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May 31, 2007

Berlin (not beyond... yet)

Arrived in Berlin last night around 9:30 to a searing magenta sunset on one side of the plane and a glorious nearly full moon rise on the other. Then walked across the tarmac, which always makes me imagine I'm deplaning in 1961 or something. Ryanair charged me $66 for 6 kilos overweight (they only allow 15 kilos in the checked bag and 10 kilos in the carryon), which brought the London-Berlin flight to about $90, after a .01 ticket price, then taxes and airport fees, with the whopping luggage charge the secret way they recoup their cheap tickets (actually they get huge subsidies from the EU, who seems bent on expanding air travel inside Europe, even while huge campaigns are going on to reduce "carbon footprints"... typical cross-purposes, I suppose)...

Tina met me and we went on a hilarious series of S-bahn and U-bahn and bus and cab rides to the Tegel airport (I came in at Schonefeld) to meet Rob. All was well, as we finally found him, and after a late night of catching up we woke today to a beautiful early summer Berlin day. Tina's apartment is in the old East Berlin, and it's not atypical of the places here now. The apartment is huge and beautiful. The building looks big and boring from the outside, but like so many east bloc apartment houses, they are getting redone now in ways that take advantage of the big spaces... We headed over to the Kreuzberg neighborhood where the three Convergence Centers are for the anti-G8 protests about to start north of here in Rostock and Bad Heilingendam... Just adjacent to the first Convergence Center we visited (the Bethanienhaus CC) we came upon this funny statue/fountain:

We picked up a bunch of information packets and a collection of posters there before walking a few blocks to another Convergence Center, this one in a huge squatted building called Kopi. This reminded me of what it was like 17 years ago when I visited Berlin with my pals in the "Anti-Economy League of San Francisco" to warn them that the free market was anything but free. Whole blocks of East Berlin were squatted at the time, and the wall wasn't yet down and East Germany hadn't yet dissolved, but it was relatively easy to cross over during the day. We went through Checkpoint Charlie then, and tomorrow I'll go and see what the area around there looks like now. But here are some photos from the courtyard of Kopi:

This last one's banner refers to the recent attack on a long-term squatted social center Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen, Denmark. In fact, the buzz here in Germany among anarchists at least is that the combination of that Danish police attack and the heavy-handed raids by German police on various squats, bookshops, and social centers here in Germany, has actually galvanized the European anarchist networks into much greater cohesion and determination to make their presence felt at the upcoming G8 summit. They already had a 1000-strong march confront a large force of police in Hamburg a few days ago during an Asia-European summit in anticipation of the G8...

Anyway, I'm pretty skeptical about this whole G8 protest. I'm going anyway, but don't think I'll last as long as some of the more dedicated. If you read the link I just mentioned, you can find some severely overheated rhetoric glamorizing the fight with cops, framing it like a sports event almost. There's a youthful excitement that somehow a few thousand anarchists dusting it up with a few thousand police is some kind of threat to capitalism! What a bizarre and ultimately narcissistic idea!... Not that I don't understand the passion that drives folks to want this kind of theater to be "real" and to mean something. But it is just theater in the end, on both sides.

Nothing of importance will come from the leaders of the G8 meeting together. It's a PR stunt for international and domestic consumption. If they meet or not, the actual negotiations are going on elsewhere. And the staging of war games is a symbolic gesture of defiance but hardly a threat to the larger system that binds us so tightly to a sinking ship. I'll write more about this when I return from Rostock, or maybe I'll get a chance to post some from there...

Meanwhile, our walk around Kreuzberg inevitably cross the path of the old Berlin wall. Here's a couple of views east and west of a spot we walked through, followed by Tina peering through a nice historic glass display installed there. (There are lot of such historic displays around Berlin, helpfully juxtaposing old photos to today. I love these!)

Later we were walking along one of the stretches of original wall that's still standing. This one is covered with graffiti, as well as a number of unimpressive murals dating from around 1990 when it was breached. These are on the former east side of the wall where no art was until after that time, unlike the west, which was famously covered in wild art. Here's a shot of an old East German Trabant breaking through the wall, its license plate indicating the day the wall fell, with an ample dose of graffiti further embellishing it:

And Tina and Rob walking along the same stretch of wall:

One of my favorite things about Berlin, and northern Europe in general, is the wonderful culture of everyday bicycling here. You are surrounded all the time by bicyclists going to and fro, laden with groceries, children, briefcases, what have you. And the street engineering is designed for bicycles too! Here's a couple of shots from the same spot, first of two bikes approaching on my favorite design, the side path separated from both pedestrians and cars by curbs on both sides, and then the view in the other direction as a whole clot of bikes cross the huge intersection.

It's all the more remarkable because in East Berlin especially the roads are huge wide boulevards, easily 6-10 lanes wide in many places. But instead of being wall-to-wall cars, like in Mexico City or New York, they are landscaped with trees and bushes, wide sidewalks, and on most streets, a continuous red pavement bikeway that is elevated above the roadway, between the sidewalk for pedestrians and the parked cars (they also have bikeways on sidewalks in many places)... Walking all around town tonight by myself I was struck by the transformation of East Berlin from when I visited so long ago... Still, Berlin feels exciting and quite romantic, in spite of the blocky buildings and huge streets. I did a bit of touristic sightseeing, and here's some shots to end on, captured near sunset during my walk...

The Reichstag

Me at the Brandenburg Gate

The Berliner Dom with the Alexanderplatz tower in the rear.

Posted by ccarlsson at 03:11 PM | Comments (2)

May 30, 2007

UK vacationing III

Starting two mornings ago in Aberystwyth, we took the "Cliff Railroad" up the nearby hill, kind of a Victorian funicular actually, and got these amazing views on a crystal clear morning:

This is looking at the town, southward.

This is the view north towards Snowdonia and the rugged northwest of Wales.

We drove across Wales and southward to Hay-on-Wye where King Richard Booth has an independent city-state and its known now as the "Town of Books"... there's a big literary festival going on there, and we plunged into the midst of the smsll town's annual frenzy. Dozens of used book dealers occupy Hay now, and we all had visions of finding various treasures... but no luck. I did meet a woman who had a poster from the recent SF Anarchist bookfair hanging on her bookshelf, so we had a chat about U.S. politics, the book business etc. She made me sign the poster (Hugh!)...

Here's a couple of shots of Hay-on-Wye:

The first picture is looking down from the edge of King Richard's castle towards the street. You can see some of his rusty bookshelves along the stone wall. This is where he offers books for 30p or 50p, but you get what you pay for and most of these are old, uninteresting books, randomly organized. Some of the shops were good used bookstores but most were really chaotic and unless you wanted old books about British history, gardening, or old British literature, you probably wouldn't be able to find what you want...

From Hay we headed stayed in Abergavenny, and yesterday morning we headed south to go to Bath. Unfortunately we hit the worst traffic jam of any of our lives, sitting for 2 full hours in traffic that went barely a couple of miles before we finally got out of it. The traffic circles, or roundabouts, are usually pretty efficient, but once they gridlock the polite British drivers really can't figure out how to get moving again... what a nightmare! Later we got stuck in incredibly slow inbound traffic into Bath too, and all I could do is remember how much I hate car travel, how incredibly inefficient it is, and sadly ruminate on how choked with cars England has become. We made it into the Roman Baths in the heart of Bath, which was interesting to see, juxtaposing it to previous visits to Rome, Pompeii and Herculaneum in Italy...

Looming behind the Roman Bath is the medieval cathedral, and of course the structures enclosing the Bath now are both 19th and 21st century, so you can enjoy a strange historic layering while there...

From Bath we drove east to Avebury, one of the most impressive neolithic sites in England, compared to Stonehenge and the like. Here's a few photos, with us in the standing stones, and also braving the freely roaming sheep (which made me think of the film Black Sheep, so I wasn't entirely sure I wouldn't be attacked by these 'wild' beasts!)...

Last night we stumbled on the lovely Hotel de la Bere just northeast of Cheltenham, and spent the night there. It's in an old manor dating from 1485! We had a great dinner, meeting Caitlin and Julie, who were walking through the Cotswolds...

After all this driving around England and Wales I was heartened to see this sign this morning in Chelthenham while were hunting for this internet cafe:

This is even funnier if you heard the call-in radio show we caught on the BBC yesterday coming from Bristol. Just like in SF, people were calling in to complain bitterly about carsharing lanes, traffic calming efforts, Critical Mass (120 cyclists just getting in the way and creating bad PR for cyclists!), and one guy even called in to complain that cyclists don't have insurance and what's he supposed to do when his car is damaged by a bicylist??? The horror! the horror!... the media environment here in England and Wales has been amazing similar to the rightwing echo chamber in the U.S. If I didn't know better, I'd think everyone was a rightwing loony here too...

Posted by ccarlsson at 03:46 AM | Comments (0)

May 27, 2007

UK vacationing II

Sitting in an elegant, slightly faded old hotel in Aberystwyth, Wales, writing this entry via their wifi in the lobby. I first heard of this beautifully named burg from some folks who joined a bicycling history tour I gave a few months ago--they were regulars on the Aberystwyth Critical Mass! Here's the view out of the window here at 9:30 pm:

Here's an image of the ubiquitous "carbon footprint" marketing going on over here:

We left York yesterday mornng and drove first up to the Fountain Abbey, an old monastery destroyed by Henry XIII's soldiers back in the 1500s... as they are charging about $20 per person to go in, we decided to forego entering the grounds. But I have to admit, the thought of a destroyed Catholic ruin warms my heart, whether I actually see it in person or not! A nice drive along a scenic route finally dropped us in Manchester where I was set on visiting the People's History Museum, given my ongoing work with Shaping San Francisco, and the developing relationship with the new SF History Museum at the Old Mint. It wasn't quite as stimulating as I'd hoped, but we did enjoy some of the old banners and many of the political posters. They had a great collection of full-sized Walter Crane images which I sorely coveted, but they had no posters or books available there. Here are a few images we grabbed:

Fundamentally the People's History Museum represents the Trades Union movement in Britain, and makes an effort to give an overview of everyday life, the issues affecting women, there's a section on slavery and the movement against it, and they sheepishly admit in their introductory 3 minute video that they haven't got a good exhibit on the rise of a multicultural society in the UK. The artifacts are interesting, the displays are dense with information, and you could spend a long time reading it all. As Francesca said, "I'd rather read a book than a museum" and I have to agree. On the other hand, it confronted me with the difficulty of presenting complex histories in ways that speak to schoolchildren as well as visiting adults and locals. No easy answers. The museum has an exhibit about the Battle for the Ballot, the long struggle for full suffrage in England, and that had a lot of great art (including the first image above) but the saga of electoral expansion just doesn't have the resonance for me that it does for a lot of folks...

We ended up spending the night in Runcorn, not far south of Liverpool, and went over to Chester for dinner. Chester is reputed to be one of the most authentic, preserved medieval cities in England. Getting there made that a hard claim to digest, since the surrounding miles look mostly like this:

But once you get all the way in and find your way inside the walls of the city, it's very pretty. There are a number of buildings that date themselves to the 1400s and 1500s, but the majority of buildings that match that style seem to have been built in the late 19th century, in what was probably a previous effort to capitalize on historic nostalgia... here's a few images from our walk around the Roman wall, the Victorian clock, and some shots of the city center...

After a desultory night in a motel in Runcorn we drove west across the north of Wales today, finally having rain and gray skies. It wasn't so bad though, since we could still enjoy big views and the gorgeous Welsh countryside. We headed for Portmeirion, the place where the 1960s TV show "The Prisoner" was shot, which my parents and I loved at the time. It is now an extremely kitschy, sub-disney enclave with shops in every possible niche, a big garden/woods to walk in, and generally a weird aura of fakery... still it was fun to visit. Francesca and I had fun taking wacky photos all day so here's a run of them at Portmeirion:

After running around and being silly, scoring some Prisoner schwag, and quickly exhausting the possibilities of Portmeirion, we hit the road, following the small winding roads along the coast to Aberystwyth, which took a couple of hours. Here's my parents at one of the few pullouts we could find to enjoy the magnificent coastal views...

I've been driving all the time, so I'm starting to feel like a regular left-side guy now... didn't have much trouble in London either, before we left. Anyway, we got here to gray skies but the rain stopped. A quick walk around town found us in old ruins again, and then another of our nightly good dinners. I've had sea bass the last few nights, and I just love it (I first learned about it as "Branzino" in Switzerland... what a great tasting fish!) So here's a few more shots from Aberystwyth. That name has grown on me already!

Tomorrow a big book fair in Hay-on-Wye... after I go to Berlin in a few days my usual subjects will probably resurface from all this family travelling...

Posted by ccarlsson at 01:23 PM | Comments (1)

May 25, 2007

UK vacationing

Got to London a week ago, and am in York tonight. Tomorrow I'm off to Manchester and then Wales for a few days before flying to Berlin on May 30... Having a great time, of course. The weather has been simply unbelievable. Brilliant, warm sunny weather, day after day, though a fierce storm is promised for this weekend.

Visiting London as a pure tourist for the first time (my 4th visit), with my parents for the first few days, joined on Tuesday by Francesca. At the outset of a six week journey that will encompass many countries, moods, activities, and people, it takes a bit to relax into the rhythm. It's also a bit jarring to spend 24 hours a day with my parents after not having done so for many years. But we're all finding our way (regrettably my mom is hobbled by a bad hip so she's not as mobile as any of us expected her to be--but we're working around it)...

London is a huge, sprawling place, so my experience was necessarily quite limited. I probably only heard English spoken by about half the people I overheard speaking (a great deal of Polish and Russian, among dozens of other languages). The whole place is either under construction or newly rebuilt, or so it seemed to my inexperienced eye. Here's a photo from the Millennium Bridge towards "The City" which is decked out in cranes; the view was similar in every direction.

London is a very horizontal city, not so tall, and riding up in the over-rated Eye (a giant ferris wheel-like device that never stops turning at a very slow half hour pace) gave a view of construction in every direction. Here I am in it with Francesca a few hours after she got off the plane:

The visit to London started out with a trip to the Borough Market, a wonderful artisan market full of local cheeses, pastries, breads, chocolates, meats, mmmmm, so many good things!

Scoring some amazing cheese and bread here reinforced my sense of the commonality of the so-called 'new food politics'. There's a general turn to the artisan, to quality, to homemade, to slow... we found it here in York too where the cafe at the Castle Howard where we went today was ready to feed people who wanted vegetarian, vegan, gluten- or wheat-free, every kind of allergy was listed...

While in London a new documentary about the Clash's lead singer Joe Strummer opened up. I didn't see it, but having seen "Punk's Not Dead" at the recent Film Fest in SF and remembering the gritty misery that produced punk back in 1970s England as well as the U.S., it was striking how prosperous and un-gritty London felt these past few days. Granted, the skies were clear and sunny, but the old urban angst and alienation was in short supply. I dropped in on x-Chris at the Camberwell squat at 190 Warham, which was a serious reclamation effort. We did make it to the 56a Infoshop and even that seemed ensconced in a pleasant housing project full of sweet people. (Granted, both squat and infoshop are in incredibly cramped tiny spaces--in that respect it reminded me of the space crunch in SF over the past decade.) Also dropped in on the folks at Mute Magazine for a short howdy (in which I managed to talk the entire time and probably made an ass of myself), who were also in a very popular neighborhood, grittier than elsewhere but still weirdly bucolic in these days. Perhaps a cold, wet visit would have led to some different sensations, but I really felt the passage of time and the oddness of London's current flourishing... apparently benefiting from the high value of the British pound and the endless influx of tourists and the monied from around the world...

Funny street signs are part of coming here too... the Brits just say things differently than I've ever heard...

We did a lot of tourist things, like riding the Big Bus, going on the Eye, riding a boat on the Thames, visiting Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, taking in Othello at the rebuilt Globe Theatre (open to the air: as Shakespeare unfolds in this quasi-authentic original open-air theater we were cursed by the passage of jets and helicopters, making the actors inaudible from time to time; still it was a wonderful experience), going to the Tate Modern, etc. Here are a bunch more photos until my next post:

The speakers at Speakers' Corner weren't impressive: a Federalist Society adherent promoting global cooperation and an African-American transplant arguing for Robert Mugabe!

Big Ben with the Eye in the background.

London's City Hall from the Thames.

Me on the tourist bus. Loved those upper decks! The next photo is just a shot from the front of the upper deck of a regular bus, showing a normally congested street scene. This is after the imposition of 8 pounds a day congestion charging...

Francesca has a very good eye I think. This and the next one are her photos...

My parents and Francesca crossing the Millennium Bridge towards the Tate Museum... next shot is from inside the Tate looking at the Bridge, in an angle where you can see something of the bridge's artistic merit.

At the Tate we saw a lot of very interesting art. Funny to spend a few hours seeing modern art before strolling 100 yards next door to the 16th century replica of the Globe Theater to see Shakespeare. Here is a photo (that I wasn't supposed to take) of a painting by a Congolese painter (whose name I regrettably failed to write down), satirizing himself as an art dealer... the rest of the paintings in this room were just magical in their intensity, humor, politics and bold humanity...

Francesca and I both went crazy too in a room dedicated to layouts and covers of "USSR in Construction", a Stalinist periodical that featured some really remarkable photography, collage and magazine design. No pics unfortunately... it was published from 1929-1940 or so.

Here's a view inside the Globe:

When we drove north from London to York yesterday, we passed quite a few nuclear installations such as this one:

I was a bit surprised at how completely the local advertising industry (which kept impressing both me and Francesca with their designs and generally edgier qualities than what we're used to) has glommed onto carbon footprints and the like as marketing tools. Dovetails with the articles I linked to in my last blog post on climate change. Anyway, we came to York, a charming small city in the north and kept our great weather for a couple of days of wonderful tourism... here's some shots of us in various places in York, then at Castle Howard where we had fun today, also saw a great exhibit of William Morris designs and wallpapers that were commissioned for that castle... the grounds were amazing too, one of the best formal English gardens in the country, and a "wood" that is also largely a garden-like construction, home to over 800 different types of rhododendrons...

Posted by ccarlsson at 03:33 PM | Comments (1)

May 16, 2007

Climate Change Changes Purpose?

OK, I'm going to do my part to heat the planet by flying to London tomorrow, and continue to use profligate transit for the following six weeks. So sue me!... Don't worry, I'll be meeting people, exchanging paper, sharing important conversations and contacts, and doing all the things you'd expect any self-respecting revolutionary traveller to do... but mostly I'll be having a grand time with my parents and daughter, and a half dozen friends scattered from the UK to Turkey via Germany... reports and photos to follow regularly over the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, I had a lovely get-away with Adri to Orr Hot Springs this past weekend. One of the highlights was a visit to the remarkable Montgomery Woods, a fantastic stand of old growth redwoods. Here I am on a trunk of one of 'em...

Recent readings inspired me to post the following three excerpts. Climate change is on everyone's lips these days, and from liberal Harper's to radical Mute, the shifting terrain of discussion is hard to miss. Quickly it's becoming the all-purpose reason why specific social arrangements are not the problem, but all of humanity faces a crisis that we can only solve together... conveniently overlooking the specific capitalist organization of life that is not just heating the planet and changing the climate but destroying the basis for life far more systemically than that... so here's three bits, first from Garret Keizer in the June 07 Harper's... he's a wonderfully cantankerous writer, blistering prose and many more outstanding turns of phrase than I can quote here.

Harpers’ magazine, June 2007, “Notebook: Climate, Class and Claptrap” by Garret Keizer

The pretense of not knowing what every idiot knows has increasingly come to define our national discourse. To say, by way of example, that it has characterized the protracted denial of global warming is to understate the point. It also characterizes the burgeoning acknowledgement of global warming, the willingness to grant that a crisis exists even as our key players scramble to guarantee that every systemic cause of that crisis remains intact… Global warming, we are told, will have its most devastating effects on the world’s disadvantaged. Therefore, we need not care so particularly about the world’s disadvantaged; we need care only about global warming—as mediated, of course, by those who stand to make a bundle off it. Wonder of wonders: you can now download all of your convictions into this one lightweight, handheld device… To quote Mr. Gore, global climate change is ‘not a political issue; it’s a moral issue,’ glad tidings of great joy to souls weary of such crassly political issues as universal health care, reproductive freedom, the rights of workers, the treatment of captives, the plight of women and men shoveled daily off our sidewalks like so much offal, and who can now devote their energies to transcendently moral issues like the daytime highs in Chattanooga.

The bottom line here is, as always, the bottom line, already being parsed out in prospectus form for the eco-savvy investor. Climate change will offer “many unique opportunities for outsized gains,” according to Sprott Asset Management… or [as Greg Easterbrook in The Atlantic invites us to ask in regard to climate change]—“What’s in it for me?”… it will come in the form of carbon trading, a shell game allowing polluters to purchase “offsets” in green-energy production, which may or may not come to include nuclear power…

We’re told that “the science is in on global warming,” and that it’s just about unanimous… But the science has also been in, and in for a while, and is every bit as unanimous in concluding that we are members of a single species, descendents of common ancestors—family in every conceivable sense of the word. How can we imagine that we will address one overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion without having acted fully on the other?.. the days of paradise for a few are drawing to a close… It is either Earth for all of us or hell for most of us…

Next we have an excerpt from Capital Climes by Will Barnes in the latest issue of Mute magazine. After this piece there are several other really worthwhile articles in this issue, all taking issue with the liberal hand-wringing over climate change... not because the science is wrong, but because the way people are addressing it glosses over the deeper reality of planetary destruction, and the real purpose of the discourse to reduce living standards rather than redistribute wealth and reorganize life...

“Capital Climes” by Will Barnes in MUTE vol. 2 #5, Spring/Summer 2007

…the pursuit of exploitable “natural resources” for capitalist production on a world-scale has created a geological and biological regression reversing thousands and millions of years of natural evolution… The problem is that specifically capitalist social transformations are borne along by an objective logic whose outcome is necessarily the very destruction of the natural world in its autonomy, cohesion, and otherness, that is, in its abiotic coherence, as living, and as a presupposition of specifically human life: It is the natural world as the totality of earthly nature… that capitalist social transformation takes as its object.

… produced in and through the movement of capital, homogenization of the earth will tend towards the creation of nature existing at two poles, uglified raw material basins (denuded forests, open mines, desertified grasslands, etc.) at the start of a cycle of commodity production and toxic wastelands and garbage cesspools (wetlands turned into landfills, decaying urban centers, vast stretches of ocean densely littered with plastic refuse, etc.) at the end of that cycle, i.e. with commodity consumption. Human beings acting and interacting in nature in this form will tend over several generations to become organically, physiologically, and perhaps even anatomically and morphologically a degenerating species.

What is important to recognize here is that the criminality of capital goes beyond the vast and potentially catastrophic problems that climate change has introduced… While capital cannot stem the ecological collapse which its very movement is engendering and within which climate change is situated, it can and, in our view, will meet the warming-induced, climate crisis. Whatever else, the social relations of capitalist production will neither disintegrate nor disappear in the maelstrom of climate change. The real question is whether capital, at unimaginable human cost, will set the terms on which this change is confronted, or whether we shall.

And lastly, just so we don't go on vacation on a totally gloomy note, a short excerpt from an essay by Paul Hawken in the May/June 07 issue of Orion magazine. I wrote about Hawken's "Natural Capitalism" in an earlier post, so I won't bother to reprise my general antipathy to his rosy belief in markets here. Perhaps this essay indicates a lessening faith in market-based solutions? Let's hope so... anyway, I liked his take on the invisibility of the largest global political mobilization in history...

“To Remake the World” by Paul Hawken, in Orion magazine, May/June 2007

I now believe there are over one million organizations working towards ecological sustainability and social justice. Maybe two. By conventional definition, this is not a movement. Movements have leaders and ideologies…. It is dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent. There is no manifesto or doctrine, no authority to check with… The movement has three basic roots: the environmental and social justice movements, and indigenous cultures’ resistance to globalization—all of which are intertwining. It arises spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and cohorts, resulting in a global, classless, diverse, and embedded movement, spreading worldwide without exception. In a world grown too complex for constrictive ideologies, the very word movement may too small, for it is the largest coming together of citizens in history… The promise of this unnamed movement is to offer solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas: poverty, global climate change, terrorism, ecological degradation, polarization of income, loss of culture. It is not burdened with a syndrome of trying to save the world; it is trying to remake the world.

I haven't finished rewriting my book yet, alas, but this last quote dovetails nicely with some of my own thinking and writing. Of course, it also threatens to be terribly naive and pollyanna-ish, which is something I'm also grappling with, but to omit any mention of the myriad forms of visionary and practical opposition is to miss a crucial part of our current world...

next time, from the road...

Posted by ccarlsson at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2007

SF Int'l Film Festival! pt 5

The marathon is over! 37 movies in 13 days!... Last night was the Edith Piaf biopic "La Vie en Rose"... quite a spectacular effort. The lead actress does an incredible job, and the casting was fantastic for the various kids who play Piaf at earlier ages... very sad story, but quite entertaining, well shot and edited (I could have cut out some of the numerous endings that litter the end of the film, but so it goes)...

Here's the last few capsule reactions/reviews of films I saw:

The Yacoubian Building
Very entertaining, nearly three hours long, a dense movie with at least four or five plot lines all weaving in and out of the Beaux Artes building of the title in Cairo, as well as weaving in and out of class and occupations. Bleak portrayal of the fate of women, which was only the most obvious aspect of the European gaze that framed this story. Based on the all-time best-selling Egyptian novel (written by a dentist!) it blatantly harkens back to an era before the 1956 revolution, when people knew their place and life for the wealthy was very good. One of the main characters is a slowly sinking sonof a pasha, 65 years old, who gets thrown out of his family's lush apartment by his bitter, heartless sister. His efforts to preserve some kind of civilized kindness is the core of the film, while around that story, several other sagas of political corruption, gangsterism, Islamic terrorism and manipulation, and a whole gay story too, all unfold. The gay angle is super cliche and silly, and the dire portray of women sexually harassed, bought and sold, and kept, all belies the horrified western eye. Of course it's easy to sympathize since I too am horrified by the treatment of women shown here; few characters are ultimately admirable except the fallen pasha who marries the chaste pretty poor girl for a happy ending. Still, the romanticized Cairo was interesting to compare to the gritty corners occupied by "These Girls" the night before.

Born & Bred
A very strange movie from Argentina. Starts out with a bucolic upper middle class family in Buenos Aires, happy mom-dad-daughter; after 15+ minutes they leave for a country trip and a terrible accident happens. Screen goes black, a fire begins, and the protagonist Santiago is screaming for his wife and daughter, implying they're dead. When the image returns he's in a barren tiny airport far south in Patagonia. Then the rest of the film is Santiago as a dissolute, despairing drunk working at a godforsaken airstrip in the middle of nowhere, befriended by his coworkers who are stuck in their own loops of drinking and dysfunctionality. When the Indian friend's wife dies Santiago bolts from the funeral and has a breakdown, finally admitting to his pal that he "killed his family" by having the car accident. All through the film he's been calling to Buenos Aires and asking for his daughter, presumably speaking with his mother-in-law, but it's never clear. The woman's voice keeps pleading with him to say where he is, but he keeps hanging up. Meanwhile, his friend keeps getting calls for him on his cellphone but Santiago won't answer them. Finally, after this endless period of despair in the snow and wind, he decides to return to Buenos Aires, whereupon he goes to the old house and his wife answers the door, deeply disturbed and angry with him. He proposes they take a walk and she agrees, and the movie ends... implying that his wife and daughter hadn't died after all, but his years-long absence had done more damage than the actual accident... I have to admit that I just found the whole story implausible and incomprehensible. They claim it's a meditation on isolation and introspection, but there was very little to justify that proposition... obviously I didn't think much of it, in the end.

Along the Ridge
This Italian movie really got into my head and heart. A complicated family drama in which the father and 13-year-old daughter and 10-year old son live together, the mother having left before the story begins. The father speaks very graphically and angrily about the mother having gone off to fuck some other guys, especially a rich guy, but he's basically a very sweet father trying his best to hold it together for his funny and sweet kids. Great interaction between the two siblings, and good scenes of the boy at school. The dad is pushing son to be a competitive swimmer instead of playing soccer, which the son is increasingly resistant to, even though he's a good swimmer. Soon the mother returns, crying and begging to be allowed back into the family. The dad is enraged and sends her away, while the kids cry, but very early the next morning he wakes up the kids and brings them to the kitchen table to make a big decision. There is mom who has been sitting up talking with dad all night, and there is a heavy scene of the children being asked whether or not they want their mom to come back (reminding them all that she has left more than once before). She's a really gorgeous woman and after they accept her back, she's soon on the phone with mysterious others, implying that it's probably other men. The son is more ambivalent about her than the daughter, but eventually everyone is back to some semblance of a happy family life (dad has started his own steadi-cam business, which is not doing well). Suddenly the mom is gone again. The sadness and pressure is huge, especially on the father, who in turn dumps it on his son, primarily through his expectations around the swimming competition. There are a great many nuanced moments in all this, realistic and painful and heartwarming by turns. The son abandons his successful swim heat at mid-course, the father is deeply upset, and when the son asks to join his wealthy neighbor for a skiing weekend, dad takes it as a deep betrayal and throws him out of the house in a very harsh moment. Later that night the son sneaks back in to find his dad sitting disconsolate in bed. The son asks if he's alright, and that leads to an incredibly intense reconnection between them, all the love and tension reaching a climax. It's a fantastic movie, full of real-life moments, great acting, and probably touched me more deeply than any other film I saw... maybe because it was my penultimate film in a 2 week marathon of movie-watching, but really, it was just fantastic.

Posted by ccarlsson at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2007

SF Int'l Film Festival! pt 4

My ongoing reactions and mini-reviews... the Festival ends today and I am finally coming up for air. 36 movies! Wow!...

A Walk to Beautiful
Remarkable documentary on a type of contemporary lepers--in this case it's young women in Ethiopia who "leak" after failed childbirth when they're 12-13 years old and their pelvises are not ready. Stillbirth is compounded by fistula--a hole between urethra and vagina, and/or rectum and vagina, leading to incessant drainage and complete social ostracism. It mostly happens among young teens in extremely remote rural Ethiopia (6-10 hour walk to nearest road is typical--146 ob/gyn doctors in a country of 77 million!). The story is heartbreaking, to see so many young women treated like pariahs by their villages and too often their own families. A happier part of the story focuses on the Fistula Hospital in Addis Ababa. It repairs 93% of the 1500 women they operate on per year. Incredibly inspiring place, fantastic to see the women transformed by this fairly simple surgery. And the longer-term impact of the 1500 women a year getting educated about fistula, childbirth, etc., is extremely hopeful. Great documentary! (update: This won the Best Documentary award at the festival as determined by audience rankings.)

The Violin
This won the big prize for best first feature film in the SF Int'l Film Festival I just heard. A beautiful, amazing movie set in a small village in rural Mexico during the 1970s (or the 80s or the 1930s or now!). The director, Francisco Vargas, claimed it had no particular time or place. It feels very timeless, the endless story of Mexico, brutal federales (natioanl army) attacking rural Mexicans who try to defind their land and lives. Vargas said it was a movie easy to describe in terms of time and place. Put a map on the wall, cover your eyes and point, and the place your finger lands is a place where this story happened a long time ago, or is happening right now, and disgracefully will continue happening in the future... An homage to traditional Mexican cinema, music, literature. Vargas happily affirmed his film as a corrido, sandwiched as it is with a corrido at front and back, one that evolves with the saga the movie told. The film is in b/w, no special effects, very nostalgic in certain ways, also very stark. The old violin player tries to save his guerrilla son by riding a mule back into their occupied village, escaping direct violence by his wiles, and playing music. A soft moment with the comandante reveals his own poor background, unrequited love for music, and a little trick solidarity is created between old man and grizzled comandante. But who is tricking whom? The old man smuggles ammo from his corn patch, but is fooled into transmitting disinformation to the guerrillas--the comandante was as wiley as he was. Sad movie, harsh scenes of torture and rape at the outset, but it underscores the intensity of the perpetual rebellion of the Mexican peasantry. Great movie, albeit a bit lost in the romanticism of armed struggle (even if at one brief point the army and the guerrillas are juxtaposed doing the same drills with the same militar resolve).

Reprise
Ostensibly this Norwegian film is about young men, two of whom are aspirant writesr, and their camaraderie, problematic relations with women, careers, happiness, etc. So it is. But it's the odd herky-jerky pacing and editing, the very funny jokes and vignettes, that make this movie. It's a sad meditation on madness and survival too, existential malaise, how to love... but it works as a movie, even if I didn't ultimately love any of the characters. A few flashes of good punk rock too!

Ad Lib Night
Very dull, empty story. A girl in Seoul (South Korea) is recruited, because she resembles another woman, to play the daughter of a dying man. The lead character is virtually silent as she is driven by the annoying young man who recruited her to a suburban home. All the hypocrisy and foibles of the family are on display, occasionally quite funny in their banality, but this movie goes nowhere and the main character is a void.

The Rape of Europa
Fantastic plumbing of archival footage, tracking the fascinating story of the looting of art treasures in Europe during WWII. I kept thinking about Iraq and its art and antiquities, but the back-and-forth looting by the Nazis first, then the Soviet Union (who returned over 1 million pieces to mostly E. European satellites, making a prallel with the Nazis false) but anyway, this is like a PBS documentary--no particular edge or quirkiness or anything to make it more than than a straight-ahead mainstream doc. Some folks I met later really loved it, thought it one of the best documentaries they'd ever seen... hmmmm.

The Other Half
A video, quasi-verite but not, set in Zigong City in Sichuan province, China. Terrible acting, weak script, bad editing. How did this "film" win any prizes? It's redeemed by a sequence of interviews in a law office where the main character works as a clerk. All sorts of odd desires to get compensation for bad marriages, maltreatment at work, even the boss of a benzene factory worried about a suit by his employees. At the end of the story a big chemical explosion focres the city's evacuation, first into air raid tunnels, then entirely out of the city. It was an explosion of the benzene factory, which had just been awarded some prize for good environmental practices and was being celebrated on TV and radio as the model chemical factory... so some irony, definitely a look at everyday life in a smaller modern Chinese city, but a very bad movie.

Punk's Not Dead
A fun tour through 30 years of punk rock, making me feel my age! Starts with the working-class sensibilities of the early punks--Sex Pistols, Clash, even the Ramones! Later they redeem the overly simplistic politics at the beginning by showing some surviving Ramones and critics talking about their music as extremely commercial. The movie has fun showing a lot of bands that have kept punk alive since the early 1980s, like the Subhumans, the UK Subs, Stiff Little Fingers, etc. Very fun to see guys my age or odler still totally punked out. The trajectory of the music into 21st century full commodification is traced, showing how melody was resuscitated by NoFX and another band in the late 80s before Nirvana, Green Day, Rancid, and Offspring went huge with melodious punk. I felt vindicated in my own "fandom" by the filmmaker's look at the music, how the punk spirit diminished in the mid-80s, only to re-emerge with the songs of Green Day etc. That's when I got back into it too. And they show so many bands through the past 15 years, esp. the last 5-8, that I've never heard of, topped by a long sequence at the end of bands that sent in clips via the internet, bands across the world, Serbia, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, Iceland, Uruguay, etc. The sound and spirit will not die! On the other hand, the film reproduces the same naive political confusion that has always plagued punk--anti-corporate by only vaguely anti-capitalist, also not much connection drawn to the many DIY "punk rock" ethics that have migrated well beyond the music. THe final tune, Sham 69's "The Kids Are United," ices the confusion wiht its silly lyric "if the kids are united, they will never be defeated"--as though "kids" were a class, as though music sharing is inherently rebellious. The film skirts the question of commodification in an interesting way--getting successful musicians to comment on "selling out" and showing the DIY "Drunk Tank" house in Los Angeles as an example of the resilience of DIY punk culture, even in 2006.

These Girls, preceded by Rise & Shine
The short Rise & Shine was really wonderful, based on a Dario Fo piece--a woman, dreaming about sewing her hand into a garment, a work nightmare, awakens to a clock that hasn't rung, wakes her baby, searches for her lost key, ruminates on her husband badly and then erotically, finally at the door remembers that it is Friday--no work! Wonderful short, Egyptian version.
These Girls is a doc about glue-sniffing, pill-popping street girls in Cairo. Quite harsh conditions, exuberant humanity despite male violence, rape, hopelessness, etc. Tata is the most amazing girl/woman among several, very tough, also very big heart, blustering and threatening, running, riding a horse in heavy traffic, doing cartwheels, eating a razor blade--an incredible glimpse into a life so narrow in space, so limited in options, so horribly common in the megaslums of the world.

The Sugar Curtain
A fascinating look at Cuba from the point of view of a girl who arrived at age 2 in the mid-1970s, growing up during the "best years," especially the last three of the Cold War (!)... Claudia Guzman (daughter of Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman) really conveys the bucolic ease for children of Cuban socialism in its last years before the shock of the Special Period, following the collapse of the USSR and the East bloc. Decrepit buildings haunted by her happy memories of childhood, disconsolate friends and neighbors, an incredibly long list of exiles ends the film; all of this creates a weird sense of a lost world, now only visible in the ruins and confused memories of those who stayed. Self-aware of her deficiencies as a historian or reporter, Guzaman doesn't try to hide that other people had a very different experience than she did (as one Cuban audience member said: what about the concentration camps?!), instead offering a heartfelt and romantic portrait of Cuban socialism when it still believed in itself.

Posted by ccarlsson at 04:32 PM | Comments (1)

May 09, 2007

SF Int'l Film Festival! pt 3

I've been having a fantastic time at the Film Festival. Not that I've thought the films are so great... in fact, there have been some amazing gems, but a lot of mediocrity and some outright bombs. Still, amidst a just-broken heat wave and an absolutely iridescent light over San Francisco these past days, it was difficult to keep going indoors, or it would have been if I hadn't been so lost in the pleasure and rhythm of a full-blown International Film Festival.

I did get a moment to catch up on my ever-rising pile of incoming periodicals and in particular want to recommend to everyone the two-part Curtis White essay in the last two issues of Orion Magazine. I referenced some of his writing a year ago, and once again, he's come through with one of the most lucid and clearly written repudiations of the basic absurdity and self-destructiveness of modern work that I can recall reading. Check out part two especially.

Anyway, back to my capsule reviews and reactions to films:

The Old Garden
This was a FANTASTIC movie! It will get on to my top 3 or top 5 list for this festival. The plot revolves around a couple, the guy was very involved in the Gwangju uprising in 1980 in South Korea, and a half year later gets caught and imprisoned, before eventually being released two decades later. While on the run he hid out with a gorgeous, feisty, independent woman, a schoolteacher and painter, who angrily watches him leave her after hiding for months, in a rainstorm, they cling, knowing somehow it's their last moment together... She calls him an idiot as the bus drives away (I fed you, I gave you a place to sleep, a place to hide, I let you fuck me, and you leave... Idiot!). But he's her true love, and she's pregnant. The structure of the film jumps back and forth in time, to the massacre, to his return from jail, her death from cancer before his release, numerous episodes among movement activists, arguments then about politics and the military dictatorship; later, one of their close friends is involved in a labor uprising, fired and repressed, after which she suicides through self-immolation. (A reference to the intense class war that continued over the next two decades, that played an important part in bringing South Korea to its present state of modernization.) The personal stories, the wrecked and altered lives admist the big historical narratives that define S. Korea since 1980--fantastic juxtapositions, nuanced portrayal of how personal and political intersect. Beautifully shot, great acting, wonderful editing. When Hoon-yee first comes back from jail to Gwangju he meets an old comrade who has been driven mad. They go to a small reunion banquet which ends in a drunken brawl, one of them saying "Life is long, but the revolution is short!"--towards the end of the film the schoolteacher says the companion line: "Life is long. History is longer!" What a great movie!

The Orange Revolution
A good but not great doc on the Ukrainian "revolution," somewhat diluted by events after the fact. It's also not as deep as I'd have liked--no mention of Soros or the U.S. or any NGOs who helped... all those flaws notwithstanding, it's great to see the blow-by-blow developments of Yuschenko's victory. It presents a rather gee whiz and civic-democracy-success sort of fantasy of social change, but not surprisingly the outcome of all that hope and courage and "direct action" was merely to elect a president whose coalition disintegrated almost immediately. I bet Ukrainians are severely disillusioned now. A better doc would have gone beyond the "orange revolution" and looked at the larger structures that were manipulating aspirations for democracy and freedom, and still are.

The Road to Saint Diego
An incredibly sweet, upbeat film about a naive rural woodcutter who is completely obsessed with Argentinean soccer megastar Diego Maradona. He finds a tree root that resembles Maradona and after carving #10 on its back and preparing it a bit, and getting a seer's advice to go, he embarks on a long trip to Buenos Aires, meeting many kind people along the way, esp. a Brazilian trucker with 50,000 chickens aboard... when they encounter a piquetero blockade, even that scene is jolly and friendly--the statue gets them through. It's painfully sweet, but the interesting angle here is the syncretism between religion and celebrity, with much talk of faith and redemption surrounding the childlike hopes and enthusiasm of the protagonist and his family, friends and acquaintances.

Special Forces
Live cinema performance? Bob Ostertag and a Quebecois guy made an overwrought, frenetic, bombastic "thing" that features images of Lebanon under attack, but mostly is overblown animations run through photoshop filters and channels to make trippy animations. The "music" was mostly a cacophony of pounding layers of video game sounds, too loud; at the end, after, Bob Ostertag said they wanted to comment on the convergence of play technology and war technology. OK, but the experience was very unpleasant, uninspiring, and drove a half dozen folks out. Not impressive.

Love for Sale: Suely in the Sky
Bad movie--another of what I'm beginning to characterize as Cinema Brasileira Tipica. Suely is the woman at the center of the plot, returned to Iquatu from Sao Paolo with her new-ish baby, waiting for her Mateus to come--he disappears instead. She needs money and the big drama is her lame decision to raffle herself off, "One Night in Paradise". Her prostitution is so uninteresting, and seems so normal as a response to her hopeless situation--the only reaction I could have was "so fuckin' what?"

Rome Rather Than You
Set in Algiers and a nearby slum on the coast, it's about a man and woman, the guy trying to get a trip to Europe or the U.S. She works in a clinic and lives with her parents, seems cool to him, but somehow hangs out. Maybe she'll go too if the opportunity presents itself. She seems hip to the movie's theme--they're going nowhere. Bu she's a fascinating character, very modern, unimpressed, seems to need nothing--not the guy, not to leave. The two of them plus a friend get arrested while trying to find Bosco the smuggler. Great scene of the angry, belligerent undercover cops hassling them in a cafe for no reason, then busting them, threatening to take their (borrowed) car, et al. They get out after some hours but too late to return to Algiers before curfew. The next day, after a long weird drunken night (the woman remains aloof throughout) they return to Bosco's house and find him (eventually, all scenes in this movie are 5 to 10 times longer than is comfortable, often feeling interminable) murdered in his tub. Kamel and Siri stand on the roof forever, staring at the sea. Seh has found 2 passports and a green card, and gives the card and a passport to Kamel. As they're leaving, she insists on driving and moments later jihadi shooters attack them, hitting Kamel. She speeds forward, continuing to drive down the road while he's dying, and last scene, she's barely checking him out while he's murmuring and sputtering--she looks towards the camera out the window as he's dying and spits: "Idiot!!" End of movie!

Everything's Cool
The companion to Inconvenient Truth, very well edited, good music, upbeat approach to a downer topic. A good effort BUT ends up reinforcing much of what's terribly naive and anachronistic about U.S. politics. Shellenberger and Nordhaus get a huge play in the film, with a fractional peep of protest about their self-serving, self-referential slanted critique. You would never know there's been two decades of dynamic grassroots environmental justice activism! Bill McKibben gets big play too, along with Ross Gelbspan--both are good and focused and human... Bill McKibben's attempt to put the "movement" into the movement against Climate Change produced a march of several thousand across Vermont, culminating in having politicians sign a petition pledging to reduce CO2 emissions. Come on! Nordhaus and Shellenberger hold focus groups which are in the film, trying to shift the discussion to economy and jobs, but are inconsistent with McKibben's original well-stated point about how our culture naturalizes the economy at the expense of nature. Also, the filmmakers include a whole subplot about a ski slope groomer learning how to make biodiesel, instead of a more broad view, a better intro to the subculture, the caravans, etc. Clearly the filmmakers are working within the logic of Democratic party and electoralism. The films drops the ball repeatedly when it could have really done something radical.

Notes on a Toon Underground
eh... many shorts, most uninteresting with live music--only good ones were Populi and Devil's Canyon. Populi is a wild iconic archetype of a scuptured head, full of energy and rapid-fire transformations of location, hands holding it, multiple versions as prop in strange locales, etc. Steady rock underbeat too.. Devil's Canyon was a hilariously laconic send-up of westerns and automation... the rest of the show a snooze...

many more to come...

Posted by ccarlsson at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2007

SF Int'l Film Festival! Part 2

More film capsule reactions:

The 12 Labors
Set in Sao Paolo, Brazil, this story of a young man two months out of two years in juvenile jail who gets a job as a motorcycle messenger, is a good look at Sao Paolo and its insane traffic, class divisions, etc., but like too many Brazilian films, it's predictable, a bit cliche'd, finaly boring for the telenovela shallowness of the characters. Kind of Brazil's version of Horatio Alger, the poor kid who heroically escapes a life of crime... heartwearming and sleep inducing--of course it was my 4th movie of the day when I saw it!

Daratt
Set in Chad, the story of a young man about 20 or so named Atim, meaning orphan, who listens to the Truth and Justice Commission's decision to grant general amnesty to all war criminals from the Civil War. His blind grandfather then bids him to get justice for his dead father by killing his murderer. That man turns out to be a baker and strong Muslim now, aware he caused a lot of harm in his life. Atim travels to his city and becomes his apprentice, wrestling with is urges to shoot him throughout. The great climax, the man wants to adopt Atim and accompanies him to meet his father. (Atim, who is occasionally quite animated and charming, is mostly sullen, filled with rage, and quite mute.) Instead they find grandpa in the desert waiting for Atim's return. He demands that Atim humiliate the man like his father was, so he is forced to disrobe. Then grandpa says "execute him!"--Atim saves him by feigning it, shotting in the air. Grandpa orders the coup de grace, and Atim feigns it again, fooling the blind grandfather. Atim joins grandpa and they walk away opposite from the terrified baker. Grandpa asks "did you hand shake?" and Atim says "no" and grandpa says "now you are a man." End of movie... !

Sounds of Sand
Relentlessly bleak, a too-healthy family with beautiful smiles and teeth are forced to migrate when their Sahel village water dries up. The bulk of the film is their impossible trip across the desert, attacked by drug-addled "rebels" and slowly dying of thirst, losing their goats and belongings, one son is taken hostage, another is killed pointlessly. The little girl who was threatened with smothering at the outset of the film, is the only one to survive with her father, when they are saved by a UNHCR patrol from coma in the stark white desert. The refugee camp seems like paradise after this film!

Broken English
Parker Posey stars, Zoe Cassavettes directs, Gena Rowlands supporting actress. Probably the most interesting thing about this movie is that it is billed as a "romantic comedy" but afterwards Cassavettes called it a "portrait of loneliness." That's much more accurate. Posey's character Nora is a near alcoholic pill-popper, scared of intimacy, has sex on first dates after getting very drunk, and ends up miserable, frantically wanting a man she can't recognize or have. Works full-time in "guest services" at a boutique hotel after getting her degree in Art. Another tale of lonely overworked isolated professional woman--she meets a nice French guy and eventually quits her job to go to Paris to find him (after a whirlwind romance in NY), which she does at the very end of the movie. So it's left open what will happen, infused with the last half hour of intensely romantic scenes in glorious Paris. Hokey or tragic--take your pick.

The Caiman
The great Italian director Nanni Moretti made this frontal assault on Berlusconi and Italian filmmaking. Amazing by the end when Moretti himself plays the arrogaintly defiant Berlusconi, refusing to relinquish power, refusing to be punished by the courts.... but getting there is a fun trip, mostly about a sad loser of a filmmaker, but one who is also a sweet father going through a sad divorce from his equally sweet, gorgeous blonde wife (also a great mom). Farcicial film-making send-ups, much hilarity, great humanity, amidst corruption and Berlusconi's Italy.

The End and the Beginning
From Brazil, set in Paraiba, the deep rural Sertao, a filmmaker arond 60 from Rio goes here to find a documentary. He wanders from village to village looking for interesting people, quickly discovering Rosa who works in all the local towns via the Catholic service organization. After a brief effort to interview folks out in other towns, the crew settles on Rosa's home village and all her extended family and friends. Most are very elderly, some survived severe drought in the 1930s. He queries them about life, marriage, death, religious beliefs, and gives them a lot of room to speak, ponder, share, feel. Becomes a beautiful, deep engagement with a dozen folks, alternately poignant, wry, cantankerous, ironic, mysterious, enlightened, charming.... a bit slow, but weirdly fascinating.

Fabricating Tom Ze
Saw it at El Rio and enjoyed it enormously--Tom Ze almost died, made wild incredible sounds for so long, since Tropicalia in the 1960s, then he wasn't exiled like Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, had a weird almost falling out, rediscovered by David Byrne and becomes HUGE in Europe. The movie takes you into his life, his '03 and '05 tours and concerts. Extremely funny, sad and brilliant, just like Tom Ze!

Heaven's Doors
Wow! Best film of the festival by far!.. 160 minutes, felt like two or three films in one, but it never got boring. Great characters, multiple plots with some overlap, but not so tightly knit that it all comes to a pat ending. Gripping jumpy cinematography, reminiscent of Amores Perros--it's a tale of a young, poor, hipster men in Morocco, on the coast in Casablanca, already mugging people, though the main guy is digging ditches to support his mother and sister. Eventually he joins the life of crime, but resists everyone who ways there is paradise somewhere else ("across The Strait"), sure it's right there in front of them all. In fact that's the real theme, powerful, humanistic, practical--paradise is something we create ourselves in our daily lives. When our hero gets shot on a drop-off, later he gets the address of his assailant. An early climax, presented premonitorily n the incredible complex editing of this film, is when he goes for revenge and is killed as he kills the guy, leaving the wife in a coma and the 10-year-old boy in the bathroom untouched. The 2nd part of the film departs from this mayhem. An ex-pat San Franciscan woman (who I thought might be a tranny, but wasn't), art teacher and affluent living there, is the aunt by marriage (husband dead before story) of the boy. She's 42, miserable and lonely and after a very unpleasant beginning, comes to love the boy Salim, only to have him taken away months later when the coma-stricken mother's brother appears to claim them. But Lisa has been transformed by learning to love Salim, and through him, embracing her own life. The 3rd subplot involves a guy who is in jail the whole film, until he gets out in the end, determined to kill the crime boss who got him arrested (the same boss of the young man who got killed in part 1)... a fallow field of dried yellow stalks has flashed before us many times... now the ex-con brings the boss in his limo to the field and kneecaps him before fleeing to Bangkok. Fantastic, gutsy, amazingly crafted film. Late in film ex-con on phone to his lost love, now 39 and jaded about men in relationships says: "At 50, life has taught me one thing: you never recover from your childhood." Smart! Surprising--again and again! Swel and Imad Noury made this film, watch for those guys! They are super talented!!

Posted by ccarlsson at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2007

SF Int'l Film Festival! Part 1

I'm completely immersed in the Film Festival... here are a bunch of capsule review/reactions to some of the 18 films I've seen so far after the first week:

Bamako
Remarkable film set in Mali, depicting an almost mythical trial pitting African "civil society" against the World Bank and IMF. Brilliant speeches, smart critique of neoliberalism, great acting, esp. by a woman writer and the final two jurists, a white Frenchman and a black Malian woman... meanwhile a gorgeous nightclub singer brackets the film, singing a haunting tune, first with pleasure, and last in tears. Her husband is a taciturn observer, brooding and increasingly depressed through the film, who finally suicides at the end, after early on ruminating with a videographer friend that death is better than life. The stats and facts are compellingly presented while daily life unfolds in the courtyard/courtroom... the old white lawyer defending the World Bank and globalization is very well presented, too, avoiding the easy cliche of a stupid proponent of the ideas under attack. A brilliant movie, works on so many levels!

Strange Culture
Lynn Hershman's latest, a one-hour documentary on the Critical Arts Ensemble and Steve Kurtz's chilling story, busted by overzealous Buffalo police after the sudden heart attack death of his wife. Not a great cinema experience--they were clearly starved for B-roll--but such a creepy and compelling story that I still liked it. Curious juxtaposition of actors and the real subjects of the story, with allusions to the corporate targets of the CAE's work being not exactly responsible but intersted in suppressing Kurtz's work. But mostly it's about the DoJ and the local prosecutor's obsessive efforts to advance politically by carrying through this insane prosecution.

Jindabyne
Really creeping story with great acting from Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney, about some Aussie working class guys who go fishing, find the murdered body of a young aboriginal woman (the murder starts the movie) but rather than reporting it and dealing with it immediately, they carry on fishing for four days. When they come home and report it, the whole area is scandalized, and the dysfunctional fissures in all their lives grow worse, nearly shattering their already fragile accommodations. Painful to watch, very well presented, typical "moderns" who are bitter, frustrated, lost, in denial, and out of touch with their basic humanity. Flashes of humanness erupt throughout, like lightning illuminating a dark landscape of alienation.

Golden Door
Opening night film, sumptuous and gorgeously shot, a charming tale of Sicilian farmers emigrating to the U.S. around 1913, landing in Ellis Island with a mysterious British woman played by Charlotte Gainsborough, attaching herself to them. Captured well the sheer confusion of uprooting a family from its normal life to emigrate, so often repeated, but the film is too sweet to have anything bad happen, instead flying into surreal dream sequences. The never exit Ellis Island by the end of the movie...

Murch
Great documentary on Walter Murch the film editor who has worked a lot with Coppola and Lucas, on Apocalypse Now, Godfather, the Conversation, the English Patient, etc. Really fun and funny, his long-time assistant made the film, adding many jumpcuts and sound effects to hilariously underscore Murch's descriptions of how he makes movies. I loved it.

Black Sheep
Sure to be a cult classic, the tale of an evil sheep farmer cum genetic engineer who Frankenstein-like inserts his own genes into his sheep with the help of some funny mad scientists. Crazy vegan eco-saboteurs steal a vial holding a failed experiment and when it breaks a miserable freak sheep attacks and bites the guy, setting in motion a frenzy of direct biting and transferrence of madness (it also makes the humans become oversized erect sheep--28 Days meets Pan's Labyrinth... or not!).. Great send-up of New Age vegetarian PC politics; gross visual jokes on meat and meat preparation, overall a bad movie, very silly and shallow.

A Few Days Later...
A somber Iranian film centered on a woman, working professionally as a graphic designer, who is stuck, indecisive about 3 or 5 major issues confronting her--her ex-boyfriend wants to reconnect, her father is dying, the handicapped son of her ex- needs to be moved to a new institution, she's stressed out with overwork, her only friend, a photographer she works with, is making advances apparently unwanted. Through all this she drives back and forth, her apartment is ripped up at the beginning as she gets a new bathroom, everything is very modern and chaotic and in the middle she's paralyzed by depression, unable to decide anything. She's caught in a quintessentially modern woman's life--competent and busy at work, extremely isolated and lonely in big city life... this film resonated even more loudly after I saw Broken English, below...

Desperately Seeking Images
A bunch of shorts, mostly not very good. Highlights: "We are Everywhere" from Mexico, in which 2 upper-middle class young men get cleverly and nonviolently mugged by a slick street tough, then just as cleverly turn the tables. A Romanian short wherein a father adn son spend the film carrying their old b/w vacuum tube TV over hill and dale to a cty to get it reparied. After much ado, the father drops it on the way home in pouring rain but they get it to work, making the boy happy--very charming. "Balkan Erotic Exhibit" by Marina Abramowicz was a weird and successful meta-doc about making an exhibit that tries to portray genitals as weapons, as tools, as healers... men fucking the ground, women baring breasts and vaginas, all presented while we see the directing and shooting--ultimately it appears in an art show in Belgrade I think. An American woman who lives in southern Austria that I spoke with afterwards assured me that Serbs and Yugoslavians realy are that weird and open about sex and sexuality, whic his what the director explained at the outset of the film, attributing it to the many years of Yugoslavian life--"food and sex were very good, even if everything else was fucked up!" "Striptease" was a hilarious, low-production value send-up of online stripping... a voluptuous woman receives increasingly wacky instructions via her chat client. She tries to be accommodating so it escalates from "find a banana" to "make a smoothie" "drink it" "dress like Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers" all of which she does. Eventually he somehow gets her to light something on fire which catches on her bed. Now he asks her, "do you have fire insurance?" Then he pitches a particular package and she's panicking, trying to put out the fire, yelling to her roommate offscreen: "Dammit Jane! It's that fuckin' telemarket again! He made me set the bed on fire again!" Hilarious!

All in This Tea
Les Blank's latest, typically charming investigation of David Hoffman's business importing Chinese tea. Very beautiful, very sweet, very informative, very inspiring. Makes me wish I liked tea better. It's a completely Slow Food movie about tea, but just as much about Hoffman's commitment to soil health and healthy sustainable agriculture, showing him all over rural China, sampling teas, arguing with Tea factory bureaucrats, etc.

I've already got notes on another nine movies, but I have one in a half hour and two more after that.... so next installment tomorrow morning...

Posted by ccarlsson at 01:32 PM | Comments (0)