alex Massie on Robin Hood:

Robin really is an anti-tax warrior inspired by oppressive levels of taxation that have enslaved and impoverished the people, leaving them with barely enough for themselves.
He doesn't "steal" from the rich, he confiscates money from the state (and its officers) to return it to the taxpayers. In other words, philosophically and instinctively, he's a Reaganite and, frankly, one would not be surprised to see Robin explain, over a haunch of venison, that if only the state listened to reason it might appreciate that the levels of taxation it imposes upon the peasantry are at Laffer Curve* levels and that productivity, revenues and happiness might all increase if taxes were lowered to a more reasonable, justifiable level.

I'm willing to buy Massie's assertion. I have never thought of Robin Hood as a socialist or a fervent believer in social justice, but rather as someone who believe fanatically that government wasn't entitled to take the people's money, that is to tax them.

Thus, in a weird way, Robin Hood has more in common with Ron Paul than with Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader.

The Hurt Locker's American-centrism

Astute observation from Chris Bertram about The Hurt Locker:

Purely as a piece of cinema, The Hurt Locker is probably the better film [better than the Green Zone], but politically it is nowhere, and indeed it suffers from the same syndrome as many Hollywood Vietnam pictures – they are all about Americans and how they feel, and the poor natives appear as mere ciphers.

Manufactured realism

Quote of the mid-day from Aaron Bady who continues to make great points on The Hurt Locker:

(...) the problem with The Hurt Locker is that it poses as realism, that it pretends to portray what happens over there. But it doesn’t; like all realism, it’s a subjective fantasy clothed in the appearance of objectivity. But while The Hurt Locker performs the very same techno-philic detachment which enables a man in a humvee to run over a child, making the entire country into a bomb to be defused makes it seem as if the problem starts and originates there. They set the bombs, you see, and they are the ones who would put a child in harm’s way. And while the movie has the courage to admit that the war hasn’t gone well, this is akin to the brave honesty of admitting that the Titanic’s prospects look dim after hitting the iceberg.

Environmentalist movies

Thought-provoking sugary excerpt taken from Rick Salutin's great op-ed in the Globe and Mail:

The Oscar combat between The Hurt Locker and Avatar, I'd say, was miscast as low-cost, feisty, relevant war film versus costly, hyped Hollywood blockbuster. But really, The Hurt Locker was a formulaic, “blow everything up real good” movie that concealed social reality (all Iraqis as faceless villains or passive victims), as well as environmental impacts. It's Avatar that had the deist spirit of environmentalism, with a reverence for all forms of life, including newly evolving ones. It also had, I'd say, the true documentary spirit, appearances notwithstanding, and all the kids I know adored it.

Le dupe de son fantasme

Slavoj Zizek on fantasy, reality, and Avatar:

If we subtract fantasy from reality, then reality itself loses its consistency and disintegrates. To choose between "either accepting reality or choosing fantasy" is wrong: if we really want to change or escape our social reality, the first thing to do is change our fantasies that make us fit this reality. Because the hero of Avatar doesn't do this, his subjective position is what Jacques Lacan, with regard to de Sade, called le dupe de son fantasme.

I have to say that with time,  I'm starting to believe that fantasies are fantasies for a reason and that try to have them mash with reality is always a mistake. After all, who/what we become if we tear down or realize all our fantasies. My answer to that question is bodies, living thing without being, dasein.

Black Mammies and other 'positive' stereotypes

I agree with Adam Serwer on this:

Mammy" is not a "positive" stereotype. There are no "positive" stereotypes, all stereotypes are created with a dehumanizing flip side that is inseparable from the faint "compliment" used to justify their invocation. But the legacy of the Mammy in particular is a grotesque one. Like every other carefully engineered old-school caricature of black people, it's meant to reinforce notions of what kind of behavior is appropriate--in this case, a docile, even happy acquiescence to white authority. "Mammy" was meant to depict black women as ugly and asexual, content to exist as surrogate mothers to the saintly white children of their owners or employers. Mammy's false happiness assures white people that the institutions of slavery and later Jim Crow have black people's consent and approval, her rotund body an alibi for the rampant exploitation of black women by their white slave masters. 
There's simply nothing "positive" about it. Mammy may give some people the warm fuzzies, but that has to do with whom the stereotype flatters. It sure as hell doesn't flatter black women.

The Hurt Locker, America, and the need to have it both ways

Aaron Bady has a great and must read review of the Hurt Locker at the Valve, which strikes me as being on point

I don’t think it’s a great film, first of all; its characters are fairly tired war-movie clichés (another cowboy who gets results? really?), its ticking time-bomb scenarios are suspenseful in almost the cheapest way possible—a literal ticking time-bomb—and the dialogue ranges from the bathetic to the banal (the line “I’m too old for this shit” badly needs to be retired). (,,,)
But more than that, the movie can’t seem to decide what kind of a hero or anti-hero it wants its main character to be; is he the awesome cowboy who gets results because he breaks the rules? Or is he a supreme asshole who puts the satisfaction of awesome bomb turning-off over the well being of his buddies and success of the mission? Manifestly, he is both, and the movie can’t decide if the young soldier’s eventual “fuck you” to him is where it wants to place its narrative emphasis (...)
Like America, I think, this movie needs to have it both ways, which the penultimate man vs. woman narrative turn lets it do: it wipes the slate clean by making a movie that has been about men fighting with each other (the exact same Kirk-Spock dilemma, in fact, mediating the same Bush-Obama problem) into a narrative about a beset man’s melodrama of escape from the “encroaching, constricting, destroying society” of a particular feminine and domestic influence. The former story would bring up uncomfortable problems; the latter solves them in a comfortably Dodge-Charger-American-Man sort of way.

First, I have to say that I liked the Hurt Locker because it was a different American film about war, one which didn't have too many special effects to make the audience forget that that it is about people and destruction. Nevertheless, I felt that it was limited precisely because Kathryn Bigelow refused to make definite points and chose to be safe in order to please everybody and not to be attacked for having made an anti-American movie or just a patriotic movie that ignores the costs of war. That said, I think it was smart of Bigelow to limit her focus and not to try to answer questions that she knew answering would crippled her film, but forcing it to take a stand or a side on the Iraq war.I see the Hurt Locker as incomplete enterprise, as the beginning of something else within America if somebody has the courage to grab a camera and to say actually " Shit, this is what war is all about and does to people."

The Hurt Locker and the realities of the Iraq war

Tom Streithorst argues that the Hurt Locker shouldn't have won the Oscar for best picture because it doesn't portray accurately the war in Iraq:

Before making Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola famously made a list of all the things that should go into a Vietnam war movie. If I were to make such a list for Iraq, it would include: Egyptian interpreters who don’t understand Iraqi Arabic and their American bosses who don’t have a clue they are making up both questions and answers, US soldiers who spend their entire tour in Iraq never leaving the base, and grizzled Mississippian truck drivers earning over $100,000 a year hauling the pork chops and ice cream from Kuwait that feed the troops. But the most important thing I would include is the casual killing of innocent Iraqi civilians, not from malice but from fear and misunderstanding.
Three scenes are absolutely wrong. In one, Sergeant James escapes his base and roams Baghdad by himself, lost and confused, looking for an Iraqi he suspects of killing a boy. No, Americans never leave the base by themselves. In the second, the soldiers wander around their base, drunk out of their minds. One of the exceptional features of the Iraq war is it is probably the first war ever fought without alcohol or drugs. And, in the last and worst, our boys have their guns aimed at an Iraqi they suspect to be a car bomber. Despite his repeatedly not obeying their orders to back up, they don’t shoot him, even though they themselves might die.
I repeat, I have massive admiration for the American soldiers in Iraq. In my experience they are brave without being brutal. It is an honorable military: the most honorable and the least vicious I have hung out with. But its primary ethos is one of limiting US casualties. In the film, Sergeant James is a cowboy, eager to risk his life, yet ever careful of not risking the lives of Iraqi civilians. In my experience this is the wrong way around. The cowboys in the US military are never reckless with their own or their comrades’ lives, but careless with those of the Iraqis.

The problem with Streithorst's arguments is that he makes two key and false assumptions. The first is that the most important quality of a movie whether it is about war or anything else is its accuracy, the fact that it portrays what it is meant to portray as it is. One has only to pick a few random movies of the last decade which were deemed to be serious and wonderful to watch to realize that in Hollywood and elsewhere the most important quality is the entertainment value. The second assumption, which renders Streithorst's arguments moot is that he thinks that the Academy, the people voting for the Oscars care about reality, about accuracy and that they are not motivated by other factors, which they consider to be more essential such as politics, commercialism and glamour. The point is that I doubt seriously that the people who voted about the Hurt Locker cared or will care about its inaccuracies and would be shocked to know that reality in Iraq is very different for all that mattered was that the movie felt real to them.

Yep, feelings trump reality!

The Wire and Ideology

For some reason, I missed The Wire while is on Television, I ike to believe that law school is the sole culprit of that outrageous omission. However, I have started watching it recently and I have been surprised about how addictive it is and how it manages to use stereotypes without being offensive. Thus, it is also because I'm both a new and late fan of the Wire that I enjoyed reading Andrew Seal's post on The Wire comparing it to the Hurt Locker (which was a good movie) and offering some explanations for the reason of its popularity, Sugary excerpt:

But I also think we can view The Wire as a multi-protagonist version of this genre, although it is certainly more canny about the possibilities of truly sinking beneath ideology. It has also been seen as a sort of “post-” or “non-ideological” text, and one of the remarkable things about it is how readily anyone can find their own ideology validated in it—conservatives see indictments of welfare policies as surely as liberals see indictments of the drug war. (Liberals are more right, but that’s not the point.) To return full-circle, I think it is very possible to read The Wire as the survival story par excellence of our time, and to see fraternity as its greatest ideal—again, a broken ideal, but nevertheless, the ideal and central theme of the show. And it too features a very extreme distinction between foot-soldiers and commanders, and some of its central plots are about the impossibility of moving from one position to the other. And, although, as I said, it is never innocent of the pervasiveness of ideology, one of its most straightforward points is that the “higher-ups” in the police force, the government, or the newspaper are more ideological, more given to justifying their actions through abstractions. Bullshit, in words more appropriate to the subject, always rises.
Obviously it is no great scandal to talk about the unparalleled success of The Wire in achieving its vision; I think it is also very reasonable to suggest that its success is part of a broader turn toward this particular strategy of using survival as a figure for a sub-ideological space in narrative, a margin between a non-resistance to ideology and an ultimate refusal of nihilism. I see this particular paradigm as culturally dominant in contemporary depictions of conflict and violence, and likely to become more so.

Ambivalences, equivocations, and simplifications

Bombastic sugary excerpt from a letter written by Vanessa Redgrave, Julian Schnabel and Martin Sherman in the New York Review of Books (Hat tip: Norm Geras):

A group of prominent filmmakers has protested the Toronto Film Festival's choice of Tel Aviv, in its "City to City" section showcasing films from and about a particular city, as "a propaganda campaign on behalf of...an apartheid regime." Their letter declared that the signatories were not protesting against the Israeli filmmakers who were included or their films. Their stand seems to us to be improperly thought out and to have distressing implications.
The protesters use the term "apartheid regime." We oppose the current Israeli government, but it is a government. Freely elected. Not a regime. Words matter.
In their letter the protesters say that "Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages." True. Just as much of America is built on obliterated Indian property. Are they implying that Tel Aviv should not exist? At least not in its present form? Which would mean that the State of Israel (the original State of Israel, not including the occupied territories) should not exist. Thousands of Palestinians have died through the years because the Israeli government, military, and part of the population fervently believe that the Arab states and, indeed, much of the world do not want Israel to exist. How then are we halting this never-ending cycle of violence by promoting the very fears that cause it?

I have the sick feeling that defending just causes too often give people the permission not so much to use words without weighing their meaning, but assertions without verifying their veracity or without caring about their truthiness precisely because they are defending a cause, which they feel is noble. But again, do you have a decent chance to be heard and to make a difference in the current environment if you don't shout, provoke, or are just fanatically/religiously inflexible ? Of course words matter, but so does every little thing that pollutes capital debates by making them about who is good rather than about what is right and what should be done.

Giving Brigitte Bardot a second look

For some reason, I've never been able to like Brigitte Bardot or to look at her as someone other than a racist old and bitter woman who loves animals more than she loves certain types of people. I think that it is due to the fact that I didn't live during the times when she was the sexiest woman in the world and that I hate with an Heathcliff-like passion her most celebrated movie And God created Woman. However, I'm tempted to give Bardot a second look after reading this from Agnès Poirier, whom I have no trouble liking:

In 1958, Raymond Cartier, then editor of Paris-Match, dedicated eight pages to an investigation of "le cas Bardot". He summoned psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists to try to unpick the roots of the Bardot phenomenon, and to ask what lessons could be drawn about "the modern crowd's psychology and the evolution of today's mores" that could be used in helping to turn back the tide.
He scrutinised in particular the events in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Providence and Memphis, where cinema managers were arrested for showing And God Created Woman and judges in wigs and robes showed up in delegation to express their outrage at its licentious nature. Would Bardot be banned from American screens? Paris-Match psychoanalysts proceeded to delve into her comfortable childhood and upbringing in the smart 16th arrondissement of Paris, near the Eiffel tower. She lived in a seven-room apartment with an older sister, a nanny and parents whom she spoke formally to, using the term "vous" rather than "tu". The family cat Crocus, "having become as bourgeois as its owners, didn't even think of devouring" the birds that lived in a little white cage.
Eight pages later, Cartier concluded: "Bardot is immoral, from head to toe." Agreeing with the American censors of the east coast, he declared: ban Bardot.
Faced with the bourgeois backlash, French intellectuals suddenly understood that there was much more at stake than just the lovely curves of a young star. In a 1959 essay about Bardot called The Lolita Syndrome, Simone de Beauvoir foresaw Bardot's entire life with its upheavals and triumphs. She called Bardot the "locomotive of women's history", and compared her irruption into French society with existentialism, presenting Bardot as the first and most liberated woman of postwar France.
De Beauvoir wrote: "When Marlene Dietrich exhibited her silk-wrapped thighs while singing in her husky voice, she was casting a spell . . . Brigitte Bardot doesn't cast spells; she acts. Her flesh doesn't have the generosity that symbolises passivity. Her clothes are not fetishes and when she undresses, she reveals no mystery. She simply shows off her body, which is in constant movement. She walks, she dances, she moves. In the hunting game, she is both hunter and prey. Males are an object for her, as much as she is an object for them. This is precisely what hurts males' pride." It was clear to all that Bardot, like Albert Camus's stranger, experienced the world through her senses.
Nowadays, feminists both in Britain and the US would shriek in horror at the thought that Bardot might be heralded as the emblem of the liberated woman. But that is just how designer Nicole Farhi remembers her: "Bardot was totally liberated; it was extraordinary to see, especially at a time when no women were allowed to be, and it was all the more unusual that she came from a bourgeois family. It was fantastic to see that she could just throw conventions away. She lived the way she pleased, she dressed the way she wanted; in that sense her freedom was very provocative."

Marion Barry, Obama, and America

I just watched the Marion Barry documentary on HBO, The Nine Lives of Marion Barry and I have to say that it was great. It's a must-see for anyone who loves politics and America. As a former resident of DC, I had head a lot of stories about Barry, most of them were bad although almost all people acknowledged that he was a politician who cared (whatever that means), that he had so much potential, which he wasted shamefully and most of all, that DC is what it is today because of him, a city, which is both prospering and struggling with its identity, poverty, drugs the racial divide, and its Americanness. The most touching part of the documentary was seeing him struggling to climb the stairs to get to his apartment with a sandwich in his hands. It made me wonder what defines success in politics, is it resilience, longevity, adoration, wealth, or something else, something more,  a certain something less flashy and less exuberant? For some reason, at that moment, I thought of Barack Obama and I realized how hard, how heartbreaking it will be for me and for so many people to watch him fail and to accept that he had choices. Of course, Obama is no Marion Barry (or rather Marion Barry is no Barack Obama), but they have, at least, one essential thing in common: an incredible number of people believe fanatically, desperately in them. They are, both,  the epitome of their dreams and what they believe to be the incredible promises of America. I heard Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Franco-Germans leader of the Green Party, say on French TV, after his triumph in the European Elections, that he cried during Obama's victory speech. I shook my head in disbelief disgusted with this Hollywood thing that seduces us into becoming the slaves to our emotions, not to say to our passions. My only hope is that there won't be a documentary 4 or 8 years for now asking the immortal Langston Hughes question: What happens to a Dream deferred?

The disappearance of the Femme Fatale

Interesting bit in the Independent on the disappearance of the Femme Fatale in modern cinema:

Mary Harron is one of few high-profile female film-makers working in the US: her films include American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page. She links the decline of the screen temptress to the rise of celebrity culture. "You know so much about stars now; there's such a relentless uncovering of everything in Hollywood," says the director, who's giving a masterclass at the Birds Eye View festival. "Actors have become kind of everyday. And the femme fatale is about mystery."
(…) The dearth of old-style glamour could be part of it, Harron feels. "When I was making The Notorious Bettie Page, I looked at a lot of films from the Fifties. In them, women are really female – the fashion and the bodies are very curvy and exaggerated – and the men are ultra-male. It's a polarised sexuality. I guess that created extreme notions of a female or male persona. Only 10 years later, people were becoming more androgynous."
The writer and critic Anne Billson (whose latest novel and collection of film reviews have just been published by lulu.com) cites changing audiences. Women were avid cinema-goers in the Forties and these remarkable roles, and stars, were created to spark their fantasies. Today, Billson says, "the target demographic is a 16-year-old boy, whose idea of what a woman consists of is not very sophisticated".
(…) There's the rub. The femme fatale has a lineage in literature, from Salome onwards, yet the signs are that she is herself a fatality of the new millennium.

I’m wondering if the disappearance of the Femme Fatale in Hollywood movies isn’t just an indication that she was never more than an imaginary creature created to satisfy someone’s fantasy and never meant to have a lot of substance.  This would explain in part the use of the term “fatale” since she is glamorous, sexual, and provocative, but yet mysterious and thus surely aggressive and possibly cruel. Her creators were/are mostly interested in having a beautiful thing that moves provoke and incite desires and strife. They didn’t/don’t want their creature to be complex and multifaceted. The Femme Fatale was/is rarely allowed to be something other than a being in itself unless the point of her cinematographic/artistic existence is to make a greater point in which case she becomes a utilitarian tool.  

Last Saturday of November

It's the last of Saturday of November and I'm ecstatic because there are so many things I'm looking forward to. I'm planning a trip, which is going to take away me not only for the holidays, but also for the whole month of January. It's when you plan a trip that you realize that it's a tough time out there because people aren't traveling as much as they used to . In any case, things are good and if you are looking for a good time at the movies, watch Australia,which is worth watching not because of the two big stars of the film Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, but for the other members of the cast, which make the movie good to watch even if it is a bit too long.

Morbid fascination

I just saw W, Oliver Stone's movie about George W. Bush and I thought that it was a waste of time for two reasons. The first reason is that Oliver Stone doesn't have any distance from the main character, Bush, to make a credible movie whose goal isn't simply to justify its contempt for him and his policies. The second is that one gets the feeling that the goal of Stone isn't to be a filmmaker, but an historian by getting there first, that is by making his views of Bush part of history. For those of us who believe that Bush was a bad president for reasons more complicated than his conservatism and his alleged simple mindedness (which I never believed in ), W is a movie that is both depressing and alarming because it dumbs down the political discourse by making the people believe that the sole differences between a JFK (the greatest president in a Hollywoodized world, but not necessarily in real life) and a Bush are intelligence and righteousness.

Describing a man of mystery

Sugary excerpt from Chris Petit’s Profile of French Director Jean-Luc Godard in the Guardian:

He suffers from vertigo (how appropriate). He admits to having no imagination and taking everything from life. When he was given a camera to use by film-maker Don Pennebaker, Pennebaker was touched by his incompetence, which included the beginner's mistake of zooming in and out too much. He was introduced to the fleshpots of Paris in the 1950s by an early mentor, film director Jean-Pierre Melville. Financial transactions with prostitutes were treated as potential mises en scène (Vivre sa vie, Sauve qui peut); cinema as whore. His handwriting features in many of his films; ditto his voice. He plays tennis, or did (he's nearly 80 now). When he passed on production money from a film to Italian revolutionaries, they used it to open a transvestite bar. He smoked a fat version of Gitanes called Boyards. In his Marxist days, he still travelled first class. He tried to avoid writing scripts whenever possible. His once great friend François Truffaut called him "the Ursula Andress" of the revolutionary movement. He is Protestant in temperament and an unforgiving moralist. He drops names. He lay in a coma for a week after a motorcycle accident. He can be nasty. He has been known to suffer hopeless crushes. In late adolescence he was committed by his father into psychiatric care. His on-set tantrums are legendary. He is the Saint Simeon Stylites of cinema, atop his pillar, or, as Truffaut described him, nothing but a piece of shit on a pedestal. For all his utopian ideals, conflict and rejection are the dominant impulses of his life and work.

I’ve always preferred Truffaut to Godard because Truffaut although he was as much of a tortured soul as Godard, he was more of a literary director in the sense that he could have been a good novelist if he had felt the same passion for writing as he felt for directing.

Reviewing Sex (and the City) part deux

I saw Sex an the City last night and I have to admit that I don't know what to say about it because I couldn't hate it and yet, I couldn't bring myself to love it or even to like it. It was like eating American cheese when you are looking for cheese and when you are a good palate; you know that French cheese is always better and yet, because you long for cheese, you eat what you are being served without complaining. My only problem with the movie is that it tries to have both ways: one of its message is that clothes, accessories, brands, stuff matter and the other one is that once you have all of these stuff you can afford to be simple, to be yourself, and to celebrate your wedding at a family restaurant instead of a five star one. I'm not buying it, but I don't think it matters here because it isn't a substantive issue because for all of its glitz, Sex an the City has no point of view and no substance. It is content on being superficial and commercially successful and the distressing thing is that it had an embarrassment of riches to make the movie something more than an acceptable summer blockbuster.

Reviewing Sex (and the City)

I haven’t yet watched Sex and the City.  I was planning on seeing early late last night, but I didn’t because I was too tired and after reading the reviews I’m glad I didn’t make the effort. Rick Groen says the following in the Globe and Mail:

For sure, I liked the TV series, along with the fact that success turned the show into its own label, a designer brand unto itself, which may explain why, after the last episode aired four years ago, the series felt instantly dated, so yesterday's Valentino. But that dated quality doesn't begin to explain why I hate, loathe and despise – sorry to mince my words – the movie based on the TV show. Or perhaps that reaction (okay, overreaction) is intriguing too. After all, bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of a culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.

[..] Spoiler alert, the secret is out: There is no script, at least nothing recognizable as such to any sentient being with a room-temperature IQ. Instead, writer-director Michael Patrick King takes the designer brand that is the TV series, which he helped create, and simply mounts it on the screen, just sticks it up there along with the other brand names, the ones attached to dresses and shoes and handbags.

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Tribune writes:

I am not the person to review this movie. Perhaps you will enjoy a review from someone who disqualifies himself at the outset, doesn’t much like most of the characters and is bored by their bubble-brained conversations. Here is a 145-minute movie containing one (1) line of truly witty dialogue: “Her 40s is the last age at which a bride can be photographed without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext.”

[…] The movie of “Sex and the City” continues the saga of the four heroines of the popular HBO series, which would occasionally cause me to pause in my channel surfing. They are older but no wiser, and all facing some kind of a romantic crossroads. New Line has begged critics not to reveal plot secrets, which is all right with me, because I would rather have fun with plot details. […] “Sex and the City” was famous for its frankness, and we expect similar frankness in the movie. We get it, but each “frank” moment comes wrapped in its own package and seems to stand alone from the story. That includes (1) a side shot of a penis, (2) sex in positions other than the missionary, and (3) Samantha’s dog, which is a compulsive masturbator. I would be reminded of the immortal canine punch line (“because he can”), but Samantha’s dog is a female. “She’s been fixed,” says the pet lady, “but she has not lost the urge.”

Ouch! I can’t say that I’m surprised by the bad reviews because from knowing the Hollywood machine it was clear that the producers weren’t going to be willing to take some risks and to mess with the Sex an the City brand by giving any freedom to writers to mess with a popular product, the lives of characters, who have become too robotic to be interesting longer than the length of a television series (25 minutes) that's the reason why the focus is no longer on them but on what they buy, wear, and on the people they flirt or sleep with. Nevertheless, I’m going to go see the movie because there is no other movies for me to see and because I don’t want to have to see Iron Man three times. Sex athe City doesn’t have any excuse for its supposed bad quality because the Devil Wears Prada shows that a movie about Fashion and Pop and still be of good quality.

Plainness kills creativity

During the last week, I saw two movies, which are supposed to be summer blockbusters and which not only disappointed me, but irritated me because I sensed they could have been good had the writers and the directors decided to take more risks and not to be bet on plainness, which nowadays is safely lucrative when it is well packaged. The two movies were the latest Indiana Jones and the sequel of the Chronicles of Narnia. I have to admit that I kept wondering while I was watching those movies whether there was something I was missing or whether the purpose of the summer movies when they are condemned to become blockbusters is to provide viewers with a sensory experience that will keep them from leaving the theater because they are watching things and people that are in perpetual actions without letting them think, take a breath and to think about what they are watching. When I was watching Cate Blanchett trying desperately to make her unoriginal and stereotypical character, I kept wondering what the purpose of the movie was and why George Lucas and Spielberg made it when they obviously don't need the money. I realized that I wasn't seeing the big picture and that nowadays, in Hollywood as anywhere else on our planet, it people are attracted to big moving things even if it means watching a train wreck, even if it means being part of a movement that is doomed. People want action because it gives them the illusion that they have controlled over something or rather that they are moving towards something. I would have loved Indiana Jones if Spielberg had taken the risk to make a picture like Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, that is to make a movie, which doesn’t try to get around its hero's age, but uses it to make power points about aging and about the fact that it changes you without necessarily giving you the chance to feel young again by marrying the love of your life and a son whom you never knew you had.

The beauty of accents

Selling domestic culture

Carl Bessai on the necessity of governments, in this case the Canadian Federal government, to sell domestic culture:

Bessai has been lobbying for changes to domestic film policies - and attitudes. He chairs the First Weekend Club, an organization that encourages people to see Canadian films on their opening weekends so they have a shot at sticking around for a second week in theatres.

But he believes that legislative intervention is necessary to give Canadians access to the films supported by their tax dollars. He doesn't understand a system that funds the making of films but then doesn't do anything to help them get shown in theatres.

"This is my sixth movie, so I've had six of these experiences," Bessai says. "And you know what? It's like you get a little bit numb after a while. You stop investing in the hope that your film will actually stay in the theatres. You know it won't."

Without subsidies or quotas, what's the incentive, he asks, for theatres to show an unknown Canadian film instead of a Hollywood movie with more obvious box office potential? "They'll say 'We can play a blockbuster with no advertising, no work, do nothing and everyone will come, or we can take your stupid Canadian movie and no one's going to come.' "

The Canadian-versus-American issue looms large in Bessai's career - and not just on the exhibition end. As a Vancouver director, he finds himself competing for resources - in particular crews - against Hollywood blockbusters that ride into town with bigger budgets. It means, Bessai says, that domestic productions rarely have access to the best crews, and small production companies like his are expected to match the prices the big studios offer for location rentals (part of the reason, along with bigger tax breaks and gorgeous scenery, he shot Normal in Victoria instead of Vancouver). It's enough to make a director feel like a second-class citizen in his own city.

[…] "I believe in the domestic film culture," he says. "I can't be a colonial, I can't be someone who just sits here with no voice and just continues to digest Americana - Canadians have a right to their own stories."

The only word that comes to mind when I read Bessai’s words is “ah!” because one only has to look at France to understand that governments don’t know how “to sell” culture because first, they don’t understand it and  second, because they aren't good at selling anything.

How to get personal

In this scene taken from François Ozon's 8 Femmes ( 8 Women), Isabelle Huppert sings one of Françoise Hardy's best song Message Personnel (Private message). What is surprising is how good Huppert's voice actually sounds if she were an American actress and a little bit younger, I'm sure that somebody would have persuaded her to make a music album. It seems that in America, everybody wants to be Leonardo Da Vinci and to be good at different things, the problem is that Da Vinci even in his time, was the exception not the norm and that doing too many things most of the times  means sacrificing greatness.

Movies and Religion

Jean Kazez has a review of The Golden Compass, which she liked, which just shows that matters of taste are always because they are most of the times completely subjective. Her review is interesting because she gives the movie, in my opinion more credits than it deserves by interpreting its meaninglessness. Sugary excerpt:

A moviegoer could come away thinking Pullman [Philip Pullman the author of the book] is for witches and demons and multipe universes, talking polar bears and mysterious dust. The movie’s real theme, though, is truth. Good in the movie is lined up with free inquiry and the unimpeded search for the truth. Evil is the monstrous institution of the magisterium, which battles against the truth- seekers.

But wait, if the movie is pro-truth, why shouldn’t it be construed as pro-God, or even pro-Jesus. (Wasn’t it Jesus who said “I am the way and the truth”?) It will take any moviegoer a moment of honest reflection to admit the power of the movie’s message. All religions claim contact with truth, but they don’t empower members of the religion to be truth-seekers themselves.

I’m not just talking about the obvious cases, like the Roman Catholic church. I think the same is true even in the most liberal religious communities. The movie brilliantly makes children the target of the magisterium–it’s brilliant because children really are the crux of the matter. They don’t yet believe, and will ask challenging questions, if permitted.

This whole business of teaching children “truths” before they’re mature enough to make up their own minds is tricky. We do it all the time. We teach them all sorts of facts before they can verify them as facts. We teach them moral values before they can discuss morality. We teach them political attitudes before they are in any position to understand the pro’s and con’s.

Religion is a special case. For one reason, that’s because children are allowed to ask questions about all the other topics, but discouraged from asking questions about religion. In the middle of a religion class, even at the most liberal church or synagogue, a child cannot raise his or her hand and say “is there really a god”?

I wish that I had seen the same movie as she had or maybe I was too distracted by the images and the fact that the actors were using a dialogue that they themselves didn’t seem to understand to realize that the movie actually got somewhere or to something. There is something that I know for sure after watching the movie and it is that the book has to be entertaining, but isn’t good? I don’t know and I may never know because the movie didn’t make me want to read the book, it made me want to reread the last Harry Potter book.

Falling out of love with DC

I had a quiet birthday weekend, which is exactly what I wanted considering the fact that I'm in a transitional period at the moment. My most important realization during this short period was that I've fallen out of love with Washington, DC. It is becoming increasingly difficult to stay in the city without feeling  uneasy and dow. I started feeling this way in the summer, but I told myself that it had nothing to do with DC, but everything to do with me. which isn't false, but things haven't changed I've fallen out of love with the DC. But apart from my feelings for DC, the weekend was short and interesting, I realized also that I think too much. I don't know how to take a step back and just relax. I know that I'm going to have to force myself to learn how to relax because otherwise, I'm going to crash and burn out. That is what is happening to me right now, I'm a brain dead woman walking who is trying to persuade herself that taking a break from blogging isn't the end of the world. Anyway, enough personal talk, I'm back and that it's what matters. To talk about something else, I saw the Golden Compass last Friday and I was disappointed for two reasons. The first reason is that I felt that I was in an universe that was very beautiful, but artificial, insignificant, and meaningless. The second reason is that I expected a lot from the movie and that what I got was just a part of something, which is advertised as big. It was too obvious that the director saved some of the best scenes for last since the movie is supposed to be the first of three. I felt cheated, like I had paid for a full meal and just gotten the appetizer, which was intriguing, but just not enough.

Refusing to accept the cold

It's cold and raining in Washington, DC! I'm having a hard time accepting it. It was so beautiful for so long that I had banished the idea of winter from my mind, which explains why I just can't stand this harsh weather. Anyway, this is an excerpt of a movie that was out a few years ago named French Kiss with Kevin Kline who plays the role of the obnoxious, but sensitive Frenchman and Meg Ryan who plays the beauty and bold American. It is a movie filled with stereotypes, but enjoyable. I hope that it helps you supporting this cold weather.

It's the hard knock life...

This is one of the last scenes of François Truffaut's L'Argent de Poche (Small Change) in which the school teacher explains to the students some lessons of life.

The past, the present, the future

This video is an excerpt from The Remains of the Day, the film based on the superb novel of Kazuo Ishiguro. In this excerpt, different European and American dignitaries are at a conference organized by a British Nazi sympathizer, Lord Darlington, whose ambitious goal is to avoid a second war with Germany. They all end it by making a toast saying that Germany wants peace and is a Friend not a foe, until the American dignitary, Mr Farraday played by the late Christopher Reeves, stands up and calls them all of amateurs who don't know anything about foreign policy. I think that it is a toast that could be made today even though I wonder whether Amateurism hasn't become the norm in the diplomatic arena.

The ugliness of dark skin

I don't know what to say about seeing this commercial, which is done by Bollywood biggest stars Shahrukh Khan, I thought that things had evolved and that especially in India, it wouldn't be an handicap to have dark skin. Well, I guess I was wrong.

A classic

This video is an excerpt of Les 400 Coups (400 Blows) one of the best films from François Truffaut. One makes this excerpt striking is how estrange the adults are from the children and that it seems that the distance between them seems unabridgeable.

How to learn to speak English in French

The Beauty and the slob

Joe Queenan had an interesting review of the movie Knocked up in the Guardian yesterday in which he made some good points about such comedies and the way that they portray relations between men and women or rather between beautiful women and slackers. Queenan argues that Knocked up and other movies, which match successful and gorgeous women with slobs with no ambition and no culture, are not only offensive, but also misogynistic. Sugary excerpt:

Thus, even though Knocked Up - like The 40 Year Old Virgin and all its other kin - focuses on immature, misogynist, porn-obsessed male losers who revel in one another's smelly, unhygienic company, there are apparently insights and laughs aplenty to be found in this tale of a loser ultimately saved by the love of a good woman - a good woman, naturally, endowed with a stunning rack.

There is, of course, another way of looking at this subject: that the new genre of romantic comedies are not really upbeat, coming-of-age motion pictures about young male schmucks who are saved by the love of a good woman, but heart-rending tragedies about beautiful young women who are doomed to spend the rest of their lives with juvenile, not especially good-looking dorks. […] Knocked Up stars Rogen, who wrote the script with Apatow, as an overweight, unemployed stoner who hits the big time, romance-wise, when he accidentally gets blonde bombshell Katherine Heigl pregnant. Knocked Up made quite an impression when it was released in the US, not only with the public (mostly young males) but with critics - who are almost all male - ostensibly because it was not explicitly idiotic like Talledega Nights or Anchorman, and because it purported to make a larger point. The point it purports to make is that men do not grow up until they have children, and maybe not even then. This will probably not come as a complete surprise to most of the women on this planet.

The other point that Knocked Up seems to make is that women, even the ones who work in television, exist for no other reason than to help men grow up, if necessary by having babies. As Denby notes, this is an idea that has been kicking around since the early Renaissance, when Dante Alighieri frantically sought salvation through the ministrations of his beloved Beatrice: men need women to inspire them to the loftiest creative and moral heights; otherwise they will fail miserably. But unlike Rogen, at least Dante had a job.

I’m less offended by movies such as Knocked up than Queenan because I have grown up with men boys such as Rogen all of my life and that I have ceased to take them seriously. I mean by that childish male fantasies have stopped to bug me since I have realized that I actually have a choice about whether to indulge them and about whether to allow myself to become a vehicle to help a man grow up or rather find himself. The truth is that men and women all have unreal, superficial, and crude fantasies about each other and that the difference once again is that in most cases, women have to bow and to accept to play along. To me, the real question is about so much about why slackers and slobs are getting the girl, but why men are obsessed with making love synonymous with submission for women. Knocked up and other movies, the beautiful woman love and submits by giving up her ideals because she loves the guy, In Sabrina and other movies where the poor and inadequate girl is in love with a stud, the ugly duckling becomes beautiful and does everything that she can to meet her man ideals. In other words, the message is that love, woman love is about submission, not so much about pleasing the man, but about letting him be the conqueror and accepting to be the woman who is hidden behind the great man. What is key is to learn is that fantasies, societal norms,  whatever one learns about love is meaning for at the end of it as always there is the question of choice. Thus, I laugh wholeheartedly when I saw Knocked up because it is predictable, incredibly safe and empowering because I knew that I didn’t want to be the beauty, who ended up with the slacker.

On the same subject of Hollywood and of unsavory romantic comedies, Keith Stuart on the Guardian Game compared the portrayal of women in movies with the ones in video Games. Sugary excerpt:

The mainstream games industry usually takes its cue from movie trends, but here the two media have diverged. Games had their dark period ten years ago when the success of Lara Croft gave rise to a sudden plethora of female leads with breasts like beachballs and waists so tiny a baby could wrap its fingers round them. […]

If anything women are conspicuous by their absence. The big shooters like GRAW, Gears of War, COD, Halo and Medal of Honor have little room for them, pushing females into non-playable support roles. Story-sequence fodder. Bioshock makes an intriguing use of girls as part of a moral decision each player must make. Like the Final Girl in slasher flicks, gender is employed to trap the viewer into an emotive, protecting position. Perhaps this is why the female lead character of Heavenly Sword is dying. Games developers, in the vacuum caused by Lara-mania, are no longer confident or comfortable creating straightforward female leads. […] Games use gender differently to films. Films are largely about relationships, games are largely about action. In films, women are often defined negatively in contrast to, and through their relationships with, the affable male characters, but these dynamics don't exist in most games.

I just wonder which is better - objectification or ostracism?

Looking for a fight: Jason Bourne and his women

Sarah Churchwell has an article on Comment is Free titled “The Bourne Misogyny.” Her thesis is that the Bourne movies use women characters in a stereotypical fashion, by making them accessories. Sugary excerpt:

There are female action heroes these days. In TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess and now Heroes, and movies such as Catwoman, Elektra and the Matrix films, women kick some ass. But these are all science-fiction fantasies: they take place in imaginary worlds, and several of them were notable flops. The rule seems to be that the more "realistic" an action film, the more hapless the women. The men can outwit entire government agencies, fight off 43 assailants at once, emerge from spectacular car crashes unscathed, and survive 10-storey drops into the East river (merely what Bourne does in Ultimatum). The women mainly stand around looking anxious. Joan Allen, who plays a CIA boss in all three films, has a slightly less thankless task; her character makes some intelligent decisions, but she isn't exactly stirring.

I disagree. I watched the last Bourne film, the Bourne Ultimatum last Friday. I thought that it was very good because it didn’t try to do too much and because it focuses on one person Jason Bourne played by Matt Damon. However, let’s assume that Churchwell is right for a second and that the women characters of the film are merely there to fill the screen. What would it mean? In other words, can a film be about misogyny to use Churchwell’s terms and still be not only entertaining, but worth seeing and instructive? My answer to that question is an emphatic yes because I think that films are not meant to please people and to portray reality as we wish it would instead of how the filmmaker perceives it to be or want it to be. Screaming that the Bourne Ultimatum is misogynistic because it doesn’t fulfill one’s vision of the world or of gender is not capricious, but it is also so useless. Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour is in my opinion one of the best movies ever made and yet, some have argued that it is misogynistic and Séverine, the woman character played by Cathérine Deneuve is not a real woman, but just an embodiment of a male fantasy. The point is that complaining that a movie portrays something bad or is bias toward something is in most cases nothing more than an assertion of one’s tastes and preferences unless more is provided to show that one’s taste should matter more than the one of its creator. Thus, after reading Churchwell’s article, I am left wondering where is the beef.

Sometimes, it really takes two

I read two articles this morning, which made my morning even though they left me very pensive. The first one is from the Little Professor on the new movie Becoming Jane, which strangely enough is not widely available in Washington DC. Sugary excerpt:

After watching the film, it struck me that biopics about the life of the author inadvertently contribute to the death of the author. That is, such films frequently represent authorship as transcription or collage; the author's own unique contribution frequently gets lost in the mix.  On the one hand, Becoming Jane does want to argue in favor of the imagination, in the form of Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe.  Radcliffe's bestsellers derive, we are told, from an mental "landscape," a wild and eerie place pointedly not embodied in her reserved, restrained figure and rather shabby setting.  And Jane's own plots, we are also eventually told, will also be unreal, if in a different sense: although Jane initially rejects the comforts of poetic justice in Fielding's Tom Jones, the novel which is also the source of her sexual awakening (this is one of the more literate seduction techniques in recent memory, I must say), her experience of romantic loss teaches her the need for stories in which everyone gets their just rewards.  In that sense, the film detaches fiction from "real life."   

I have seen the movie so it would be unfair of me to make a judgment about its quality. The first thought that I had when I heard that there was a movie about Jane Austen’s life, I wondered if that wasn’t a way for the makers of the movie (and the author, Jon Spence for it is based on a book titled Becoming Jane Austen) to have it both ways. Let me explain what I mean. My guess is that the movie would have been harder to sell and to commercialize if it didn’t make the assertion that it was about Jane Austen. Thus, Jane Austen in this case is the hook to attract a wider audience even though it seems clear from the reviews and from the trailer of the movie that it may be a well-made romantic film about a young woman trying desperately to find love. How many times have we seen that before? So to make it fresh and sexy, they used Jane Austen to attract bookish people who want to know more about the writer and they use Anne Hathaway to attract a younger and hipper audience who like her in her roles in the Princess Diaries and in the Devil Wears Prada. I wouldn’t surprise if Becoming Jane were a good movie, but I wonder if it sells what it promises implicitly that is a film about the life of Jane Austen.

The second article was a post by Louise Tucker on the Blog Books of the Guardian. It is about the fact that Ann Patchett was involved in a controversy when a book Truth and Beauty (which was a good, but a difficult and exhausting read because it is so intense) about her friend Lucy Grealy was assigned to freshmen at Clemson. Some people had trouble accepting that fact and went to extraordinary lengths to prevent her from giving a lecture at the School. Sugary excerpt:

Which brings me to my question. At Clemson, the minority did not win. Patchett still gave her talk, despite her friends urging her to cancel, despite the unfriendly newspaper and TV coverage and despite the fact that her book had been described as a "sewer". But, if Clemson, in the supposedly free US, can try to ban a writer and her work on this basis, how is it any different from those who imposed a fatwa on Salman Rushdie, or tried to imprison Orhan Pamuk? If bigots and the religious right can make the most mild-mannered and uncontroversial of writers think twice about discussing her work in public, what hope is there for those whose writing is far removed from either of those descriptions? And what hope is there for education, if teachers hesitate to include titles that may cause offence? I wonder now if I would still blithely choose to teach Madame Bovary (adultery), or Orlando (transsexual, or transgendered main character depending on your perspective), or even Ulysses (all those yesses...) what happens to our education system, and to our freedom to read, if, and when, those decisions are hampered by fear?

I think that Louise Tucker puts her finger on one of the contradictions of America, which is after all the only country on earth, which guarantees the pursuit of happiness to its citizens. However, increasingly in some parts of America, some thoughts, writings, forms of expression are forbidden because they are deemed anti-American or immoral. The question of purpose and of effectiveness is never asked in this type of heated confrontation between those who value free speech and those who asserts that not all speech is free and that they know obscenity and vileness when they see them. In other words, is it rational or even American to argue that some speech is so vile that is contagious for Americans who are so weak and so vulnerable that they can only be infected by materials, which are deemed by some to be inappropriate? What I’m trying to say is that it is easy to understand why it is difficult and forbidden to read Lolita in Tehran, but not why it is the case in Clemson or any place else in the United States.

Fascination, artists and evil

Sign and Sight has an interesting article on the fascination that too many artists have with evil and with people who embody it such as Hitler and Kim Jong II. Georg Diez, the author of the article uses the expression “the idiocy of artists” which he admits can be visionary even though he deplores this morbid fascination. However, Diez doesn’t answer the question whether this kind of art can be more than visionary and can defuse evil by humanizing and thus reminding the world that all of the people it has in a way elevated or rather debased to the mythical level of the Devil were all too human. For that reason, not only memory is important, but so is also the recognition that good and evil are about humanity and its choices. Of course, artists are prone to exaggeration and to provocation, but that is the beauty of art and its ability to serve as a mirror for society. Sugary excerpt:

Fascination, obfuscation, clarification always have been weirdly connected around the character of Adolf Hitler. In some cases, particularly in recent years, in the case of Bernd Eichinger ("The Downfall"), Bruno Ganz and the Parkinson's Hitler twitching in the bunker, it really isn't clear why this story is being told again – except perhaps to summon up the devil again, show him to two million Germans in the cinema and thereby keep him alive. Hitler's shadow is long, but not as long as it is made out to be. And even when the talk turns to Sophie Scholl, to the role of the resistance, or now to Stauffenberg and Tom Cruise – it often seems as if we Germans just can't or won't let go of Hitler.
"Images cannot be dispelled," Jonathan Meese once said, with Hitler in mind. "If you want to be rid of certain images, you must give them the chance to fight themselves." But it doesn't look like Meese wants to dispel Hitler; it seems more like an invocation. […]
But Hitler continues to be a popular image for German artists and intellectuals to wank over, however bizarre this might seem abroad. Meese stages his on-line Hitler posing and his whole Germanic carryings-on with an anti-authoritarian gesture – which can only serve to conceal the kick which he gets from this authoritarian strutting. This is not about post-modernism, this is not about deconstruction, it is about using Hitler's power. Dirty is good, is the old art reflex at play here; dirty is fun, the excusatory logic behind it.
But it's not funny. It's not funny when Meese gives Eva Braun as his MySpace girlfriend, a neo-Nazi centrefold, in an up-beat Obersalzberg pose with a polka dot skirt. And it's also not funny when his friends include Richard Wagner and Pope Pius XII, Hochhuth's "Deputy", the Pope who kept quiet about the persecution of the Jews, this figure of historical ambivalence in all its holiness – whereby "ambivalence" conceals a slight but real, original fascination. Meese, with his Hitlerisms, is not going down particularly well in these days of low-level democracy and grand coalitions.

Bergman and Cinema

Ingmar Bergman died on Yesterday. Although I feel the same way about his movies that I feel about Michel Houellebecq’s books or Andy Warhol’s art, that is I understanding the reverence people feel towards them without sharing it, I believe that his death is a great loss for cinema. I feel that way because his work stood apart. Bergman refused sameness and by doing so, showed that it is possible to achieve greatness by refusing to conventions and formatting. Nowadays more than ever, I think that art in general and cinema in particular need difference and people who dare to take the road less traveled because otherwise, watching movies is going to be like sleeping or like eating (for most people), something that we do without having to think and to force our mind to participate in the activity . In this video, Bergman explains how he approaches his work, Saraband in this instance. It is interesting because it shows that great directors are as demanding themselves as they are with themselves.

Corrupting kids

Writing, exoticism, and Africa

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who just won the Orange Prize has some interesting things to say about Africa, writing, and arts in general. Adichie says the following about Africa, which I believe is right on point:

We have a long history of Africa being seen in ways that are not very complimentary, and in America [where she has been studying for the past 10 years] being seen as an African writer comes with baggage that we don't necessarily care for. Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe Aids. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations. I was told by a professor at Johns Hopkins University that he didn't believe my first book [Purple Hibiscus, published in 2003] because it was too familiar to him. In other words, I was writing about middle-class Africans who had cars and who weren't starving to death, and therefore to him it wasn't authentically African. […] People forget that Africa is a place in which class exists. It's as if Africans are not allowed to have class, that somehow authenticity is synonymous with poverty and demands your pity and your sympathy. Africa is seen as the place where the westerner goes to sort out his morality issues. We see it in films and in lots of books about Africa, and it's very troubling to me. […] What I find problematic is the suggestion that when, say, Madonna adopts an African child, she is saving Africa. It's not that simple. You have to do more than go there and adopt a child or show us pictures of children with flies in their eyes. That simplifies Africa. If you followed the media you'd think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that's not the case; so it's important to engage with the other Africa

I don’t share Adichie’s skepticism about celebrities and Africa for I believe that Africa needs all the help that it can get even if too often it is misplaced or even unwelcome. However, she is right to say that African writers are expected to be different and to be about solely exoticism. What is peculiar to me is that this crushing and handicapping expectation of exoticism of African writers is great in French literature than in English literature. I think that Adichie is extremely lucky to be writing in English because French is a more chauvinistic language and so is the French literary world. It is for that reason that there are a lot more African writers who make in English than in French because although it is difficult to be considered literary, it is possible because English is more flexible and can be Africanized more easily than French.

Dalí and film

Richard Dorment has an intriguing article in the Telegraph on Salvador Dalí and his cinematography collaboration with Luis Buñuel. He argues that the partnership between the two men was crucially important and that once it ended, Dalí lost his edge and stopped to be able to do good work in film. The most fascinating part of Dorment’s article is that he argues that Buñuel looked physically like Dalí’s father, which explained in a way why their professional relationship was successful. Salvador Dalí fascinates me because he was a major figure in one of my favorite movement in French poetry, Surrealism. He  also fascinates me is because he was able to steal Paul Eluard’s wife (Eugène Grindel) Gala and because I believe that if you are able to steal the wife of the best poets of the 21 century, you have to be an unbelievable artist.

Deepa Mehta, life, film, and controversy

The Telegraph has a great article on Deepa Mehta, which is worth reading. It shows why she is not only a great director, but also a fascinating person. Meetha talks about the controversies behind some of her movies and also about her life in Canada and India. Sugary excerpt:

There was no particular reason to expect trouble when, in 2000, Water began shooting in the holy city of Varanasi. The script had been vetted by the then ruling party, the Hindu nationalist BJP. But the first days of filming were interrupted by chanting crowds, by the phone ringing with death threats, and one man even threw himself into the Ganges in protest. The set was burnt down. Ironically, many of the elements under attack were not even really in the script; the protesters 'were writing their own version of Water,' Mehta says, and most were 'quite illiterate. When did you last see a mob sitting down to read a screenplay?'

[…] She is a determined downplayer, though perhaps the illnesses she suffered - on the first shoot, an asthma attack complicated by exhaustion and serious enough to see her in hospital; on the second, a 104-degree fever - tell another side of the story. 'I remember being really upset but I tried to retain a sense of humour - that's the way I dealt with it. I also knew I was very angry.' But her natural reaction to threat would always be fight rather than flight; in those days, she has recalled, she found her fists and her teeth were permanently clenched.

Fact and fiction are hard to disentangle, since myth was being used against the mythmakers. The Varanasi police told the filmmakers they could not shoot because 10,000 people were protesting on the ghats, the cremation grounds on the banks of the Ganges. The filmmakers sent their own observer, who found only 12. The man who threw himself into the river in protest turned out to be a 'professional suicider', paid to make such gestures.

[…] Does the sense of being poised between two cultures fuel her art? 'I'm not conscious of making it a perspective - after all, everyone is an immigrant these days. And access to both cultures is a distinct advantage. As Salman Rushdie said, "East and West, I refuse to choose."

Cannes, France, and class

Ken Russell describes his experience at Cannes in an insightful, which says a lot about the festival and about France. Sugary excerpt:

Applications for a critic’s ticket for the festival are investigated by a committee. Should the applicant not enjoy international status, they stand a good chance of complete rejection. And even if the authorities are gracious enough to grant you a pass, your troubles could be just beginning. This is because you are not informed of the colour of your pass until you arrive and, at Cannes, colour is everything. It reflects your status and which holding pen you will be packed into like so many cattle. And if you are unfortunate enough to possess a bog-standard blue pass, you’d better join the box-office queue at the crack of dawn or you’ll have to fight your way in. Should the screening in question be a hot ticket, you could get your shirt torn off your back, as was the case in 1995 in the frenzied scramble to see Larry Clark’s controversial teenage romp Kids.

Cannes is a beautiful and stylish city, but it also one where class in the social sense of the term is closely bond with style. Cannes shows an essential difference between the United States and France. With Cannes, the French show that what matters for them first of all is glamour and eccentricity in the sense that Cannes want to be apart and to continue to show that showbiz is about glamour, art, and quality, in simpler terms about beauty and well-dressed people making beautiful and artful films. American film festivals such as Sundance and Tribeca are a lot more democratic and less about the presentation and the style, which are considered fluffy or secondary. To say things crudely, Cannes shows that in France the principles that not all things can be accessible to everybody and that art rhymes with glamour are rooted deeply into the French consciousness. This is the reason why access in Cannes is difficult because it is a world where class, style, and art are everything and bound closely together in the sense that if you lack one, you need to have a lot more of the others. In the US, it is a lot easier to become a nouveau riche or artiste without class, style, and artful qualities becomes more often the defining criteria is whether what you are making will sell and there is in a way nothing more democratic than that.

Bollywood musicals and Indian history

Rochona Majumdar explains the fact that every Indian film is in fact a musical in the sense that they have all extensive dance and music scenes within them by making a link between film and Indian history. She argues that, “the song-and-dance sequences as a mirror reflecting—more or less intentionally—India’s social and political transformations. In the six decades since the country’s independence, inaugural prime minister Jawahar-lal Nehru’s nationalist, populist government, rooted in socialist ideals, has given way to neoliberalism and globalization.”

Gore and Democratic politics

Daniel Gaste speculates on an Al Gore's hypothetical candidacy and writes:

[…] there is nothing Democrats love more than a politician who isn’t actually running for President. Ever since liberals began mythologizing JFK, the party’s nominees invariably fail to measure up. It’s as if any politician who has the guts to enter the arena and dirty his hands immediately loses “purity,” and faces a cynical column from Joe Klein. As a result, come primary season, the Democratic chattering class always falls in love with a hypothetical candidate: Mario Cuomo, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Colin Powell, The West Wing’s Josiah Bartle.

I would argue that Gore has a shot in becoming the next Democratic nominee because he has now had a life outside of politics and what a successful one it is. If Gore chooses to run for president, he may not win, but nobody will accuse him of being the normal Washington politician who has run for president all of his life. I remember that in 2000, George Bush went to Tennessee and argue that Gore was from Washington and not from there because he had spent his youth in Schools in the capital and because he was a fake. I bet that nobody will be able to make the case that Gore is not an authentic character. However, I have the feeling that he will not run.

America's obsession with pedophiles

Nancy McDermott argues that all of the hoopla surrounding Dakota Fanning’s rape scene in the movie Hounddog shows that America has an unhealthy obsession with pedophilia:

For one thing it’s very hard to argue that the American public is either unaware of child sexual abuse or desensitized to it.  On the contrary, the topic has become something of a national obsession. At least a dozen websites make it possible to track the numbers of convicted sex offenders by zip code and sometimes go as far as to offer photos, home addresses and details of their offences. ‘Amber alerts’ are broadcast on radio, television or on signs along the highways to warn that a child has been abducted.

Television shows like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit regularly deal with themes of rape, pedophilia, incest and the legacy of child sexual abuse. It’s become almost expected that any drama involving children must include some reference to these themes, whether it is the implied threat or an actual element of the story. Even plots that aren’t explicitly concerned with the sexual exploitation of children often rely on it to explain the motivations of characters. A history of abuse explains the actions of the villain or makes us love the hero even more for overcoming it.

So while depicting a child’s rape on film is new, it is simply a more explicit version of what’s already commonplace within America’s popular culture - the notion that child sexual abuse is ubiquitous.

I agree with McDermott even though I will make the following distinction, America isn’t obsessed with pedophilia, it is obsessed with pedophiles for how else can we justify the success of shows such “to catch a Predator” from Dateline, NBC. It is hypocritical to argue that Dakota Fanning shouldn’t in a rape scene because she is too young or because it is immoral when as a young actress, she must have seen worst and when child rape is part of a sad reality that is ignored or trivialized. Usually, society’s focus isn’t on the child, but solely on the perpetrator because it is less disturbing to focus on an adult’s pervasions because it can be exploited and commercialized than on a child’s victimization.

Filming a rape scene with a young actress

Dakota Fanning's (who is almost thirteen years old) rape scene and sexual behavior in her next movie, “Hounddog” is causing quite a stir in Sundance and in some corners according to the New York Times. Money quote:

The furor hampered the production, and it continues on Fox News and on Web sites like A Minor Consideration (minorcon.org), run by Paul Petersen, an advocate for child actors. Mr. Petersen, himself a former child actor who played Donna Reed’s son on her 1960s sitcom, said in an interview that Ms. Fanning should never have been allowed to play the victim in a rape scene, no matter how much she wanted to or how sensitively it was filmed, and that her doing so violated the letter of federal child-pornography law.

“Nothing excuses it,” he said. “The plain cold fact is this is illegal, the statutes are what they are, and Hollywood chose to ignore it. If they’d made the character 15, and hired a 19-year-old, they wouldn’t have heard a peep out of me.”

To me, this controversy is much to do about nothing. I mean what is the point of those objecting to the scene, is it that a young actress should not play a sex scene? Or that a film about a young girl being rape shouldn’t been made because it has nothing to do with reality? As hard as it may be for some people to accept, a child actor is an actor and yes, little girls do get rape in real life. The outrage in this case is misplaced and manufactured for it is directed at something, which isn’t real in an attempt to deny the fact that in real life, young girls get rape all the time without it causing any stir and with people even excusing it by saying that they are fast and provoked it.

The Hawksian woman, the female Eunuch, Lauren Bacall and Cathérine Deneuve

Germaine Greer has an review of a book on Luis Buñuel, the director of Belle de Jour in the Guardian, which bugs me because it reminds me why feminism can be such a narrow and incomplete frame of reference. Her argument is that Lauren Bacall is a Hawksian woman (a creation of Howard Hawks who directed To Have and Have Not, a movie in which Bacall portrayed more real and more acceptable woman according to Greer), a truer or rather more authentic woman than Cathérine Deneuve who is a female eneuch and epitomized man’s fantasy of the woman who always looks perfectly, but is never lively, always blank and without sexual desires. I disagree. Cathérine Deneuve may not be my favorite French actress, but she has something, which so many actresses today don’t have and that is her own sense of who she is and of what she can’t do as an actress. It strikes that Mrs. Greer is actually arguing that there is only one-way for a woman to be authentic, Hawksian woman and to avoid becoming either a or a female eunuch, being sexless and that is to be Lauren Bacall. Money quote:

Belle de Jour (1967) has a reputation for being one of the sexiest films ever made, simply because Deneuve behaves throughout like a pre-adolescent girl. Through the prism of the 21st century, the film seems oddly contrived; what is now a cliche - the child who, subjected to the sexual advances of an adult, then becomes a frigid woman who is only turned on by squalor - is coyly exploited as a series of fetishistic images that juxtapose her fantasy life with her actual life. As Séverine Serizy, Deneuve moves through the imagery of what are meant to be her own fantasies like a sleepwalker. By her own account, director Lous Buñuel could not relate to her at all and never told her what he wanted. Unconsciously, she gave him what he wanted, which was as little as possible. The fantasies were his, after all.

[…] The sex scenes in the brothel consist of her stripping to the full armour of suspender-belt, knickers, stockings and padded brassiere, and allowing ugly men to kiss her. In one extraordinarily unsexy sequence, she is required to process through the rooms of a ducal chateau dressed in nothing but a cloak of black georgette and a crown of white roses. She trots ahead of the camera like a lamb to the slaughter. She should have used a body double; it is typical of her passive obedience that she didn't. Lauren Bacall would never have done that for anyone, would never have stripped and had them shoot her bare arse from the back as she trotted through take after take. The Hawksian woman would have decked any man who asked her.

[…] The Hawksian woman was an idea that flourished at a time of crisis, in the depression and during the war, when the full energies of women were needed if they were to survive. After the war she was supplanted by the female eunuch, weighed down with huge hair and false eyelashes, unequal to any challenge - all things to all men and nothing to herself.

Food for thought: Interpreting Apocalypto

“The most straightforward - if not the best - way to interpret the end of Apocalypto is that Christian Europeans finally arrived in the New World to put an end to monstrous pagan barbarism. Whether or not that was Gibson's intention, I bet a lot of viewers will see the movie in this light. The more I read about the conquest of the New World, however, the more convinced I become that the far left has the facts on its side. The Europeans came not to bring civilization, but to destroy civilizations. […] The Spanish, Portuguese, French, and yes, the English did not come to bring civilization. They came to loot, enslave, steal land, and murder anyone who got in their way. The reason they succeeded was not that Europeans were more advanced, but that European disease quickly killed a large majority of the population of the New World- with contagion often emptying lands where no European had ever set foot.” Bryan Caplan, “New World Apocalypse.”

Food for thought: James Bond should be fighting "Islamofascists"

“It’s certainly true that this Bond faces more believable threats than his predecessors in fantasies like “Goldfinger” or “Moonraker,” but for all the references to international terrorism the movie remains more silly than serious because it contains no references whatever to violent, conspiratorial threats by Islamist fanatics. In place of the diabolical jihadists who threaten to blow up our cities in the real world, the movie depicts an international terror network comprised entirely of suave Europeans and subhuman thugs from sub-Sharan Africa. Actual counter-terrorism combatants focus their attention on Muslim killers and plotters in every continent but in the latest “Bond” adventure this dire threat simply doesn’t exist. […]Today, the Islamists already attack the entertainment industry for alleged Zionist bias, despite the absence of a single major studio release (no, not one) of the last thirty years that offers a distinctly positive vision of Israel, and despite the obvious, irrational, and ultimately shameful shyness about showing Islamo-Nazis as the demented, degenerate, terrorists they truly are.” Michael Medved, “Hollywood Dodges the Truth About Terror”