Movies I’m Watching:It’s a Free World

I’ve always like Ken Loach movies because i’m a lefty symp and a sucker for women with British accents. The last one I saw from him was, if memory serves, My Name is Joe, i know that he’s done a few since then, like the well-received Wind That blows through the barley (or whatever it was called). This one is about Angela (Angie), a single mother in London who gets laid off and then decides to start her own recruiting business, where she finds jobs for low-wage proles from Eastern Europe and beyond. Of course, all the ethical and social problems facing contemporary England with regard to low-wage labor, the urban poor, and immigration are somehow distilled into the characters, which throws everything into relief and makes the movie fairly easy to understand. The lead performance is great, she’s quite attractive, plucky, at times a tender mom trying to what’s best for her son and yet at other times can stoop so low as to lie and cheat desperate foreign workers just so she can get ahead. Everything rattles on at a good pace, and while the first part of the movie is dedicated to their can-do spirit in starting a business, the movie veers in the last act somewhat, throwing in a few plot twists and turns. The ending is a bit ambiguous–you see that she has to go on with this morally questionable vocation of hers, but this time because she’s been forced, under threat of violence to her and her son–to repay money that she owes the workers. At the end, she hesitates when she takes the precious euro cash from an aging Ukrainian woman. Angie knows that this is how her racket works–the eastern europeans are eager and optimistic, and she plays along, peddling sometimes false hope to these people. She rationalizes this as “giving them a chance,” but it becomes obvious throughout the movie that this system is built on exploitation. People refuse to pay money, skim corners at the expense of others. People are fleeced, their fates put in the hands of some unscrupulous if not outright evil factory owners and recruiters. Of course, I don’t know the sociological truth of this, because i don’t know much about social realities in London or Britain except from what friends and the media tell me, but i think it’s a fine film, and would definitely recommend it, if not highly, at least as an entertaining and thought-provoking movie, which already makes it better than most of the crap out there.

Technorati Tags: ken loach, uk, britain, england, movies, lefty, immigration, politics,

Music I’m listening to: Dido’s “Safe Trip Home”

I’ve never been a Dido fan, i don’t even know the name of any her songs save that “White Flag” one, but I did download her recent one. And although there are many nice tunes on it, there is one in particular that sticks out. The song is called “Look No Further” and i suppose that its poignancy, for me, is related to this whole idea of looking further–especially when it comes to relationships. There have been many times when it would have been possible or even wise to settle, and yet I was restless. Hormones, desires, neurotic maximizer tendencies, fear of making mistakes and wasting time–which is nothing but a permutation of the fear of death–what is behind that constant tendency to look for something more, something better, something ideal. Something that will bring us close to some kind of very probably illusory, half-baked notion of what happiness is. This song is the song of someone who has found something and will look no further–and I find solace in knowing that yes, people probably do, on the whole, experience a longer and more fulfilling happiness in this state–but the whole song, and not just the lyrics, is shot through with the consciousness of what one loses in that process. “Everyone I’ll never meet/and friends i won’t know make…”–lyrics like this understand the difficulty in acknowledging the sacrifices that every human being, simply by living in time with his animal condition, must confront everyday. If you think hard enough about it, do you get overwhelmed by sadness? Is it something more than you can bear?　Do you think about things that have past, people who have passed from your life and perhaps from this earth, or do you manage to always maintain that healthy, optimistic attitude of looking towards the future. Have you learned, somewhere, a philosophic tolerance for that transience？Was it something inherent in your genes, in your personality and the way it processes such things, or was it engineered by the formative experienced of childhood or early adulthood?

There is still the tendency of life to not make that choice. However, every moment that you are breathing you are making that choice. The contradictions are enough to tear one apart–therefore, in order not to go mad, all human beings have to firewall their attention so that you act, without thinking too much about the action. I only remark on this because the balance of power, in my life, has always sided with thinking–to the detriment of my overall happiness, i think. Vita contempliva and vita activa–that’s the wrong distinction. Both can be healthy and non-neurotic, depending on how you live them. The neurotic impasse, the block, the rut–those are the things that have to be avoided if you want to live life the right way.

Here are the lyrics to the song:

I might have been a singer
Who sailed around the world
A gambler who wins millions
And spent it all on girls

I might have been a poet
Who walked upon the moon
A scientist who wouldtell the world
I discovered something new

I might have loved a king
Been the one to end a war
A criminal who drink champaign
And never could be caught

But among your books
Among your clothes
Among the noise and fuss

I’ve let it go

I can’t stop and catch my breathe
And Look No further for happiness
And I will not turn again
‘Cause my heart has found its home

Everyone i’ll never meet
And friends I wont now make
The adventures that they could have been
And the risks I’ll never take

but Among Your Books
Among your clothes
Among the noise and fuss

I’ve let it go

I can’t stop and catch my breathe
And Look No further for happiness
And I will not turn again
‘Cause my heart has found its home

Some Olympics photos from Marc Aspland of the Times UK

Olympics in Pictures via kwout

This picture is from the Times UK photographer Marc Aspland: quite nice and painterly. He’s photoblogging the Games but if you’re in China you probably have to use a proxy to read his typepad.com blog.

Shanghai Expo tickets to go on sale Sept 28 for expected price of 160 RMB.

上海世博会门票9月28日首发 价格拟160元_社会频道_新华网 via kwout

What is more interesting to me is this weird picture from the Xinhua article where I got this information. Maybe this design image has appeared somewhere else on the internet before, but this is the first time that I’ve seen anything like it, though, like with the Olympics, the Expo is one of those things that I have to be dragged kicking and screaming into caring about.

Some interesting tidbits from that article: many of the buildings used during the Expo are temporary, and are destroyed after the Expo is over…however the UK one will remain—because it’s just that good? In any case, the report is just a status update (as if the Expo people were tweeting, Peijin!)…now that I’ve seen how, in certain areas, Beijing and its infrastructure has really been overhauled I feel a bit more anticipation for the Expo than I did before. Of course, we are all easily bedazzled by showy things, aren’t we—a distraction from deeper issues that we’d rather not think about.

BBC Chinese on the “harmoniousness” of the Olympics

BBC 中文网 | 中国报道 | 奥运外围：当“和谐”被重复千遍 via kwout

BBC Chinese journalist Meng Ke tells it like it is in the above article. He roasts some of the sacred cows of Olympics propaganda, like the “100 years dream of the Chinese people” (he says: did Chinese people really care about having the Olympics way back in 1908?）as well as the whole thing about “fire and water can mix, why can’t people be equally harmonious” (he says: sounds like a good metaphor, until you realize that it doesn’t make much sense).

Meng is critical of opening ceremony director Zhang Yimou’s attempts to cram in all the best parts of China’s long history and vast cultural depths into a few hours: he wonders whether or not cultural elites are not just like political and business elites in desiring a “harmoniousness” that is derived from and sustained by the power to control.

In the last section, Meng says that “harmoniousness requires decoration”—though “decoration” is the literal translation of what he says, what it means is a certain “dressing up,” which the more critical among us believe lies on the slippery slope towards outright falsification. He talks about Beijing’s rebuilt and cleaned up streets with the faux-ancient buildings (a la Shanghai’s Xintiandi) as a “Disneyification” of Beijing.

Finally, Meng mentions that one of the more well-known BBS in China, the Qiang Guo BBS (强国论坛), has been under tight supervision and monitoring: some netizens are complaining about how fast their posts are getting deleted, making it hard for them to reply to others and engage in any kind of conversation.

Movies I’m watching: Le Feu Follet and Naked

I think it was a happy coincidence that I watched Mike Leigh’s Naked and Louis Malle’s Le Feu Follet (The Fire Within) in succession, on the same day. Both are character-driven movies about men who, on the surface, appear to live in the same world as us. Sure, they’re troubled—but only temporarily so.

Of course, it turns out that this isn’t the case. Johnny (from Naked) and Alain (from Le Feu Follet are in various states of Sartrean nausea. They’ve lost existential traction but no one seems them slipping, at least not in the way they really are. The inner context is a secret we all possess, but they so more than others, more than the rest of us. They are outsiders—it could not be otherwise.

Maurice is about to commit suicide. No one sees it coming. Everyone thinks there is hope for him. Everyone thinks that he’s been down, but he’s a plucky and resilient type of guy. From what we can surmise from the film about his past—he was a socialite, maybe a playboy, and most certainly the life of the party. He used to have it so together. And yet, something happened to him. It seems to be something more than issues with his estranged American wife. Surely, a failed relationship is no reason to commit suicide, right? His suicide doesn’t come at the end of some vicious mood—it’s premeditated, methodical.

Johnny is a bit different—we first get acquainted with him as he’s raping a woman. He’s not instantly likable, and it would hardly beggar the imagination call him an emotional parasite. He seems to play with people, goading them, leading them on, a demonic actor-director of dramas in his mind that we (and the other characters) cannot even begin to fathom. There’s something inherently vengeful and misogynistic about how he treats the women in the film, even including the ones he supposedly cares for.

His emotional vampire act left me bewildered. How can someone sustain themselves like, that for long. My answer is that most people cannot, and that’s why Johnny is at the end of his tether. The real source of his angst is not Y2k, and it’s not his exile from Manchester, and it’s even more not the feelings that stirred by being around old flame Louise. The source of his angst is his aloneness and outsider status.

There are tender moments in both films, where old friendships seem, at least for awhile, to offer the possibility of redemption. But in the end, neither Alain or Johnny can dally too long. In the case of Alain, I was never under much illusion that he would change his mind, it seemed a foregone conclusion that he would die on the 23rd of July, and the only question left was how. On the other hand, when Johnny and Louise are having that conversation in the bathroom, and she decided to go back to Manchester that very day, you wonder or not if this is the happy ending that we had all hoped for. Actress Leslie Sharpe, who plays Louise, is resplendent in this deceptively simple scene—the shots of her face as she talks with Johnny and they find out that they still have feelings for each other and might go back to Manchester together. That scene left a deep impression on me, if only because it the ONE bright light in the bleak landscape of the film. I had seen the film before but had forgotten how it ended, so the scene and the end of the film still hit me as if I’d been watching it for the first time. So when you see Johnny taking the money and limping away, the sun behind him, it’s a bit devastating. It’s as if he knew that he couldn’t really make good on his promise to Louise. It’s as if he knew that getting close to another human being—opening to them to the point that you might become an integral part of their happiness—was just something he couldn’t hack. And so he drifts, yet again. The selfish impulses of the man are nothing if not consistent.

Alain, never seems to waver. You begin to admire the man for being so methodical. He ends a visit to his old friend by lambasting the fellow for choosing the path of mediocrity. The says in reply that although outwardly he might seem mediocre, with his nice apartment and kid and bourgeois lifestyle, but that his passion is still there. It’s that he lives without passion, but that his passion has been transferred to these extremely mundane things. Throughout the film you don’t get the sense that Alain is killing himself out of artistic principle—that is, there is no great ideology behind his suicide, it’s just an intractable sadness that transforms him, a huge glitch in the neurons that throws everything off. Yet in this scene, with his friend, you really hear him speak out, about the choices that people make, the ramifications of those choices, for him, for the friends who made those choices, for their lives, for their friendship. It’s one of the more rare “outbursts” that Alain has during the film.

I’m not sure where to end this. These are both excellent films that etch themselves in my mind in a way that ensemble pieces or movies with dense plots lines cannot—I suppose that there is just something inherently more captivating about movies that deal with the inner depths of the individual.

Movies I’ve watched: Cassandra’s Dream

Is there any reason why Woody Allen should continue subjecting us to these morality tales? If you want to see the Abel and Cain-esque moral fallout that happens when two brothers once so close get in over their heads, you’d be better off watching “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” with Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Woody Allen can still weave a good yarn, but he’s still too talky, and not in a good way. Woody Allen is a natural comic talent, yet he has this more “serious” side that deals with the choices that you make. This is Allen attempting to be Dostoyevsky, attempting to tease out what happens when you murder someone. Do you, like the Ewan McGregor character, move on and get on with your life, or do you, like the Colin Farrell character, get beset by personal demons and fear of God’s censure?

Movies I’ve Watched: In Bruges

In Bruges Movie Reviews, Pictures – Rotten Tomatoes

If you take a cursory look at what the people on Rotten Tomatoes are saying you’d find htat most people have a generally positive take on this film, starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes. I don’t know if I could anymore that hasn’t already been said by people who actually get paid to write about film. Personally, I enjoyed watching Ralph Fiennes and Colin Farrell the most. Colin Farrell has a comic flair that isn’t always well exploited in the Hollywood movies he does, where he’s paid to be dark, manly, sexual, and tough. His character in Bruges is isn’t short on machismo but that’s not the main thing, by far: it’s a personal crisis he has after accidentally killing a young boy after his first hit–on a priest no less–goes somewhat awry. What I like about him, though, is how stupid and opinionated he is (especially regarding the topic of midgets, a topic that seems to really fascinate him). Ralph Fiennes was intriguing for the same reason: he got to play against type. He plays a gangster boss that’s strangely religious (if you kill a little boy by accident, you ought to commit suicide right there and then–as if the murder of innocent children was that much worse than the murder of adults) and who follows his particular code of honor and ethics to the tee. I would bet that the image of Ralph Fiennes that most of us have etched in our minds is one of the quintessential Englishman. He’s elegant, educated, diffident and reserved–and yet underneath that surface there is something very sensitive, something smoldering–and the mystery of what that is varies with each character he has, but is what makes him so compelling to watch (insofar as you might think he’s compelling to watch).

However, when we first meet Fiennes’ character in this movie, it’s through his voice on the other side of the phone, and not his person. When I heard his voice I whispered to my girlfriend that must be Michael Caine in a cameo, because the voice was so Cockney and dirty. But of course, it was Fiennes talking, and that’s what so fun about his character–he got to be so bad, but not without sacrificing the intelligence and refinement to each character that he plays. I just don’t think he’d be able to play a completely inane, macho type gangster even if they decked him out with fake muscles. He’s just too sensitive looking.

Anyway, the film is dark comedy and has a few twists and turns, nothing special, nothing hard to follow. In terms of pacing it keeps an even keel, with plot points and jokes interspersed quite evenly, which makes it that much more enjoyable. Check it out–entertaining and funny in that inimitable British way.

Portishead’s Third

Portishead’s latest album isn’t really trippy or hoppy. Pehraps I’ve just been out of the loop since their first album was released ages ago (haven’t followed them closely since, though I did like that album quite much); but they deifnitely have evolved into something differenet altogether. In this album the massive trip-hop machinery behind vocalist Beth Gibbon toned down, throwing her voice out front and center. There aren’t many effects on her voice in these tracks, which reveals a voice that, while still eerily beautiful in the way that made their name, reveals a bit more frailty, which is, for the most part, good.

Overall, I found the album to be decent, but nothing that blew me away, but then again, we’re all a bit older and more cynical than we were when “Dummy” came out, aren’t we? What follows are just brief and desultory notes on individual tracks in the album.

“Magic Doors” is a song that really annoys me. It just doesn’t feel very well put together. There’s just too much going on in the background, and it all sounds quite tinny, like someone just threw a bunch of loops on the computer and then said “ok, now just sing over this.”

The only thing remotely trip-hop about “Threads” is the beat, but the drums and guitar make it more of an art-rock type of song. I found it a bit repetitive; again, somehow the music seemed to fight with Beth Gibbon’s voice.

“We Carry On” is another track with atmospheric distorted guitar…layered over machine-esque electronica. Again, I felt the music was fighting with Beth Gibbon’s voice…or perhaps they were just operating in different spaces. I love rock music but I found the guitars a bit too distorted and abrasive at the end of the track, where the same riff is played repeatedly. There is something Bjork-esque about the beats in the track, which I liked, but of course you only really hear that beat when the guitars are done upstaging everyone else.

“Deep Water” is mostly mandolin and Gibbon on vocals. It’s short–1:35–but sweet, and sits in the middle of the album and provides a little intermission from the rest of the album.

“Machine Gun” sure lives up to its name–the beats recall machine gun fire, which is cool for about the first 30 seconds of the song, after which it gets a bit annoying. That said, I love the vocals on this track, it hearkens back to “Dummy” era Portishead; you don’t know what she’s saying exactly, but the voice takes you somewhere very Christian–I don’t knwo what makes me say this, but her voice belongs ot that of a Saint–there is something very ethereal and otherwordly about it, it takes you into a confessional zone, where you are tormented by searing, private pains that other people cannot see.

“Small” is a cool track, mosty vocals and cello, but it gets boring rather quickly because there isn’t much by way of contours. It starts out in this particular zone and stays there until the middle of the song when it gets trip-hoppy (and here I mean trip-hoppy in the way that Portishead helped define). There are no vocals during this part, and although some people might like the whole trippy instrumental thing, I confess that part of me kept impatiently waiting for Gibbon to start singing again.

Gibbon doesn’t start singing until over two and half minutes into “Silence”, but when she does, it’s trademark Portishead–confessional mutterings and secret pleas, some sort of haunting and inexplicable pain.

“Hunter” is even more trademark trip-hop. The creepy and punchy beats are captivating and cinematic. That’s one thing that I always loved about this music–it is always the soundtrack to some peculiar scene in the movie where the protagonist is in some harem or drug den, a place where fantasy, fear, and neurosis burst through the mental floodgates and even if they emerge into sunlight on the other end, life is subtly changed by the experience. A secret is formed, and there is no going back.

“Rip” is a more emotionally engaging track than the rest.

“Plastic” is even better. Gibbon’s voice reaches a nice crescendo at the end of each chorus, showing a bit of the range that we don’t normally hear when she’s in quiet confessional mode. The guitars that begin the verses are nice, they are vaguely sinister in a Radiohead kind of way. Then the trip-hop beats kick in.