Hoping some warmer music cures my flu once and for all, and still under the influence of The Wackness: Guru — Feel The Music (from the album Jazzmatazz vol.II). It’s incredible how good hip-hop used to be before the bling era.
TumblrIs 'Slumdog Millionaire' poverty porn?
Quite a discussion is going on at Slashfilm, mimicking the debate Danny Boyle’s movie is sparking among critics. I’m quite a fan of Danny Boyle, but I won’t say anything about Slumdog Millionaire until I actually see it. The concept of a rags-to-riches via TV contest plot seems quite dodgy to me, but somehow the trailer I’ve seen leaves hope that it won’t work like that, and I trust Boyle not to be obvious.
But still, the mere existence of this film seems to lead to a Catch-22: If you depict India like the kind of tourism infomercial you get on CNN, then you’re avoiding reality, but if you depict the poverty then you’re being pornographic. I guess that’s in the eye of the beholder / critic, if you think a film glamourizes poverty, then it’s probably you who have seen the glamour.
In films such as these, I think the main issue should instead be the production’s ethics: are there people being exploited in the movie? Did the people whose poverty is being depicted get proper compensation? (I’ve seen way too much ‘socially conscious’ documentaries that were totally exploitative of the people in it.) If Slumdog Millionaire was done the right way, then it’s fine by me.
Poison cure
Here's a genuine dilemma: How to review Raquel Freire's Veneno Cura. Three close friends with whom I've worked in my own stuff — Margarida, Inês and Cristina — lent their talents, respectively, to one of the major roles, a minor role, and the production side of things. And I know more people involved in VC, such as the musicians, who did in this film a great job, just as they did in my latest documentary, the Coimbra Science Museum-sponsored remake of Words and Thoughts in RGB.
I do want people in the know to watch this film and take notice of my friends' awesomeness, and to give them work. But I can't be raving about Veneno Cura — it's a mediocre film. I won't go to the extreme of some internet reviews that demolish every single bit (which are funny to contrast with the ejaculative rave reviews that seem the work of the production's dark operations). The acting's quite good (but understandably inconstant), I thought the directing was competent and unobtrusive (it was a major point of criticism for many, but I disagree), and so is the tech end. So what's wrong?
The bloody script! It struck me as an exercise in extreme feminism — the three leading ladies are victims, while the two men are obnoxiously bad men — one a giant asshole, the other an horrorshow psycho. The problem is that the characters are so weakly developed they immediately appear false and distracting to the audience. At the root of it, a prejudgement of character, one of your most basic No-Nos of writing (even if you are writing Hannibal Fucking Lecter, you can't forget Evil people aren't just mean, they're people who really believe they're right). Characters are cardboard in the kind of film that doesn't work with cardboard characters, and even the better developed characters act with Deux Ex Impredictability. A second problem with the script is a common problem in portuguese filmmaking: no 'darlings' were killed, so there are unnecessary scenes that have a copy-paste feel, and it's at those points the actors somehow lose faith and their performances are weaker.
However, it's all about the script: jarring, distracting, and completely distancing from the main 'selling' point of the film: a look into the darker and intimate corners of love and sex. And since it's so prejudgemental to its characters, I can't agree with the critics that say the film lacks morality. It's a twisted one: men are rapists while women want to be loved, but it's there, heavy-handed. It's yet another film to fail where Shortbus succeeded, it's not the (very light in comparison) sex scenes that make the difference here, it's the characters.
The end result is a pretty tragic outcome — a feminist film whose press hype reads like "Naked Girls! Come and Watch!" And two out of five.···
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Under The Influence: Beastie Boys-inspired Artwork. Wow. Above is Ken Garduno’s ‘Bust’. (via /Film)
Ecologia Spec Ad I
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Paul Thomas Anderson’s first short film Cigarettes & Coffee.
Useless Superpowers. Such as, achieving 99% opacity.
How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing
It’s impossible not to chuckle with schadenfreude while reading the story of how Porsche pwned Gordon Gekko-type speculator fucks bent on pillaging and bankrupting a perfectly functional company (Volkswagen). This tale could probably do a lot more than politicians to prevent the kind of financial gambling that brought us The Crisis in the future.
Then again, there’s no shortage of cautionary tales about real casinos.
Offset Millenium Tension
Is it possible someone did the math wrong and the New Millenium actually starts in 2010? It certainly feels that way. Reading my predictions for 2008, I can't help but smile at the following two sentences:
Does it even make sense when the world economy is set for One Hard Crash?
Well, bingo. I actually had some money set aside in an investment fund, good thing I withdrew it early in 2008 and used it to buy a new computer and to pay for my Master's tuition fees. Of course, I would prefer to be wrong, because:
One thing I'm certain about 2008 though, is that decisions will be made.
Nope. Nada. Okay, I did enroll in a Master Degree in Multimedia, but that's no decision, that meant taking shelter doing something and hoping for some change in the future, as at the moment I am not emplyoyed, but rather disunemployed — does teaching two afternoons a week count as a steady job? No, and it doesn't pay like one either. But being a freelancer with almost no clients means I'm not even a jobless person (and that's why Portugal has a lower unemployment rate than many other countries — because there are lots of 'freelancers' here).
This is of course quite depressing. I don't earn enough to rent a flat, my little place of independence being a shared office which I use as a means to get out of bed and make myself presentable every day (there's no bigger vice than working in your pajamas, believe me). Of course, maybe I could improve my independence status if I found a job as a cashier or telemarketer somewhere, but that would mean giving up on my meager hours of teaching (which I love) and, at least for some time, giving up on my (mostly unpaid) filmmaking, and being able to cling on to these dreams means I'm actually fortunate to have a choice, so I'll shut up and stop bitching.
In April I'll turn thirty. I certainly don't feel like it (maybe except when I do push-ups), the facts I described make me feel as if I was in some sort of very late teenage years. But I do worry about being single, even though I had my chances to find out I prefer being single than in a relationship just for the sake of it. I'm very, very picky. Once I was having a date with a girl I was interested in, and it seemed somewhat reciprocal. But then she asked how good was my pay at the college where I teach. I said "oh now you're reminding me, I have to wake up early tomorrow", gave her a ride home, said goodbye and never called again. Am I a freak? You betcha. So I guess this one's on me, too.
Anyway, this wasn't intended to be a exam of conscience, but a reprise of 2008, a year that won't be missed. Not even the summer weather was any good. Being someone susceptible to weltschmerz, I must mention I did enjoy the election of Barack Obama as American President, and that night I went to sleep dreaming that an evil spell had been defeated. Of course, Great Depression II and all the other wrong shit going on in the world offset the apparently good news of Obama's election.
2009 then. Expected to be the Year of Utter Madness, so I won't bother predicting anything. Here's what we know: Obama is due to take office soon, and even though I hope the United States will now point the rest of the Western World towards a different direction, I must recognize that Obama is, after all, a político, and I wouldn't be surprised if Cool America turned out like Tony Blair's Britannia.
But maybe not so: That different direction is the direction away from Reaganism-Thatcherism (or its 'left-wing' guise, Blairism), that culture of greed and competition in which kindness is a sin and other people — workers, colleagues, etc — are not to be engaged in cooperation but rather to be pwned, and which led to things such as a generation of college graduates not being able to find jobs that pay — bosses who claim that "they're the ones who should pay for earning experience" — rioting in Greece (and not in Portugal, I guess, because the rioting genes ain't in us); or I being unable to count as an unemployed worker — because I am an intermittent one. Reaganomics led, of course, to the current Great Depression II, so it's impossible for me not to experience a certain amount of schadenfreude whenever I read news of the Rich in Trouble, even though something the rich do very well is the Redistribution of Trouble, meaning we'll all be worse off.
So I do hope we'll go in a different direction from here, not towards forcing the redistribution of wealth of course, but perhaps towards the redistribution of prosperity, meaning something very simple (and perhaps shocking to readers in proper First World countries who don't know the simulacrum of development Portugal is): all work gets paid. That'd be all.···
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Screamin Jay Hawkins’ I Put a Spell On You, the greatest song I (re)discovered in 2008. Stranger than Paradise, Jim Jarmusch’s hip supreme, got me hooked.
As an aside, here’s Bryan Ferry’s cover in late 80s music video kitsch. Geez. But Nick Cave’s is pretty nice.
