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.···

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.···

Music, then. It's now almost a decade since I gradually stopped caring about any sort of zeitgeist, so nowadays I'm probably less hip when it comes to music than your grandad. Just a few notes:

1. I've listened to way too much Beirut. I find it funny when DJs in drinking establishments use Beirut in dance music playlists, because I sure find them depressing as hell. You can dance, sure, but you are dancing because the Panzers are coming.

2. Portishead's third — Third — has one extraordinary start, Silence, my greatest audio Wow!-moment of 2008. But with the exception of a couple of other tracks, the rest of the album sounds forgettable — and, after a few listenings, skippable.

3. When in doubt, I still default to Stereolab. Unless I'm feeling mellow and put on some jazz.

Really sophisticated, eh?···

As for books, not much to comment on. The eagerly-awaited Anathem was my personal Disappointment of the Year, not because it's bad, but because it's... meh. I don't think I read any other 2008 release, instead I took my time reading a couple of classics and a few potboilers. My definite literary highlight was the almost three months I spent carrying another heavy tome around — Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow — which I found perfect but baffling.···

So what can be said about 2008 in the arts and entertainment?

Well, the films I enjoyed mostly during 2008 were the following:


P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood. Technically a 2007 film, but only released in Portugal on Valentine's Day (now, this is a date movie)! Anyway: One of the Best Movies Ever. I repeat, Ever. Fuck the Coen Brothers, No Country for Old Men is just good enough, this years' How Green Was My Valley, a pale effort in comparison to Citizen Kane. Paul Thomas Anderson's masterpiece kills God, and like the proverbial t-shirt, God may one day kill P.T. Anderson, but There Will Be Blood lives forever. Its final act satisfies the viewer's lust for blood in a way even Stanley Kubrick fell short of.


Alain Resnais' Coeurs / Private Fears in Public Places. Despite the annoying defacement of the original stageplay's title (what the hell is the ideia with Hearts?), Alain Resnais is proof that not all old masters of French cinema descended into hypocrisy and critic-pandering. It's the movie about relationships made with such class, like a carefully handmade watch to Nora Ephron-esque Chinese Casio knock-offs. It has some of the best photography seen this year, and also shows the critics how careful use of CGI (as also seen in James Gray's incredible chase sequence in We Own the Night) can enhance a film rather than End Cinema.


Jonathan Levine's The Wackness. I was expecting a Sundance standard film when I went to watch Jonathan Levine's debut, instead I felt the Giant Hand of the Mighty Spirit of the Universe (or whatever) pointing at me and ennumerating the ways I suck. The right film at the right time, even if it has its weaknesses, so what can I say — even Ben Kingsley performance dialled down his creepiness factor by a few notches.

There's also another film I must mention, even if it'll mean nothing to the non-portuguese readers:


Miguel Gomes' Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto. Up until the day I watched this, I thought of Miguel Gomes as a symbol of what's rotten with portuguese cinema. Although I only knew his short films, they allways struck me as futile, publicly financed exercises in intellectual masturbation of the most serious kind, the kind of shit you just have to endure in film festivals while you wait for the short film you actually want to watch. But Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto is actually good... better than that, excelent. Its director is now a puzzle, this film being in my view the exact opposite of everything Miguel Gomes did before. It's a documentary about a movie being made in the Portuguese interior, and it is at the same time that movie, without conforming to the movie-within-a-movie formula. But what makes it special is that it is very enjoyable and not for one moment does the audience cease to identify with what the film presents — and that's what makes this movie so strange and up to a point an indictment for what's wrong with portuguese filmmaking, coming from the unlikeliest of sources.

Like 2007, I felt 2008 was a weak year for cinema, and probably that's why I only went 48 times to a proper theatre, by far my lowest amount of film-going since... erm... I became a film-going adult. And as usual, I saw half the year's movies from January to March — because that's when all the good For Your Consideration pictures come out in Portugal, and not just the American releases, European movies too. The usual spike in very good late summer releases (Portugal-wise, meaning films that appeared in Cannes or whatever) was once again nowhere to be found (with the exception of Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto and perhaps a movie I unfortunately missed, Abdel Kechiche's The Secret of the Grain).

Anyway, other films I enjoyed to a five star level were Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton and Jiri Menzel's I Served the King of England. Not much, even though I would rank many of the films I watched during the year at four stars, so I still enjoy my time at the theatre a lot more often than not. There were a few stinkers, though: the remake of 3:10 to Yuma was as necessary as a kick in the butt, Indiana Jones IV raped a lot of childhoods, including mine, Juno was a overrated piece of crap, a misleading anti-abortion pamphlet disguised in self-conscious coolness stolen from the likes of Ghost World, Youth Without Youth felt like a bad episode of The Twilight Zone, and Gomorra was yet another overrated — and badly directed — piece of shit, this one raping the one book it was supposed to adapt. Of course, I did refuse to go see things like Speed Racer (seriously, you can't get me to watch a film that looks like an unplayable Megarace — already one of the worst computer games I ever played), or else this list would be a lot bigger.


Television-wise, 2008 was the year of The Wire. I watched every single bit of every one of the sixty episodes, and it must be told that if this was a 60-hour movie, it'd be up there with There Will Be Blood, one of the best movies ever, with a storytelling scope such that regular feature films, at 3 hours or less, can only dream of.

And that's it for now. Check again soon for my thoughts about books and music.···

Well, that's it for 2008, a year that won't be missed. Phew! Not that anything bad happened in my life, it was just a Year of Minor Annoyances. There may be ominous signs for 2009, with the Pyramid Scheme Economy going to pieces, but at least it is, as Mafalda put it, like a brand new notebook.

I will recap the best and worst of 2008, and write down some predictions for 2009 in a day or two, once I recover from the hangover from last night's reveillon at Maria. For now: Happy 2009!···