Cannes 2009: Dancing in the snow

Gasp.

Breathe in, breathe out. Pause. Excitement building. No..must breathe again.

Who am I kidding....

YAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Cannes 2009 line-up is announced and that means, once again, the film festival year has officially kicked off!!!!!

Joy. Joy.

And the line-up is absolutely mouth-watering. Of course it is, it always is. And I am willing to bet all the critics lucky enough to see these films will once again complain about how substandard Cannes is this year, about how Cannes used to be better decades ago. Blah. Don't care. The point is these are the movies I rather see any day given the pathetic choices hogging multiplexes across my snowy city -- yes that is not a typo, there is snow on the ground despite it being end of April.

So...the line-up:

Opening film: Up (Pete Docter and Bob Peterson)
Closing film: Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky (Jan Kounen)

In competition:

Bright Star (Jane Campion)

Spring Fever (Lou Ye)

Antichrist (Lars von Trier)

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé)

Face (Tsai Ming-liang)

Les Herbes folles (Alain Resnais)

In the Beginning (Xavier Giannoli)

A Prophet (Jacques Audiard)

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke)

Vengeance (Johnnie To)

The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman)

Vincere (Marco Bellocchio)

Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza)

Thirst (Park Chan-wook)

Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar)

Map of the Sounds of Tokyo (Isabel Coixet)

Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold)

Looking for Eric (Ken Loach)

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)

Taking Woodstock (Ang Lee)

Out of competition

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Terry Gilliam)

The Army of Crime (Robert Guédiguian)

Agora (Alejandro Amenábar)

Comments:

Absolutely delighted to see that Mendoza has gotten his film into this year's competition as well, following last year’s Serbis. He remains the only director I have chatted with from the above list. Ok, it was not really chatting but me mostly gushing over how great his films Slingshot and Foster Child were :)

Even more thrilled to see that Alejandro Amenábar has a new film out. I am a big fan of his work and have seen all his previous 4 features -- his Open Your Eyes is a personal favourite (remade into Vanilla Sky) plus admired his first feature Thesis.

I will have more to say in upcoming days. But for now, just delighted :)

Perceptions...of

One film -- three short stories, three directors.

Segment 1: Interior Design directed by Michel Gondry

Gondry’s film starts off simple enough but ends with an intriguing transformation.

A young couple, Akira and Hiroko, head to Tokyo to make a new life for themselves.

Akira is an aspiring film-maker looking to wow people with his gimmicky feature. While the couple search for a place of their own, they temporarily live at their friend's apartment. But things don't go per plan as Tokyo is too expensive for the couple. As Akira gains some success with his eccentric feature, Hiroko feels isolated. And a snide comment from her friend makes Hiroko feel worse and pushes her towards a metamorphosis, kafka style. The point of the metamorphosis? To emphasize the sentiment that some Japanese women feel in society.

Segment 2: Merde by Leos Carax

Merde is clearly the least subtle of the three shorts and the most political film. At first, the film feels like humour but it quickly turns into horror and then shifts into a parody of sorts.

A mysterious character emerges from the sewers and rushes to bother ordinary citizens.

His behaviour seems like a prank to begin with but quickly turns sinister. On his next visit from the sewers, the character becomes a terrorist killing people at random. After the mystery man is arrested, it is learned that he speaks an unknown language. A French lawyer, who ends up being only one of three people in the world who speaks the same language as this character, agrees to represent him in the court trail. The mysterious character is named Merde and his court trail raises some very angry reactions. The film represents how past Japanese crimes in Nanking come to bear fruit in the present and touches upon the distrust that certain Japanese have of foreigners and how some Japanese don’t like to recall their past. Leos Carax certainly goes over the top and his film is the only one of the three that can easily divide people -- some might dislike it while others might love it.

Segment 3: Shaking Tokyo by Bong Joon-ho

The shortest film of the trio ends up being a nice pleasant love story. Bong Joon-ho crafts a sweet boy meets girl tale with his own tailored twist.

The main character is a self proclaimed hikikomori who has not stepped outside his house in 10 years and not made eye contact with another human for 11 years. That changes when he makes eye contact with a pizza delivery girl. The hikikomori is finally forced to leave his home to find the girl and learns that he isn’t the only one who stayed locked up in his home. Bong Joon-ho gives a vision of a futuristic Tokyo where humans stay indoors and do not make contact with other humans. The hikikomori learns that good things happen when one leaves their surroundings and interacts with others. Love literary shakes Tokyo up!

Comments:

Tokyo! contains three diverse films which primarily address the following aspects of Japanese society -- the perception of women, the distrust of foreigners, the denial of the past and the tendency towards isolation. I found all the films enjoyable yet I can’t call any of the films perfect. Bong Joon-ho’s film is the safest of the three and does not take any risks and even though Michel Gondry’s film is mostly clean-cut, it ends with a wicked metamorphosis. Leos Carax is the only one who attempts to push people’s buttons with his over the top yet smart film.

When the dust has settled...

For the third straight year, there will be three English teams in the Champions League semi-finals. And for the 2nd straight year, Barcelona will be flying the flag for the rest of Europe against the English teams.

Man Utd vs Arsenal

The ultimate rivalry will be rekindled on the European stage. Can't wait!!!

Chelsea vs Barcelona

After a brief gap, these two get to tango with each other in Europe again. There was a time when Jose’s Chelsea were involved in some nasty tussles with Barca, especially given Jose’s false accusations regarding Swedish referee Anders Frisk. But Jose is no longer there and neither is Rijkaard.

In the UEFA Cup -- two local affairs in the semi’s.

The first semi-final will see Dynamo Kiev take on FC Shakhtar Donetsk while Hamburg will take on Werder Bremen in the other semi. So the UEFA Cup final held in Istanbul will be between a German team and Ukrainian team.

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Arsenal certainly have the most intense 5-6 weeks in football ahead.

18 Sat The FA Cup Chelsea
21 Tue Barclays Premier League A Liverpool
26 Sun Barclays Premier League H Middlesbrough
29 Wed UEFA Champions League A Manchester United
May
02 Sat Barclays Premier League A Portsmouth
05 Tue UEFA Champions League H Manchester United
10 Sun Barclays Premier League H Chelsea
16 Sat Barclays Premier League A Manchester United
24 Sun Barclays Premier League H Stoke City
27 Wed UEFA Champions League Final
30 Sat The FA Cup

Like last year, Arsenal get to face an English team in the Champions League along with a corresponding league fixture close by, although thankfully not back to back but having Chelsea sandwiched in between two games against Man Utd isn’t easy either. In a way, Arsenal could play Man Utd 4 times in just over a month and Chelsea 3 times. Overall, Arsenal have atleast 6 games against their 3 main league rivals in the next month. And then there could be atleast two more games if Arsenal make the finals and either Man Utd and Chelsea make the F.A Cup and CL final respectively. Incredible!!

What this means is that Arsenal, Man Utd and Chelsea could stand in the way of each other for two trophies. And then Arsenal still have a huge part to play in the destiny of the English title as they travel to Anfield next week and have a league fixture at Old Trafford. Despite all the misery this season, the Arsenal vs Man Utd rivalry would take center stage again, just like those good old days. But Arsenal have to dispatch of Chelsea first this Saturday.

Bring on the good football.

Coming up: Alfred Hitchcock spotlight

Alfred Hitchcock directed about 56 features plus quite a few tv serials and shorts, with about half of the tally directed in the UK and the other half in the USA -- 1939’s Jamaica Inn was Hitchcock’s last film in the UK and 1940’s Rebecca was his first film in the US. Hitchcock’s first feature was directed in 1925 with his last one coming 51 years later in 1976. In that staggering timeline, Hitchcock directed silent, sound, b&w and colour films. But when it comes to critical acclaim, Hitchcock’s most cited films are near the end of his career in the late 50’s such as Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest and Psycho. It turns out that I had only seen one of Hitchcock’s UK film, the brilliant The 39 Steps directed in 1935. But I was inspired to hunt down Hithchcock’s older films while reading André Bazin's Cinema of Cruelty. On my first try, I came across a few of Hitchcock's older American films:

Rope

Foreign Correspondent

Saboteur

Strangers on a Train

While all the four films were entertaining, it was also educational to observe the framework of Hitchcock's future films buried in these older works. Saboteur and Foreign Correspondent contain elements which pop up in North by Northwest while Strangers on a Train predicts Dial M for Murder. Also, The 39 Steps lays the tracks for Saboteur. Intrigued by what I had seen, I planned to view more films and started to draft a list of works to chase. And then as fate would ordain, I came across a box set of 20 Hitchcock films from the 1920’s until the 1940’s. So I will be spending the next few weeks doing a truly comprehensive spotlight on any film director I have ever done. Previously in 2007, I had watched every single David Lynch film but Lynch’s output is much much less than Hitchcock’s so it was easy to do a full spotlight on David Lynch. But as far as Hitchcock goes, it will be interesting to see how far I make my way down his list of films:

Family Plot (1976)
Frenzy (1972)
Topaz (1969)
Torn Curtain (1966)
Marnie (1964)
The Birds (1963)
Psycho (1960)
North by Northwest (1959)
Vertigo (1958)
The Wrong Man (1956)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
The Trouble with Harry (1955)
To Catch a Thief (1955)
Rear Window (1954)
Dial M for Murder (1954)
I Confess (1953)
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Stage Fright (1950)
Under Capricorn (1949)
Rope (1948)
The Paradine Case (1947)
Notorious (1946)
Spellbound (1945)
Lifeboat (1944)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Saboteur (1942)
Suspicion (1941)
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941)
Foreign Correspondent (1940)
Rebecca (1940)
Jamaica Inn (1939)
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Young and Innocent (1937)
Sabotage (1936)
Secret Agent (1936)
The 39 Steps (1935)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
Waltzes from Vienna (1934)
Number Seventeen (1932)
Rich and Strange (1931)
Mary (1931)
The Skin Game (1931)
Murder! (1930)
Juno and the Paycock (1930)
An Elastic Affair (1930)
Blackmail (1929)
The Manxman (1929)
Sound Test for Blackmail (1929)
Champagne (1928)
Easy Virtue (1928)
The Farmer's Wife (1928)
Downhill (1927)
The Ring (1927/I)
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)
The Mountain Eagle (1926)
The Pleasure Garden (1925)

fade to white...and then pitch dark....

It was almost ten years ago that I first heard about Jose Saramago’s book Blindness. By then, I had read his The History of the Siege of Lisbon. Even though the core concept of ..Siege of Lisbon was interesting (how adding a single word in a novel could alter the historic meaning), I was baffled by Saramago’s writing style which consisted of sentences spanning multiple pages and not separated by any periods. Plus there were no quotes for a conversation between characters as their words were separated by commas. This meant that I could not stop at just any place in the middle of my reading and had to continue on for another 50 pages or so before a natural stoppage appeared. In a way, this style is good because it ensures that the reader is fully engaged and forced to read each word slowly lest they lose track of things. But on the other hand, this style does make for an exhausting read. Shortly after I finished reading the book, Saramago won the Nobel Prize in Literature and his other books gained popularity. And Blindness was a title that popped up quite a bit in conversations with friends. It turned out that the book’s popularity spread in an infectious manner, just like the blindness disease in the book, and most people around me swore of the book’s greatness and urged me to read it. Unfortunately, since I was exhausted after reading The History of the Siege of Lisbon I was not in any mood to tackle another book written with endless sentences.

And that was that. Then three years earlier, I found Blindness in a book sale and decided to finally buy it. Unfortunately after repeated tries, I couldn’t make it past page 150. I had hoped to finish the book before Fernando Meirelles’ film version was released but I gave up and decided to watch the film instead. Oddly, the first 30 minutes of the film were quite painful to view as having known the story, there was no mystery and everything appeared quite superficial and poorly done. The film did eventually become interesting when the dark savage human nature was exposed. Still, I was left with mixed feelings regarding the film. Reading the book, one can conjure up their own visual path while objectively following the character's plight. But the problem with the film adaptation is Fernando Meirelles’ attempts to impose a visual style (example: having multiple shots of the blurred white vision the characters have) thereby wanting the audiences to experience the characters disorientation. As a result, the film is caught between a visual style which does not integrate well with the depiction of the characters. I felt the strongest aspect of the film is near the end when the visual style is temporarily suspended and we observe the savage humans at work. We observe how morality can be easily dropped within a mob when individuals either find comfort & a safe haven in their group or get a fake sense of power when encouraged by a thug. In a way, the latter part of the film makes for a character study to observe humans at their worst akin to Philip George Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment documented in his book The Lucifer Effect. But even if the visual style of Blindness was dropped in the editing room and the film became a pure character study, it would still pale in comparison to the intense German film The Experiment. While The Experiment is based on Mario Giordano’s book, it is loosely inspired by the Stanford prison experiment and shows how humans either conform or rebel against roles they are thrown in.

Saramago does not explain the blindness disease in the book because he is more interested in studying the human condition. In that regard the blindness is a hook to get people isolated together so that Saramago can conduct his Stanford prison like experiment. Although, Saramago’s experiment is not a study of pure blindness as the characters contain a woman who can see and a man who was born blind thereby making him more aware of situations around him. Not having finished the book, I can’t comment on how rich his story is but besides the visual style, there is nothing original in the film – the characters act as one would expect them to given the situations. There are some who take a power role and demand things from others while some easily become the victims. Then there are the rebels who want to fight. Sure one can say aspects of the story hold up a mirror to our society when some rules are taken away. But these aspects could be studied in other ways and not by infecting characters with a mysterious blindness.

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It was by pure coincidence that after I finished watching Blindness I saw Errol Morris’ documentary Standard Operating Procedure. Morris’ film looks at the incidents of abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib and is a real life horrific case study in the manner of the Stanford prison experiment. In fact, Philip George Zimbardo talks about Abu Ghraib in his book The Lucifer Effect because he was asked to testify in the courts regarding one of the soldiers involved in those sick acts.

Standard Operating Procedure is a visually sharp film that allows the audience to make up their own minds regarding the incidents. Morris ensures his camera lingers on the soldier’s faces a bit longer than usual and lets them naturally open up. There are plenty of instances where Morris shifts his camera’s position (either to the left or right) as the soldiers talk thereby ensuring we take the soldiers words with a grain of salt – did the soldiers act on their own? Or were they just following orders?

The outcry from the prison pictures ensured that the soldiers who were seen doing things in the pictures were the only ones accused. But Morris shows that there were other personnel standing outside the frame who were also guilty but were spared. And no one seems to be talking about the setup of the prison and the interrogation procedures as they contributed to the abuse. This is where Philip George Zimbardo's work is important as he talks about the environmental conditions that play a factor in tranforming people from good to evil behaviour. But people don't want to listen to that either. They just want to get rid of the "bad apples" so that they can get on with their happy lives. Blindness & The Lucifer Effect do show how most people can become those "bad apples" given the circumstances but our current society is more interested in blaming individuals rather than studying the overall situations that cause individuals to act in certain ways.

Blindness and Standard Operating Procedure do make a dark double bill of sorts – they depict humanity at its worst and the combined crimes from both films range from rape, sexual abuse to murder. In Blindness everyday people mutate into villains while in Standard Operating Procedure it is the military that resorts to evil.

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Ratings out of 10

Blindness: 6.5

Standard Operating Procedure: 9

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On another note: the events in Abu Ghraib are predicted in Jon Ronson’s hilarious yet dark book Men who Stare at Goats, a soon to be made film. In Men who Stare at Goats we learn about some of the techniques used to disorient Iraqi prisoners so that they would talk. In one case, the prisoners were trapped in dark shipping containers with strobe lights keeping them awake along with loud blaring music of the Barney song (yes the purple dinosaur) repeatedly played. What kind of demented torture technique is this? But this is just a minor torture technique as opposed to the other truly sick ones that have been going on for decades yet the public is blissfully unaware. So when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out, people just wanted closure by punishing those in the pictures as opposed to questioning the entire setup that has encouraged such acts for decades.

Images...

Hiroshi Shimizu's 1933 film Japanese Girls at the Harbor


It is remarkable that one can spot out gangsters even in a 1933 silent film. And quite a few Japanese gangster films in the last two decades (even in Takashi Miike's films) have used similar reproductions of this shot where three well dressed men are spaced apart.


Spinning an affair -- a simple yarn used to good effect.

In the first instance, the yarn gets tied up as Sunako (Michiko Oikawa) dances with her ex-childhood love Henry (Ureo Egawa) who is now married to Sunako's good childhood friend Dora (Yukiko Inoue). The threads tangling around their feet indicate that their love for each other is rekindling.


Sunako (on the left) is having second thoughts about her feelings for Henry. She does not want to stand in the way of Dora's marriage with Henry and decides to untangle herself from both of them.

Sunako hands over the yarn to Henry and indicates that his place is next to Dora.

The camera angle and Henry's expressions indicate that he feels trapped in his marriage. The threads form a pair of handcuffs.


Overall, Japanese Girls at the Harbor contains many wonderful shots and moments. Which makes it all the more remarkable that I had not heard of Shimizu until a few weeks ago when some of his films were re-released. So I plan to view more of his films in the upcoming weeks to see whether his name should be added next to Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi's when discussing vintage Japanese cinema.

Beauty in simplicity

Wendy and Lucy (2008, USA, Kelly Reichardt): 10/10

Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy has certainly gotten a lot of critical acclaim since last year, including being named as the top film of 2008 in Film Comment's end of the year list. But despite all the attention, it wasn't until this past weekend that the film finally opened in my neck of the woods. And I am glad to have seen it finally. Wendy and Lucy is certainly a beautiful film, a film that contains much depth hiding behind the simple appearance.

The film only has a running time of 80 minutes but there isn't a single wasted minute. It is a perfectly crafted film. A rare thing in fact. The film follows the journey of Wendy (Michelle Williams) and her dog Lucy as they travel across the US to make their way up to Alaska. Gradually in the film we learn that the purpose of Wendy's journey in her beat up car is to look for work in Alaska, a place that is willing to hire people without an address or even a phone. This matter of fact revelation does tell quite a bit about the state of the American economy and how things have become. There are plenty of towns that are wasting away and while Reichardt beautifully keeps the focus only on Wendy, one can sense the collapse lurking around the corner.

Wendy and Lucy is another example of a film that shows how a skillful film-maker can create a beautiful work without diluting the screen with needless words. Much of commercial cinema in America is packed with over-smart non-stop dialogues which go on and on, but in reality do nothing to add to the story -- they are just meaningless words polluting the screen. So compared to that Wendy and Lucy is a breath of fresh air, something to be cherished.

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A few weeks ago, A.O. Scott had a very interesting article about the state of the new American cinema. These are some of his comments regarding Wendy and Lucy:

There was some talk of an Oscar nomination for Williams, who was so believably ordinary in her look and so rigorously un-actressy in her manner that you could easily forget her celebrity. But “Wendy and Lucy,” released by Oscilloscope Laboratories, a small and ambitious new distributor started by Adam Yauch, a member of the Beastie Boys, would have looked a little awkward alongside the other Academy Award nominees. It’s true that the big winner, “Slumdog Millionaire,” concerns itself with poverty and disenfranchisement, but it also celebrates, both in its story and in its exuberant, sentimental spirit, the magical power of popular culture to conquer misery, to make dreams come true. And the major function of Oscar night is to affirm that gauzy, enchanting notion.

The world of “Wendy and Lucy” offers little in the way of enchantment but rather a different, more austere kind of beauty..........


I can't imagine that a film like Wendy and Lucy would ever win an Oscar for best film of the year, even though it is by far the best American film made in 2008. This does highlight that the award shows are nothing but attention hogging spots for the big studios and their executive’s egos. Sure every now and then, some independent film is allowed in but for the most part, it is an exclusive party for the studio films. And then there is the pattern that after an independent film maker gets a break, he/she is invited to be part of the studio machinery. Steven Soderbergh is such an example. He got his break when Sex, Lies and Videotapes made it big. But shortly after, he was sucked into the studio machinery. Thankfully he is still making good movies and Che (especially part two) is certainly a vintage film but he is far away from those initial independent days.

note: I thought of Sex, Lies and Videotapes while watching Wendy and Lucy as the leads in both films live in their cars and have no fixed address -- a free independent spirit.

There are too many tags around films – studio-backed, independent, foreign, avant-garde, etc. And somehow these tags alienate and differentiate films. Good cinema should be celebrated, regardless of how much money it cost to make or where it came from or its style. But I am drifting into a much longer rant about the messed up nature of film distribution. I will end however with some more relevant words from A.O Scott's article:
WHAT KIND OF MOVIES do we need now? It’s a question that seems to arise almost automatically in times of crisis...In recession, as in war — and also, conveniently, in times of peace or prosperity — the movies we evidently need are the ones that offer us the possibility, however fanciful or temporary, of escape.

Maybe so. But what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism?


It seems that escapism cinema will never go out of fashion. Both Hollywood and Bollywood have done such a wonderful job in dumbing down the expectations of audiences for decades that it doesn't matter what the current economic situation is, escapist films will always be in demand. Recently, box office numbers are up for Hollywood flicks and studios are putting that down to more people heading to cinemas as they can't afford to go on vacations or go to concerts. So that might mean more excuses to produce brain dead films while continuing to shut out quality works.

More blues for French football

Thank God I am not French because otherwise I might have to spend every day cursing Raymond Domenech for ruining French football. I also would have had to save some unsavory words for the French federation for allowing Mr. Domenech to remain in his job when clearly the results have been against him. Take today’s French game against Lithuania as an example. Last time I checked Lithuania were not a major power in international power. But that didn’t stop Mr. Domenech from deploying 4 defenders, two holding midfields and only a single forward in Thierry Henry. Seeing that line-up it was not a surprize that France scraped a 1-0 home win, the same score that France recorded a few days earlier in their away win to Lithuania. But then again with Domenech’s team 1-0 or 0-0 is always to be expected.

It is true that the French team started in free fall 2 years before Domenech's time when a tired performance in the 2002 World Cup was followed by a boring and ineffective performance in the 2004 European Championship but Domenech has continued to lower the bar since he was hired in 2004. After the disaster of the 2002 & 2004 tournaments, the French federation needed someone who could harness the young talent that existed in French football and combine that with the experienced squad members to create a balanced team. But Domenech kept recalling the older members and benched the younger squad members. As a result, France produced dull and inspiring performances in the 2006 World Cup qualifying campaign and only narrowly qualified. These poor results should have been enough to remove Domenech but he was kept:

France 0 – 0 Israel
Faroe Islands 0 – 2 France
France 0 – 0 Republic of Ireland
Cyprus 0 – 2 France
France 0 – 0 Switzerland
Israel 1 – 1 France
France 3 – 0 Faroe Islands
Republic of Ireland 0 – 1 France
Switzerland 1 – 1 France
France 4 – 0 Cyprus

At the 2006 World Cup, France were awful in the group stages drawing 0-0 with Switzerland and 1-1 with South Korea before a 2-0 win over Togo allowed them to reach the last 16. Thanks to senior players like Zidane and Henry France managed to put together a 3-1 win over Spain and followed that with 1-0 wins over Brazil and Portugal to reach the final where they lost out on penalties. The only reason that France reached the final was because the players managed to put together a decent performance and not because of any tactical innovation by Domenech.

Still, he was left in his job and the French poor performances continued through the Euro 2008 qualifying campaign. And at Euro 2008, France were by far the worst team and produced three dull games:

France 0 - 2 Italy
Netherlands 4 - 1 France
Romania 0 - 0 France

Despite a string of failures, the French federation incredibly felt that Domenech was the man for the job. So it was no surprize that France started the 2010 World Cup qualifying by losing 3-1 away to Austria. Yes Austria. A 2-1 home win over Serbia and a 2-2 away tie to Romania managed to keep France in the hunt. Even though two 1-0 wins over Lithuania have moved France to second place, these results can't disguise the fact that the team are in trouble.

Maybe the French federation don’t want to win anything or have their national team play beautiful football. Maybe they want to have a soccer team that produces average performances. If that is their goal, then they have the perfect manager in Domenech.

So thank God I am not French because I can safely ignore the average performance of the French team after I am done complaining in my blog... :)

be careful with those words..

Pontypool (2008, Canada, Bruce McDonald): 8.5/10

Words can be dangerous. And Bruce McDonald’s film Pontypool, based on Tony Burgess’s book Pontypool Changes Everything, takes that concept to a brilliant and horrific level. The story is about how people in a small Canadian town start to get infected by words and turned into zombies, even though the film does not mention the word ‘zombie’ per say. This is certainly a fascinating concept and not unbelievable. Often it takes just one word to change people’s emotions and behaviour, so what if a word crept into someone’s psyche to completely take over their brain? Ofcourse, different people's behaviour is altered by different words so appropriately the film shows how the town folk are infected by different words. And not just any words, words that may have meaning in their life.

The film’s setup is engaging thanks to the dark radio studio and the husky soothing voice provided by the radio jockey Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie). The camera never leaves the radio studio so all the information about the incident is communicated to the radio station via cell phones and radio waves. This trickle of information certainly raises the creepiness and mystery around the infection and makes the first hour of the film quite fascinating. Things dip a little after the hour mark but still there are plenty of interesting ideas that jump out of this film.

Incidentally, the infection in the film is only caused by the English language. It is a good thing that Canada is a bilingual country :)

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Film Trailer

Revisiting Syriana

Some trust fund prosecutor, got off-message at Yale thinks he's gonna run this up the flagpole? Make a name for himself? Maybe get elected some two-bit congressman from nowhere, with the result that Russia or China can suddenly start having, at our expense, all the advantages we enjoy here? No, I tell you. No, sir! Corruption charges! Corruption? Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That's Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win.
-- Danny Dalton, Syriana

I loved Syriana when I saw it in 2005 but was also quite angry at the state of the world portrayed by the film. My anger was reflected in my blog posting about the film:

Tell me something I don’t know! Seriously tell me something I don’t know. For the record, I don’t live in a world where my news comes from only one tv channel. I am lucky enough to live in a world where there are books which are not only interesting but intelligent. I also live in a world where there exists art which is not only meant for entertainment. And speaking of entertainment, what about movies? What the hell is the point of a movie? What purpose does a movie like Syriana serve? If one likes this movie, then it does not matter. If one hates this movie, it does not matter either. It does not matter if one sees this movie or not. This movie will not change a thing in the real world. In the real world, lies are openly told. People believe it because they don’t have a choice. Governments lie, corporations lie, so what? We have been told to shut up and turn a blind eye. And then come movies like these. People will call this the truth and people will call this propaganda but in the end, it won’t change a thing. At the end of the day, the only thing the average man can do is to watch movies which affirm their beliefs about the lies that they already know. Because you see the average person needs to drive a car everyday, the average person needs a bus or an airplane or other transportation which relies on energy. Energy which is generated by OIL! Yup bloody OIL! Black oil, money oozing oil! Oil! People are killed, governments are toppled, money changes hands, a few men get together and smoke some cigars, some drink and some get fat (and the fat is not only because of money), jobs are lost, jobs are gained, ships move, cars are blown up, technology fails and movies are made. Syriana has the look and feel of Traffic because Gaghan was the screenwriter of the 2000 award winning film. Syriana is more complicated than Traffic and it does not explain everything. Is it hard to follow? Not really. The movie jumps from location to location but it has no choice because the movie tries to cover all the essential angles – covert operations, corporation take-overs, corruption, rich rulers, good noble rulers who are trying to make a difference, the unemployed worker, the corruptor, the family man, etc. Everything is presented. There is no start and no end. We get a slice of the happenings in the crazy OIL world. We also get some very realistic portrayals of life in the lower rungs of the oil crazy world. Finally a movie which accurately shows the daily life of foreign workers in the compounds!

Syriana forms an interesting trilogy of movies in 2005 with The Constant Gardener and Lord of War being the other. Put all these movies together and some very hard facts come out in the open. But like I said earlier, it won’t change a thing! One of my favourite movies of the year!!! Yet I can’t give it a perfect rating. Why? Because I wanted more angles to be covered, I wanted more lies to be shown.

Watching Syriana again almost 3.5 years again is a sobering experience. In 2005 I only picked up on the oil policies and the spy games shown in the film. But the following quote can indeed point to other areas of the market where things went wrong:

Corruption is government intrusion into market efficiencies in the form of regulations. That's Milton Friedman. He got a goddamn Nobel Prize. We have laws against it precisely so we can get away with it. Corruption is our protection.

Now the entire world knows which people got away with what over the last few years. And this time, it wasn't only the oil men. It was other wall street corporations, men in suits, who got rich when no one was looking.

Syriana was certainly relevant back in 2005 and amazingly the film is even more relevant now because the film brilliantly shows how financial manipulation was/is tied with covert operations and regime changes. We truly do live in a world that gets worse every day because of past actions and manipulations yet we only judge the villains based on their present reactions.

Syriana does make a worthy double bill with Body of Lies. In fact, Body of Lies does borrow some scenes (the target strike) from Syriana. At the end of the day, movies like Syriana offer people a chance to look at the ugly world that exists and in that sense, the film does not offer any form of escapism like most commercial movies.

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Plenty of useful quotes from the film:

When a country has five percent of the world's population but spends fifty percent of the world's military spending, that country's persuasive power is in decline. -- Prince Nasir Al-Subaai

Bob Barnes: Intelligence work isn't training seminars and gold stars for attendance.
Fred Franks: What do you think intelligence work is Bob?
Bob Barnes: I think it's two people in a room and one of them's asking a favor that is a capital crime in every country on earth, a hanging crime.
Fred Franks: No Bob, it's assessing the information gathered from that favor and then balancing it against all the other information gathered from all the other favors.

greed..in the open and even in the dark..

In a way there should be no surprize in reading this:

The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

The average person on the street knows all about the greed that exists. Just because a company gets the government's (meaning the taxpayer's) money, does it mean that their greed will stop? Ofcourse not. Who looks like the fool here? Only the government which tries to help out the companies and the overall economy by giving out billions and billions.

These companies fooled the government with phrases such as their "companies were too big to fail". Ha. It is the ego's of the executives that was too big too fail. The average hard working person gets laid off at the drop of a hat but the executives keep getting fatter with all the money. It is true that not all employees will get an equal amount of money.

The bonus plan covers 400 employees, and the bonuses range from as little as $1,000 to as much as $6.5 million. Seven executives at the financial products unit were entitled to receive more than $3 million in bonuses.

Even if some employees get only $1000, the combined total makes things outrageous. But this is not the only company doing this. Plenty more. But what will all these executives who get million dollar bonuses do with the money? Buy bigger houses, bigger gas guzzling cars?

Greed fuels greed. And the average person can't do anything about it. Ofcourse, if one combines the above story with this Globe and Mail story about the shrinking number of newspapers in North America, then that means fewer papers will be covering such news resulting in fewer people following the story.

"It means that more things will happen in the dark," said Paul Starr, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. "Certainly the Web made certain things more available than they have ever been before, at a lower cost. But availability is not the same as exposure. I don't think there's enough of a protection of democratic accountability."

So if an openly published heading about the bonuses getting paid to the executives will not result in any action, then imagine how much more money will disappear into their pockets if no one covers the story?

roll the dice...europe...

pic: Getty Images, uefa.com

It wasn't pretty but the young Arsenal team held their nerve to advance to the Quarter-Finals of the Champions League.

Arsenal put in an awful 90 minutes in Rome and looked to be on the verge of elimination after poor defending allowed the defender Juan to give Roma an early lead. But a glaring miss from ex-gunner Julio Baptista let Arsenal off the hook. In the penalty shoot-out, after Arsenal's calm and composed Eduardo missed the first spot kick, things didn't look that bright. But amazingly the rest of the squad held their nerve to convert their kicks, including the young players such as Walcott (20 years) & Denilson (21).


pic: Getty Images, uefa.com

Viva Thierry Henry. Two quick goals in the first half took the wind out of Lyon as Barcelona raced to a 5-2 win over the French champions. Henry had also gotten that all important away goal in France tying the first leg 1-1.

Quarter - Finals

Once again like last season, 4 English teams are in the quarters as Arsenal, Chelsea, and Man Utd managed to eliminate the three Italian teams in Roma, Juventus and Inter Milan, while Liverpool easily handled Real Madrid.

Porto, Villarreal, Bayern Munich and Barcelona round up the final eight. On paper, Porto and Villarreal are probably the weakest of the bunch while Barcelona look the most dangerous. Although, I am sure no team would want Bayern Munich after they destroyed Sporting Lisbon 12-1 on aggregate. After a jaw-dropping 5-0 away win in Lisbon, Bayern showed no sympathy in the second leg and easily won their fixture 7-1.

The other Europe

The round of 16 games for the UEFA Cup kick off on Thursday, March 12 with the return legs to be played next week. The 8 games feature teams from France (St-Etienne, Marseille, PSG), Ukraine (Dynamo, Shakhtar, Metalist), Germany (Bremen, Hamburg), Russia (CSKA, Zenit), Holland (Ajax), Turkey (Galatasaray), Portugal (Braga), Italy (Udinese), England (Man City) & Denmark (AaB).

Bremen vs St-Etienne
Marseille vs Ajax
Dynamo Kyiv vs Metalist
CSKA Moskva vs Shakhtar
Hamburg vs Galatasaray
PSG vs Braga
Udinese vs Zenit
Man. City vs AaB

While the UEFA Cup does not get even half the attention of the Champions league there are some interesting match-ups. The match up between CSKA Moscow and Shakhtar should be an interesting rivalry, while the Marseille vs Ajax match up brings together two former European Cup winners from the 1990's. In terms of financially un-even matchups, look no further than Man City vs Aab. Man City have all the money in the world while AaB from Denmark are a small club. But as they showed in the Champions league, AaB do possess the ability to spring a few surprizes and City could have a rude surprize if they are not careful.

A thing of beauty...

Best goal of the season has to belong to Eduardo, who scored Arsenal's second goal. And if Eduardo's goal was a beauty, then Vela's finish was quite pretty too..

The wait is over.....

Che, Part One (Director Steven Soderbergh): 8/10

Almost a year after the film made its premier at Cannes 2008, Che is finally released in my city. Part One made its debut this week while Part Two will be released March 13 onwards. I first heard about the movie when The Motorcycle Diaries was doing the rounds in the film festival circuit back in 2004. Part One of Soderbergh's film picks up Che's journey after his motorcycle tour of South America had first opened his eyes to the idea of seeing a unified Latin America. At the start of Soderbergh's film, Che is shown in Mexico City (1955) for his first meeting with Fidel. Both men exchanged their ideas regarding a proposed Cuban revolution. The plans arising from that meeting led to Fidel, Che and 80 other armed men taking off on a boat towards Cuba. A guerilla warfare resulted in the beautiful island of Cuba before the revolutionaries took control of the island and overthrew the US backed dictatorship. After Cuba was liberated, a soldier asks Che if he could go home because the revolution was over. To which Che replies that only the war over but the revolution was going to begin. In a way, from 1959 onwards not only did the revolution begin but so did the isolation of Cuba from the rest of the world.

Part One shows the early years of Che and how his ideas made him a symbol for global revolutions. The film alternates between the interview and U.N speech that Che gave in USA (1964) while depicting the guerilla warfare tactics that form the basis of most revolutions around the world . Overall, there are plenty of interesting moments in the movie but there is nothing ground breaking about the work. Although I will wait until seeing the second part to form an overall judgement of the work.

Some debating points that arise from the film are obviously regarding the US policy towards Cuba and one can extrapolate these to those of other nations that seek strategies to either isolate or befriend selected nations. Prior to 1945, one knew who the villains were and who the good nations were. But after WWII, things got less clear as the propaganda and spy games increased. As a result, the world became a place where nations despised their neighbors and befriended nations across the world. And if a nation had a leader that was not friendly to a foreign power, then the complicated series of coups and hate campaigns started. And the awful political mess that exists today in the world could directly be attributed to the years from 1950 until the 1970’s when so the all knowing “intelligent” men ran amok and thought they were helping to create a better world. Ha.

Spy games

What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?
-- Alec Leamas, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

The description of a spy above is in complete contrast to the one created by Ian Fleming and the subsequent James Bond films. Even though Martin Ritt’s adaptation of John le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold came out in 1965, we still have not had a cinematic spy like Alec Leamas (Richard Burton). Leamas plays a lonely miserable spy struggling for money, who gets drunk frequently, and is not afraid to throw a punch or two. Credit for such a character has to go to John le Carré who was still a “spook” himself when the movie came out and one can see the brutal honesty involved in how the spy game is truly played. But then again, the British know a thing or two about spying since they spent centuries perfecting the art. The following dialogues spoken by Leamas’ boss Control (Cyril Cusack) show the false morality involved in the spying game and the mess such self-righteousness causes:

Our work, as I understand it.. is based on a single assumption that the West is never going to be the aggressor. Thus..we do disagreeable things..but we’re defensive. Our policies are peaceful..but our methods can’t afford to be less ruthless than those of the opposition.

You know, I’d say, uh..since the war, our methods - our techniques, that is - and those of the Communists, have become very much the same. Yes. I mean, occasionally...we have to do wicked things. Very wicked things indeed. But, uh, you can’t be less wicked..than your enemies simply because your government’s policy is benevolent.

Shockingly the above words could easily apply today as they did four decades ago.

Technology as a spy tool...or not

Martin Ritt’s film shows how local personnel are critical to the gathering of information and form the most important currency to assist spies. But in the last few decades, technology has given the ability to listen in on others conversations and follow someone’s movements. And this technology gives the false ability that one can understand the enemy. Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies shows that spy technology is useless when the enemy chooses to live off the grid and does not exchange messages via cell phones or the internet but rather meets face to face to discuss plans. In a way both The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Body of Lies show that if one needs to get information from others, then they need to gain their trust. Body of Lies contrasts this style of trust by showing how Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) opts to foster a healthy relationship by trusting the local people while his boss Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe) prefers to push people aside whenever he feels like it and is constantly looking to use people.

Another common element in both films is how the bank is used by both Leamas and Ferris to lead the enemy to suspect one of their own -- in The Spy Who Came from in the Cold a letter to the bank causes the damage while in Body of Lies it is an email that causes an innocent person to be blamed.

The Spy Who Came from in the Cold is a brilliant film that focuses more on the interaction with the characters while Body of Lies is a fascinating travelogue through the middle east depicting the complexity of the problems that lie there. As much as I enjoyed watching it, Body of Lies feels like a missed opportunity and could have been much better had it employed the framework of Syriana and Traffic. The explosions and Hollywood machismo does get in the way but thankfully Leonardo DiCaprio shines in a role akin to the brilliance he brought to Blood Diamond.

Smile..for that camera

London probably has the most CCTV cameras than any other city in the world and it is hard to escape the watchful eye of the cameras. The British TV series MI-5 shows some of the people that do their spying remotely while gathering feeds from these cameras. While the show is currently in the 7th season, I caught up with Season One which consists of 6 one hour episodes. The first episode is the weakest as it features a topic of pro-life activists. But thankfully the show started to take more risks as Season One progressed and the 6th episode depicts the complicated decisions involved in balancing the threat from two different enemies (Islamists and the IRA).

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Ratings out of 10

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965, UK, Martin Ritt): 10
Body of Lies (2008, USA, Ridley Scott): 8.5
MI-5, Season One (2002, UK, various): 7.5