Time Flies 1994-2009 - Oasis

This post was going to be about the relation between Oasis and Britpop on the one hand and Tony Blair's New Labour on the other. But then I realized I already did that before.This book also talks about the same topic.

Time Flies is obviously important only for completionists.The special edition has the band's last live performance and a compilation of all the singles' videos. If you put the comments on, you can hear Noel Gallagher recognizing that most of his songs don't make sense, that he hates most of his videos, and that the band should not have recorded Standing on the Shoulder of Giants. Liam also speaks but, as usual, he's completely unintelligible.

Carbon for Water - Evan Abramson & Carmen Elsa Lopez

Carbon for Water is a movie about a project aiming to make Kenyans from the Western Province boil water using plastic filters donated by Vestergaard, a company manufacturing public health tools such as mosquito nets and water filters.

Though the project may sound like charity, Vestergaard would make money in the carbon finance market: Vestergaard PR team was smart enough to convince the Gold Standard Foundation (one of the two major accrediting bodies) that the carbon dioxide issued by Kenyans was enough to be offset by issuing carbon permits.

Carbon for Water won the Best International Short Film Award in the Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival (2011), Best Short Documentary in the California International Short Festival (2011), was picked as the official selection of the Festival international du film d'environnement (2012), and was "highly commended" at the Development & Climate Days Film Competition, a side event at COP 17 in Durban, South Africa. The film and the project were also praised by the good-doers of the World Bank.

From a public relations point of view, Vestergaard's project was tremendously successful: a movie, kudos from development partners, and carbon-finance money. The development community, in its relentless search for funds, and in the context of has been recently joined by NGO people and other kind of characters with people skills who are very good at marketing ideas and concepts -Carbon for Water is a sign of the things to come...

However, from a public policy perspective, it is unclear whether Carbon for Water had any significant impact on the lives of the people this project was supposed to help. To begin with, this project is one more in the long list of well-intentioned initiatives that compete with the State as a provider of public services. There is a reason why "public services" are called that way, and ample evidence indicates that public services tend to be under-provided by the private sector. Water being the ultimate public good, I am afraid that Vestergaard's project will eventually fail.

Also, a quick google search shows a tremendously high number of laudatory comments from NGO people and only two critical comments by a guy named Kevin Starr. I was unable to find any impact evaluation, peer-reviewed article, or anything that really tells me whether this was a good idea. I personally don't think it is, but beyond my personal preferences, I would really like to see anything measuring the impact of this initiative on the Kenyans' living standards, not on the pockets of Vestergaard's shareholders -I'm sure they made a lot of money out of this.

Journal articles, randomized trials, and impact evaluations are boring and imperfect. They are also the kind of things that NGO people (mostly school dropouts or people with the white man's guilt) and donors (bureaucrats who actually hate under-developed countries) hate. But they are a better tool to know what works than a movie.

I am unable to recommend this movie until I get some serious evidence about the benefits it brought to the Kenyans in the long run.

North of the Rio Grande - Edward Simmen

Ed Simmen belongs to that sort of Texans that is about to disappear: he is a person who tries to build a bridge between Mexico and the United States instead of pretending that Texas is unique in the Universe. The highest points in Ed's academic career were North of the Rio Grande, a compilation of short stories written by Mexican-Americans in the United States, and Gringos in Mexico, which simlarly collects stories written by Americans living in Mexico. 

I will not talk about Gringos in Mexico here. Maybe I will do it someday. I will only let the reader know that, while Gringos in Mexico includes some "big names" like Kerouac or Jack London, the only professional writer included in North of the Rio Grande is Stephen Crane, who is not even  Mexican-American but happens to be one of the first American writers to use Mexican characters. The difference between Gringos in Mexico and North of the Rio Grande is evident: at the time both books were published (1980's), Americans saw Mexico is a friendly exotic place next door where it was possible to do stupid things without fearing any legal consequences; for Mexicans -particularly poor Mexicans-, the United States was the promise of a better life. The possibilities of having a young promising American writer going to Mexico were as high as the possibilities of having a young Mexican manual worker crossing the border in the opposite direction. American artists used to go to Mexico, whereas Mexican workers used to go to the U.S.; the quality of the artistic outputs produced by each community was obviously different.

And that's probably the main feature of North of the Rio Grande: the book is fantastic as a documentary but fails miserably as an artistic product. With few exceptions, the stories contained in North of the Rio Grande are full of clichés and, probably worse, are actually quite amateurish. The classical image of a drunk sleepy Mexican laid on a cactus and wearing a big hat and a sarape leaving everything for mañana permeats most if not all of the stories the book. Most of the authors presented in the book would be completely forgotten if not for Ed's efforts to go to obscure university quarterlies trying to find chicano writers regardless of their quality as writers. 

Try googling names like María Cristina Mena, Sandra Cisneros, or Carlos Flores. The first entries will probably be Facebook or LinkedIn pages of some random people, but at one point, these three names belonged to leaders of opinion and somewhat recognized writers among the Mexican-American community. In fact, the profiles of the authors is probably more interesting than their stories: sons of illegal immigrants who had to work as handimen and study at the same time, went to college, and eventuallly got a job as a community college professor; not bad for a first generation immigrant. The problem is that such a background hardly allows for producing high quality literature. In a way, North of the Rio Grande reminds us that there are too many people who want to write and to few people who want to read.

Despite being composed of mostly boring stories, I would still like to recommend North of the Rio Grande. It has a lot of value as a historic document: also, as the Mexican-American communities integrate into the mainstream American community, terms like chicano or people like Cesar Chavez will be part of the past. And it's always more fun to learn about the past using novels and short stories than History books. 

Crossing the Line - Daniel Gordon

Crossing the Line is the third and final installment of Daniel Gordon's trilogy on North Korea. After gaining the confidence of the North Korean government with The Game of Their Lives (to be reviewed soon) and A State of Mind, Daniel Gordon requested permission to film a documentary about the four American soldiers who defected to North Korea in the early sixties. Only two of the four soldiers were still alive at that time: Joe Dresnok and Charles Jenkins, who hated each other for reasons that are explained in the film. Jenkins defected back to Japan while the movie was being filmed and spend 30 days in an American military prison after being judged by a military court. Dresnok decided to stay and spend the rest of his life in North Korea, so the movie focuses on him: his personal story as a member of America's Southern underclass (he came from a dysfunctional family, didn't finish high school, and his first wife cheated on him while he was in the army), his role as a movie star in North Korea, and his daily life as an elderly.

When I reviewed A State of Mind, the second movie of Gordon's trilogy, I said that it had become useless since the funerals of Kim Jong Il. The death of Kim Jong Il and the media show that the North Korean government presented to the World served only to reinforce preconceptions about the country: people who thought that the North Korean regime is composed of lunatics would carry on with that idea, while people who had admiration for the North Korean Communist Party (most notably, Mexico's Labor Party), would share the grief of the North Koreans who appeared on TV.

Crossing the Line, on the contrary, is a movie that transcends Kim Jong Il, or even North Korea. This is a movie about America's soldiers and the environment the grow in, but also about totalitarian regimes and their legitimacy. After watching this movie, you will spend a couple of hours trying to disentangle Dresnok's puzzle to no avail. Like all North Koreans, he was obviously brainwashed by the government (he admits having spent several years in "reeducation" after trying to ask political asylum in the Soviet Union's embassy), but the troubling thing is that he looks sincerely happy when he talks about his life in North Korea. His smile and his eyes don't betray him, as they do with people in other totalitarian regimes like China or Syria. Dresnok did well for himself in North Korea: his account of "The Arduous March", in which he acknowledges that the received his rations regularly while other people starved are meaningful, just like the scene when he appears drinking Jack Daniel's.

The great thing about this film is that it doesn't provide a clear answer to the primary question any person interested in this movie would like to answer: why did Dresnok (or Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, if you start considering civilians) defect? In the case of Dresnok, the answer has to do, I guess, with the desire to escape from a sad reality; in other cases, ideology plays the most important part, and so on. 

Last but not least, Gordon deserves praise for presenting the opinions of the South and North Korean and Japanese governments, and the American army in an balanced way fashion. Doing so guaranteed not only the survival of the film, but also enables the viewer to form his own opinion about Dresnok. The multiplicity of views also makes the movie look like a regular drama. This is one of the best documentaries I've seen in my life. The story could be made a Hollywood movie, but no studio would put money in a movie likely to be pointed out as North Korean propaganda.

You can start watching Crossing the Line for free in Youtube, here:

A State of Mind - Daniel Gordon

I put A State of Mind in my list a couple of months ago, but was not able to watch it until today. The movie follows two preteen girls preparing to participate for the Mass Games, a gymnastics performance held in honor of Kim Jong Il. Daniel Gordon had unprecedented access to the daily life of two North Koreans families (both of which belong to the country's elite), so the movie was widely discussed in the West after its release. CNN even presented an abridged version of it. This movie was the first glimpse that the West had of North Korea since the end of the war, at the moment when the Kim regime was about to finalize its first nuclear weapon.

A State of Mind is remarkably neutral, the only criticism of North Korea coming at the end of the movie, when a subtitle informs that Kim did not attend the Games, and we get to see a bored group of high-level military staff seeing the performances (one of them is actually looking at his watch constantly). Having said that, the movie won two prices in North Korea's International Film Festival, which means either that what I have described as "criticism" is subconscious Western North Korea bashing, or that the censors didn't get the message.

Sadly, its neutrality makes A State of Mind a dated movie. North Korea has constantly been in the news for the last 8 years, the number of defectors is increasing, so the novelty is fading away. As usual, over the last 8 years, some people have condemned the abuses of the Kim dynasty, while others praised their resistance to capitalism, the US, and all that. There was room for neutrality 8 years ago, when North Korea was the big thing in the news, but not anymore.  The funerals of Kim Jong Il were useful, if nothing else, to allow Westerners to reinforce their preconceptions about North Korea. Most people confirmed that the North Korean government is composed of lunatics; others, like Mexico's Labor Party, saw in it the opportunity to praise an anti-imperialist leader who fought for the welfare of his country.

I've seen a number of posts criticizing Gordon for not presenting the harsh of the North Korea regime and not being upfront about its violations to human rights. By being neutral, the argument goes, Gordon is actually an accomplice of the North Korean dictatorship. Gordon had an unprecedented opportunity to ask real North Koreans what they think about their beloved leader and he wasted it, either unintentionally or because he's a double agent. I think this opens an interesting debate.

For some reason, Gordon gained the confidence of the North Korean government. The fact that he was allowed to talk to people is, in itself, a testimony of that. Gordon could have pushed the interviewees to talk about politics, with two different and exclusive results: 1) the interviewees decide to stop participating in the movie; or, 2) the interviewees decide to talk about politics, which means that they would probably be dead or in a reeducation camp by now. Scenario 1) leaves us with no movie, and scenario 2) would destroy even more lives just to confirm what we already know.

No matter how you cut it, the approach followed by Gordon (i.e., letting North Koreans express themselves freely about whatever they want) is the best one. Hearing two children referring sincerely to Kim Jong Il as a demi-god is enlightening enough.

A State of Mind is available for free here, via youtube.

The Cove - Louise Psihoyos

Stereotypes are a fact of life. Movies that break them are good.

When people think about Japan and the Japanese people, this is what they have in mind:

Source: Deviant Art

Or:

Source: flickriver

Or probably:

Source: Lifefashionfy.com

People who have traveled have this in mind when they think about Japan:

Source: Cure Byte

The Cove will take these stereotypes out of your mind. Instead, you will see Japanese as:

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica Advocacy for Animals

(the fishy things in the boat are dolphins, the boat is floating on a blood-tainted beach, and the people on the boat are Japanese dolphin hunters)

Dolphin hunting is an very important part of Japanese culture, and the Japanese government subsidizes it to annoy the West. 

It could be worst. They could be working on getting atomic bombs like Iran, building a mighty navy in the Pacific like China, or opposing Security Council resolutions against nasty Arab dictators like Brazil, India, South Africa, Russia, China (again) or Germany (Germany is not really Western; if they were, they wouldn't be sitting while the European project collapses).

The Cove is a great documentary. And the website is here.

The Story of the Weeping Camel - Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni

This is the best movie I watched in 2011. And the best thing is that it is available for free here. This is a "narrative documentary" filmed in Mongolia about a nomadic family trying to save the life of a bactrian camel after it is rejected by its mother.


It is extremely hard to say who are the main characters in this movie: is it the family, whose millennial way of life is threatened by inventions like TV? Is it the camels? Or is it the Mongolian desert, which is portrayed with all its beauty by the directors, who avoided commonplaces like sunsets, or danws?  Is it slowness, which seems dull at the beginning, but is actually the way in which the directors create the dramatic momentum of the movie? Or is it the violin player, who appears for only five minutes but culminates the entire plot?


If you want to give a shot to any of the recommendations of this blog, watch The Story of the Weeping Camel. The National Geographic sponsored website is here, and the full movie is actually right below:

Live Forever. The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop - John Dower

Brit Pop was my first window to popular culture. I liked it so much that I grew up believing that the United Kingdom was a sunny place where everyone was happy, optimistic, and full of enthusiasm. Time would teach me better. Let’s be under no illusion: the United Kingdom is a gray, rainy, and cold place with little social mobility. I eventually realized that songs like “Live Forever” are in fact aspirational anthems against a boring life with no future.

Live Forever. The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop is a 2002 BBC documentary that describes the years between 1990 and 1997, which is, according to the director, the year when Brit Pop died. In that year, Oasis issued Be Here Now and Princess Diana died. Throughout the movie, Brit Pop is presented as a spontaneous reaction against the Thatcher years which was co-opted by Tony Blair. From that perspective, Noel Gallagher is the betrayer who compromised the movement's ideals. The movie requires the viewer to be aware of some glorious moments of British culture, like when Liam Gallagher appeared on Vanity Fair’s cover. The documentary is hard to follow sometimes, since it does not have a narrator: the viewer only gets to see fragments of interviews with people without any introduction or anything.

But the biggest problem of this documentary is that it was filmed too early. If we believe in the idea that New Labour and Brit Pop were linked, then the latter died when either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown left Downing Street, not before. Granted, with the death of Diana the world re-discover that monarchies are ruthless and ossified. And Be Here Now might have been a bad album (I personally do not think so, but let’s assume it is for the argument’s sake), but other bands pretended to sound like Oasis after that, and even Oasis eventually sounded like What’s the Story again. The Crown’s reaction to the death of Diana was only the first deception of a generation that believed in the promise that we could ignore how our friends’ gardens grow. After Diana, came the support to the War in Iraq and the saving of the big banks. And Blair passed from being Bambi to Bliar.

In retrospective, it is now evident that the legitimacy of New Labour rested upon the following bargain: in the first place, the government closed one eye to the excesses of the City bankers as long as they paid enough taxes to keep the social programs running. The other side of the agreement was that the social programs would not create human capital or enhance productivity. Like in the rest of Europe, the British state has decided to maintain an underclass of people who make more money by being unemployed and receiving their unemployment benefits than working. In Cool Britannia, it is easier to sell the idea that any guys’ band can become rock ‘n’ roll stars and make money than telling them that their life will not be better than their parents’.

Labour left office a couple of months after Oasis announced its split. The sound-like-the-Beatles formula is exhausted, just like the idea that big taxes and generous social programs compensate for the lack of regulation. The United Kingdom is broke and its prospects are dim: the dullness and frustration of the Thatcher year will stay here for a long time after 15 years of partying. Things like Britain’s Got Talent just make the landscape even more depressing. 

Sorry for the kids.

We had a good time.

Buena Vista Social Club - Wim Wenders

Although six of the original members of Buena Vista Social Club have died since the band’s Grammy winning album was recorded, the band still tours around the world. This has taken some critics to say that Buena Vista is a brand more than a band. In reality, Buena Vista Social Club was always a brand (actually Ry Cooder’s), which brought Cuban son to the United States and Europe. Cooder has found a market niche in World music: his most recent offspring is a fusion of Irish and Mexican traditional music.

In the case of Buena Vista, Cooder gathered all the musicians (some of them were famous before Buena Vista; others were not), did all the promotion, and eventually took Wim Wenders to film the documentary about the band’s members and their performances in Amsterdam and New York.

 After the album and the film, Cuba’s tourism industry grew exponentially and, from what I have heard, you can find 50,000 bands (probably 5,000,000) in the streets of La Havana who play the same songs as Buena Vista. In a way, Cooder and Wenders have done more for Cuba’s tourism industry than anything else.

Cooder and Wenders has been criticized for showing just a part of Cuban folklore, making the Batista years looking like a golden age, and for commercializing Cuban music and making money. Probably they are, indeed, evil people, but even if they are, I am still of the view that the World is better off after re-discovering Cuban music. Probably there are 5 thousands (or even billions) musicians as good as (or probably better than) Ibrahim Ferrer or Rubén González, but we would not ask ourselves these questions without Buena Vista.  Those who are interested in the answer will always be able to go to Cuba and figure it out.

With the exception of the scene where González is playing in a children gymnasium, Wender’s documentary is awful: the handy-cam that records the scenes in La Havana never stops moving and the voices of the band members when they tell their stories interfere with the music. I do not know how to solve that, I just know that I did not like it.

But anyway, here is the trailer:

Memorias del subdesarrollo - Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

¿Yo era como él antes? Es posible. La revolución, aunque me destruya, es mi venganza contra la estúpida burguesía cubana, contra los cretinos como Pablo.

-Sergio Carmona Mendoyo (Sergio Corrieri)

Mal anda un régimen cuyas películas propagandísticas parecen, en retrospectiva, críticas despiadadas.

Me explico. Películas como El acorazado Potemkin o Alexander Nevsky, de Sergei Eisenstein, hacen que  los ideales soviéticos parezcan heroicos y dignos de ser perseguidos a pesar del tiempo y de la caída de la propia Unión Soviética. La propaganda soviética ha envejecido con gracia, en parte porque le vendía, primero a los rusos y luego a la humanidad entera, la idea de que existían ideales nobles y un futuro justo que trascendían la existencia individual y por los que valía la pena luchar.

Algo muy diferente ha pasado con la propaganda cubana, que lo único que le ha vendido al mundo desde que cayó la Unión Soviética es que la vida es resistencia, un eterno purgatorio. ¿Alguien se imagina un futuro mejor para Cuba que no sea la muerte de los Castro? (y lo de mejor depende de tantas condiciones que hay que tomarlo con asegunes). Acaso la mayor tragedia de Cuba sea que no ha podido encontrar ninguna épica que no sea la de sobrellevar el bloqueo.

Pero me estoy desviando. De lo que quería hablar es de Memorias del subdesarrollo, película cubana de 1968 que pretende fusionar el género documental con el género ficción. La película está fuertemente influenciada por la nouvelle vague francesa: sus silencios y minimalismo ambiental son más apropiados en una película de Godard que en el trópico. La película presenta cómo Sergio, un burgués que decide quedarse en Cuba mientras toda su familia y amigos se van a Miami, ve nacer un nuevo orden que no alcanza a entender. Sergio, entonces, se dedica a cortejar a su sirvienta y a dormir con Elena, una adolescente que a la postre le dará muchos dolores de cabeza. Sergio no es ni revolucionario ni contrarrevolucionario. Es, como le dijera Elena, nada.

Por lo general, los directores de películas de la nouvelle vague y sus imitadores latinoamericanos no son claros en cuanto a los mensajes que intentan transmitir (algo que presentan como signo de sofisticación y de lo que se enorgullecen, los muy cabrones), pero me imagino que, al presentar a Sergio como un abusador de mujeres débiles y frágiles, Memorias del subdesarrollo pretende hacer un símil con la situación de desventaja en la que se encuentran las naciones latinoamericanas frente al imperialismo. Además, al presentar al burgués como un ser tibio, que ni pincha ni corta, la película pretende mandar un mensaje claro sobre quiénes son las personas en las que puede confiar la revolución.

Pero esa es mi interpretación. Estoy seguro que algún crítico de cine marxista (enemigo de los poderosos) tendrá otra, mucho menos kapitalistas y con palabras más rebuscadas.

Lo más valioso de la película es el juego de cámaras y cortes, que llevan del tiempo presente a la mente de Sergio, sus divagaciones y sus recuerdos, así como a discursos del Comandante Fidel, o tomas de la televisión. La película es un poco lenta y sus silencios aumentan el torpor con que se desarrolla.

Políticamente, la película es triste, como todo lo que tenga que ver con Cuba que no sean putas, tabaco, o turismo para europeos y latinoamericanos pudientes. Y es que la realidad terminó desmintiendo a Memorias del subdesarrollo. La razón la tuvieron los que se fueron, la gente a la que Sergio tanto despreciaba y que tenían miedo de que Cuba se convirtiera en una nación tan pobre como Haití, como lo es ahora. Los que tuvieron razón fueron los que, como Pablo (el amigo burgués de Sergio que huyó a "la gusanera"), se fueron hartos a Miami porque en las gasolineras les decían que no tenían aceite para coche pero que igual se los podían checar. 

Lo más trágico de Memorias del subdesarrollo no es el proceso psicológico mediante el cual Sergio se convierte en una ruina física y mental tras ser un hombre atractivo, sino que, al tomar técnicas de documental "objetivo", le da voz a los críticos de la Revolución Cubana a los que pretende mostrar como traidores.

Memorias del subdesarrollo presentó a los burgueses como gusanos que huyen o son displicentes hace 40 años. Hoy parecen ser los únicos que tenían idea de qué estaba pasando en el país. Lástima que Fidel haya vivido más que ellos y hayan perdido la batalla de la historia.

Memorias del subdesarrollo está disponible gratis aquí.

Nota: hasta hace poco, cuando alguien decía que Cuba era un país pobre, la respuesta automática era (al menos en México) "que al menos ahí nadie se muere de hambre y la gente está educada y tiene acceso a la salud." Podría hacer ligas a cientos de artículos que muestran cómo los mitos de la educación y la salud cubana son sólo eso:mitos. Pero corro el riesgo de que se me tache de contrarrevolucionario. Lo que sí voy a decir  es que, en 2010, Cuba no fue incluída en el Índice de Desarrollo Humano de la ONU porque su moneda no es convertible y por lo tanto no se puede medir qué tan bien vive un cubano (aquí está el reportaje de la BBC, herramienta del imperialismo, al respecto). En otras palabras, Cuba es un universo paralelo que no se puede comparar con el resto del mundo. 

Morning Sun - Carma Hinton

"Never forget the class struggle"

-Mao Zedong

The Cultural Revolution was probably the only original feature of the Chinese Revolution. Until the mid 1960s, the Revolution did not deviate considerably from what happened in other armed struggles, either bourgeois or socialist: purges and betrayals inside the winning faction, national unification promoted to face external threats, and personality cult, were features common to the revolutions lived in France, Mexico or Russia. Even the Great Leap Forward was inspired on Russia's agricultural policies implemented by Stalin in the early 1920s. 

The Cultural Revolution was a really innovative idea both from a practical and a theoretical perspective. From a practical perspective, the Cultural Revolution was Mao's opportunity to consolidate his position as the sole leader of China right after the Great Leap Forward. When his leadership was stumbling: Mao encouraged the expression of all discontents and grievances for 11 years in order to get rid firstly of any potential challengers within the Communist Party and then of any independent thought outside the Party's structure. In his view, the irrational violence lived during the period was, as we would say now, "collateral damage." From a theoretical perspective, the Cultural Revolution was the most ambitious experiment to revolutionize revolution itself ever. The idea behind the Cultural Revolution was to take break away with the past in every sense.

The historical and political aspects of the Cultural Revolution at the macro level are relatively clear. What we still have to determine are the effects of the Cultural Revolution on the ordinary people who lived it. While pundits often praise China for carrying the most ambitious capitalist revolution in History, they often forget that the people who are turning China into a bourgeois society were the children who denounced their parents for being "counterrevolutionary" during China's Cultural Revolution. The aversion to democracy of the Party's leadership can be partly explained by the psychological effects that mob rule as applied during the Cultural Revolution had on them.

Morning Sun  is an amazing documentary about the daily live of China during the cultural revolution. This movie does not only present  pictures and films unpublished in the West, but also interviews Chinese people who lived during that process -some of them, children of former leaders of the Communist Party. The fact that  Chinese citizens dared to speak with a Western filmmaker about the Cultural Revolution should not be underestimated. Interestingly, while all the Chinese people interviewed in the film acknowledge their initial enthusiasm with the Cultural Revolution, none of them recognizes to have participated in the lynchings.

Here is the website of Morning Sun, which contains several documents and pictures of the Cultural Revolution. The film is not available for purchase in Amazon, but you can buy it in the website of the Center for Asian American Media.

Photo: Tianamen Gate, March 2010