The buzz

We suddenly were all proud of ourselves as "Europeans" in the context of the four recipients of the acting Oscar awards: Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Javier Bardem and Tilda Swinton. So we are taking over Hollywood, right? Us, Europeans that is...

Whatever.

Sometimes people are really looking for a buzz, I think, and journalists are craving for generalizations that make little or no sense. The year English patient won, 1997 I think, everyone was buzzing about the independent invasion: 4 out of 5 movies up for the best movie award were independent productions. Oh my God, this was, like, so important! And then what happened? Did Hollywood suffer a blow? Did Tom Cruise get a pay cut? Did he stop making Mission Impossibles? I don't think so...

Things come and go but stupid Hollywood stays. With its ridiculous blockbusters (Jumper, don't even get me started on this one) and its over-payed stars.

Good things are here and will always be here, some years more, some years less. This year's highlights for me were an ex-stripper receiving a writing award, an excellent two-headed monster of a director receiving the recognition for their truly independent style, an unknown song-writer invited back on stage to finish her acceptance speech after being idiotically cut off by the producers etc. I wish I could have seen the brilliant Paul-Thomas Anderson been awarded with something or Johnny Depp for his rendition of the dark and irrevocably hurt Sweeney but whatever, this is Hollywood after all.

What is modern?

Some time ago, when I was going through my Mark Ronson phase I was thinking a lot about what it means to do a good cover of a song. What does it take to take an old song and make it new? Usually good covers are songs that were unknown in their times and they were reinvented as successful hymns, the artists changing nothing more than the arrangement, making it more current and voilá... the new song is born! Mark Ronson's case is not like that though since all his covers break the basic rules of this business, i.e. that the covered song needs to be old and unknown. His songs were new and/or famous. Yet his record is awesome, current, relevant and his songs are appreciated by many (apart from stupid arctic monkeys who said that they cringe every time the hear his version of the smiths' classic 'stop me if you've heard this one before'). Whatever.

But it is not just Mark Ronson, who is new and modern, it is also Duffy, whose '60's feel is so now, it is covers like 'Umbrella' by the Brighton-based 'Mechanical Bride' (thanks to hallow kitty for sending it to me!), Husky Rescue's version of 'poison' and so many more.

Duffy's story is amazing and I think also very telling: living in a village in Wales, she had no access to modern music and kept listening to her parents' 45's from the 60's. When time came for her to write her own music, out it came this fantastic mixture of soul and '60's sound that sounds so original. And I think maybe that's what it takes to be original in music (and possibly elsewhere): one needs to distance oneself from the what is in fashion at the moment, because it is useless to try anyway. Things change so fast, so trying to keep up is a bit futile (we can leave that to the DJs). Originality means to be true to oneself, even if what one likes seems outdated and old, if it is true it will work. With this in mind, I am making a tribute band to the Suede, do you think it will work?

Too many movies...

All my recent posts are about movies, d/a told me and I agree. So maybe I need to write about something else. But what? I haven't finished reading Madame Bovary (that was one of the first topics proposed to me by Youkali, namely how all women are still the same) and when I do, I promise I will write something, because I really like the book. If I don't write about the movies that I see, then I have to write about my everyday boring life and that, nobody wants, I know.

But I think I found something I could talk about. Every morning I walk through the same part of town to go get my bus to go work. There was an earring that I would see every day on the same part of the pavement, and every time I saw it I would smile. It was funny because I thought that the person who lost it must miss it and must be looking for it. I saw it every day and I couldn't give it to the person who lost it, I didn't know who she was. This made me think about how useless it is to know something important without being able to say it to whoever cares for it. I didn't care about the earring, it wasn't mine, it was only one and I didn't really like it. But the person who lost it, missed it and might have been looking for it all the time. But she didn't know where it was.

I haven't seen the earring in the last week. I hope the girl found it before the cleaners.

The cinema and the vegetable

In one of the funnier scenes of the movie 'the diving bell and the butterfly', Jean-Do, the protagonist overhears some people referring to him as a vegetable. In the voice over of his thoughts he wonders, what kind of vegetable am I, am I a carrot or a potato? And then he laughs.

The story of the movie is well-known, successful editor of Elle with extra cool lifestyle (fashion, women, cars and photoshoots with Lenny Kravitz) suddenly gets locked-in syndrome and can only move one eyelid. With the genius help of his therapist, who devises a method of communication, he dictates a book, publishes it and then dies. If you want a tragedy, it is fair to say that you can't get more tragic than that.

There have been various recent movies with people that cannot move (the sea inside) or are vegetables (talk to her), but Julian Schnabel's triumph in this movie is the amazing way of portraying the solitude of the person locked in this diving bell. With a lengthy initial point-of-view shot, through the eyelid of his protagonist and with the voice-over of his thoughts that cannot be heard from other people, we get the tragedy all right. And it is too much indeed.

But the movie is funny as well as uplifting in some weird sense, not because of the 'triumph of human spirit' in a cheesy sense. It is uplifting because Jean-Do, whose first words when he first manages to communicate are, je veux mourir-I want to die, ends up hanging on to 'what makes him human' and uses his imagination and his memories to carry on living. It is not too much but it still something, for him at least. In a day in the beach with his children, he says, I think a fraction of a Dad is better than no Dad at all.

This is in sharp contrast with the hero of 'the sea inside', who is certain that he doesn't want to live, even if he communicates all right. Art should not be judgmental, it is not for anyone to say what people can endure. One person wants to die and another dictates a book and then dies, unwillingly. The women in 'talk to her' are vegetables, girlfriends in a coma, but their lives go on in spite of them: they copulate, break-up, get back together with ex-es and use face cream. We never hear their voices and maybe they don't have any, but their bodies are there and that makes them present.

In the ever-relevant debate of mind vs. body, these movies takes different stances, all of which interesting. Maybe one day we will know what makes a man a man, the body or the mind, the diving-bell or the butterfly, the ghost or the shell. Until then, we make movies about it.

Bye Bye Life...

Joe Giddeon is an iconic figure, the main character in all that jazz and the actor that portrayed him, Roy Schieder just died. It's funny that this guy was more associated with death than anyone else, even before he died, because of this scene. Maybe the greatest scene from a movie, ever. A scene that encapsulates perfectly human vanity before death, human desire to be important and loved and adored. So, in his honor let us all sing in chorus:

Bye bye life, bye bye happiness
Hallow loneliness, I think I'm gonna die...

And while we're on the topic of death (and life) maybe this is also an appropriate extended quote...

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Black Black heart

There's something amazing about a woman singing 'they tried to make me go to rehab and I said no, no, no' when she performs in a ceremony while on a break from ehm, rehab. If it was anyone else, I would disapprove, I am sure, but her, I cannot resist. They way she sang, for the first time in a long time sober, enjoying her moment, with her eyes shining at the camera. The way she hugged her mother, the way she said thank you to her record company. The way she stood in shock when her win was announced. The way she disappeared in the arms of her huge black backing singers, a tiny scared white girl with a black, black heart.

I don't know what amy is without the drugs, the pain, the problems and the charming decadence. I don't believe that a great artist needs so much drama, at least not all the time. A great artist has to go back to black but can take these black moments that every life has and turn them into ingenuity. The way amy does...

Follow-up to previous post

Thanks to Youkali for sending me this.

Is this good or bad, Obama becoming a superstar and being super-endorsed by everybody? I think the overwhelming Hollywood support to Al Gore, did not go down very well in the end.

But this is a touching video, a new generation finding its 'I have dream'. A new iconic speech, with a new iconic phrase that defines our generation: yes we can.

My only political post

I am not used to writing about politics, but I think the Obama vs. Hilary debate has caught an amazing amount of attention, especially in Europe. It is an interesting and important issue in general, but what has intrigued me about it was a side issue.

At some point Oprah Winfrey openly endorsed Obama, and attracted the criticism of women across the world: in a race that is increasingly about a black guy vs. a woman, why did Oprah 'betray' her gender and align herself with her race? Her answer was that her choice had to do with the person, the character of the candidate more than anything else.

My question to this is: how much of the Obama vs. Hilary debate actually IS about the character of the individual and not for the fact that he is black and she is a woman? And if Obama and Hilary are indeed just symbols of their race and gender respectively, how should the voters vote? Should they align themselves with their gender or with their race? Is Oprah a traitor? Should all women vote for Hilary and all blacks for Obama? And who should all the Hispanics vote for? What about the Greek lobby?

The important question is, if someone asks you to define yourself in one word, what would you say? Woman, white, other?

Oldboy's distant cousin

How many more stories about revenge are there? How many more can we handle? Stories whose protagonist is this man broken by life, whose precious family has been taken away from him and he has been left destroyed? Rhetorical questions. Apparently we can take many more, indeed we are thirsty about such stories, they will never cease to exist.

I have always liked them, myself. More importantly though, I’ve been struggling to find out why revenge stories are so important in the history of theatre, literature and film.

Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd is yet another take on the familiar plot: naïve barber has a nice family with a blonde wife and chubby baby daughter, evil judge eyes wife and daughter and arranges for the naïve barber to be taken off the picture, imprisoned somewhere far away for a crime he did not commit and we don’t even learn what is. Barber returns after fifteen years, bloodthirsty and much less naïve. He takes up his old profession with the aid of the baker, who is in love with him. He learns that wife has been poisoned and evil judge holds daughter. His plan is simplistic yet effective: barbers have knives and can shave, razors are sharp, maybe perhaps he could kill people that have wronged him? But what will become of the bodies? No problem as the love-stricken pie-maker needs fresh meat for her pies. The macabre enterprise proceeds with effectiveness, bringing fresh clientele for the barber and the baker, with little or no satisfaction for the former. The baker loves the barber though, she wants another shot in a happy life ‘it might not be as I dreamt, it might not be as you remember, but we can have a life’ she tells him. His empty face leaves no room for misunderstandings, he disagrees. His only goal is to kill the judge that deprived him of his life. In the end he succeeds amidst a bloodbath that spans an hour an a half of film, but alas in the process he also kills his wife, who poisoned herself, yes, but didn’t die and spent her life as a half-crazy beggar in the street. Sweeney is broken once again, when he sees that his life was not entirely lost, not until he was deceived by the baker and killed his wife. He holds her murdered body and he lives for one moment before the antagonist slits the final throat of the movie and Sweeney is reunited with his wife forever. And all this in songs, some of which genius.

The parallels with Oldboy are endless, minus the incest of course, no need to enumerate them here. Two tragic heroes that suffer for no reason and become worse than the people that wronged them. Oldboy can never be happy again, knowing what he has done and settles in a tormented existence. Sweeney dies, and perhaps gets his redemption in the next life. But the biggest affinity of the two of them is their metamorphosis, from naïve, kind-hearted idiots, whose mere existence is hubris to people that crave for love and boring family dinners and walks in the market, to the bloodthirsty monsters that they have become. Sweeny’s eyes say it all, he hates the world, he has finally grown up.

And that’s the tragedy, I think.