Rudo y cursi - Carlos Cuarón

• Gael García y Diego Luna van que vuelan para ser la reencarnación de Viruta y Capulina}. Eso, o la adaptación mexicana de Brokeback Mountain. (momento: eso fue justo lo que hicieron en Y tu mamá también...)
• Diego Luna no puede dejar de hablar con acento fresa del D. F. ni aunque le pongan bigote de ranchero. Simplemente es más fuerte que él.
• Al final de la película, el argentino dice que el personaje de Diego Luna regresa a dirigir un equipo en Chilpancingo, lo cual hace creer que los protagonistas son de Guerrero. El hecho de que hablen como norteños demuestra no sólo la ignorancia de Cuarón y los productores, sino la idea, muy despectiva y muy extendida entre la burguesía de la Ciudad de México, de que fuera de ahí todo es Cuautitlán.
• No hay diferencia entre los albures baratos del Compayito y las modelos de Televisa y TV Azteca y las mentadas de madre proferidas constantemente por García y Luna. La gente que critica unos y aplaude a los otros no tiene idea de nada.
• Chespirito al menos pateaba el balón en las del Chanfle. Y no necesitaba gritar ni mentar madres para hacer reír a la gente.
• El humor del mexicano es como su educación política: ambos confunden la crítica con la queja. Por eso uno es pesado y la otra es deficiente (e ineficaz al momento de tomar acciones concretas).

The Iron Lady - Phyllida Lloyd

The first half of The Iron Lady is a depiction of a senile Margaret Thatcher that understandably annoys her family and members of the British Conservative Party.

The second half is a collection of sketches showing several passages of Mrs. Thatcher political career, masterfully performed by Meryl Streep. You need some basic knowledge of British History and politics to get a good grasp of this part of the movie.

The Iron Lady is just one more average movie, but it is likely to get several Oscars given the well-known American fascination with British accents.

The Young One - Luis Buñuel

A lot of things have been written about The Young One, the second and last movie filmed by Buñuel in English. Check, for instance this website (in Spanish), this one, this one, and obviously the reviews written by the users of IMDb. Most of the comments agree that this is a great movie for a number of reasons: it portrays racism in the United States as a social construction rather than a good vs. bad issue; it shows how religion is practically irrelevant whenever man is in the state of nature; it shows a sarcastic view of religion; from a plot perspective, The Young One offers the opportunity to all its characters to be the main actor and the most powerful person at least once; at the end of the movie, it is extremely hard to say who was the main character. Also, the fact that the movie has no music other than the sounds of nature increases dramatism exponentially.

What I haven't read so far is an appreciation of the extent to which Evie, the 13 year-old girl is used as a piece of exchange by the male characters of the movie. Traver uses her to get free; the priest buys her from Miller in order to have one more soul for God's cause, and Miller sells her (or more accurately, she rents her) to buy the silence of the priest for raping the girl.

The Young One is an extremely rich and complex movie, and you can watch it for free here:

3 - Nouvelle Vague

Nouvelle Vague is a concept designed by French musicians Marc Collin and Olivier Libaux consisting of having female singers (previously called "girls") performing new wave and rock songs with bossa nova arrangements. The experimental character of the project is enhanced by having singers performing songs they had never heard before. Yes, the entire thing is very French.

Their first two albums were very successful, at least in France. For 3, they were even able to recruit people like Martin Gore, who sings the back voice for "Master and Servant."

Overall, the entire concept of Nouvelle Vague is not that bad. Their music is OK for listening in an office and, quite honestly one gets to appreciate the music with a set of headphones. The arrangements are worth the price of the albums.

I guess that the problem with this band is that they take classic songs and rip them off their essence to make them palatable to all audiences -with the remarkable exception of the people who heard the original versions. But that's not the problem of Nouvelle Vague. During the first decade of the 21st century commercial art general was characterized by remakes. Hopefully that was just a trend and originality will eventually come back.

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 Fall of Baghdad - Jon Lee Anderson

An Iraqi youth walked up to me, showed me some kind of a military medal, and said, in English, "Saddam animal," then walked away. Groups of young Iraqi men would wander up, smil, give the thumbs-up, say, "Down Bush", or, "America good," before walking on. It was unclear o me whether they meant what they said or thought this was a ritual they should perform.

The Fall of Baghdad is not a book analyzing the arguments in favor or against the American invasion of Iraq, though the book argues that the two opportunities to invade Iraq on humanitarian causes were when Saddam Hussein bombed the Kurds with chemical weapons, and after the 1991 Gulf War, when Saddam massacred the Shia population of the Southeast. This not a book about explaining what Americans should do (or should have done in 2004) to calm the mess Iraq quickly became, either. In fact, a tremendous amount of books and articles on these topics were written since 2002 but none of them became nearly as successful as this.

The Fall of Baghdad tries to tell how the life of about six Baghdadis changed between early 2003 and mid 2004. The aim of the book, modest only in appearance, is to do what the American intelligence community should have done but did not bother to: survey the hearts and feelings of some Iraqis on how an American intervention would be received (probably the American secret services did carry out some in-field intelligence, but it was not heard at all, so it counts as if it didn't do anything). Collecting the views of Iraqis at that time was no easy task.  There were few American journalists in Baghdad as the coalition troops entered the city, and the city fell into disorder quickly after. Talking to people, or even going back to the hotel, should not have been an easy task.

The Fall of Baghdad was issued right before the 2004 election, and it quickly was used by the Democratic Party as a testimony of George W. Bush's failure to provide stability to ordinary Iraqis, as well as to bring American troops back. The book became a bestseller, and Anderson joined the debate, siding with the Democrats, as this interview shows.

Eight years later, once that Americans left Iraq, and the country slides into sectarian chaos instead of chaos focused to make Americans go, I think this book is valuable for three reasons. The first one is that it tries to portray what Iraqis think, taking their opinions at face value. Anderson was criticized for this, but I think that this way of narrating inscribes in the tradition of historiography created by Thucydides and followed by chroniclers like Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Anderson could have editorialized his book, like many journalists do today, but then it would be a description of Anderson's thoughts on other people's thoughts.

The second reason is literary and is the reason why this book should be mandatory for students on journalism and literature. The Fall of Baghdad feels like a novel narrated from the first person rather than a journalist document. Anderson achieves this by not corroborating or denying the information that he received in real time. Anderson was in Iraq, getting sporadic information from the West and subject to the rumors in the street and the propaganda of Saddam's Ministry of Information. As he reviewed his notes and drafted the book, he could perfectly have narrowed all the opinions and ideas he heard by using formulas like "as we realized later, this proved to be false." Instead, Anderson lets facts follow their natural course, and information gets denied or confirmed, or left unaddressed, in their due moment. There are only two moments in the book where Anderson corroborates his real-time impressions  with information received later on: right after the attacks of the American army to the Palestine Hotel, which Anderson thought had been carried out by Iraqi terrorists, and when he confirms that a burned boy he saw at the hospital was in the U.S. receiving medical treatment.

The third reason, and this can't be stressed enough, is that it shows the failure of American intelligence. It took Anderson a couple of interviews in late 2002 to realize that American troops wouldn't be received "with sweets and flowers", as the Bush administration forced itself to believe. The fact that a semi-independent journalist did a better job than the CIA on surveying Iraqis' feelings about Americans is disconcerting and worrisome. The inability to assess the conditions of the invasion aftermath is the real failure of the U.S. intelligence and not, as some people argue, the obsession with Saddam's WMD. Saddam confessed in his interrogations to have bluffed about the WMD because he was afraid of showing weakness to the Iranians, so he brought disaster on himself -and on his people.

Here is a preview of The Fall of Baghdad via Google Books.

Here is Anderson's latest writing on Iraq, published by The New Yorker a couple of days after the last American soldier left Iraq.

And below is Anderson talking about the book, via NPR:

Cape Fear - Martin Scorsese

It's amazing how things change in twenty years. Here's a list of things that you wouldn't find in a movie today but were common in a R-rated movie in 1991 such as Cape Fear:

• An adult kissing an underage girl (the actress who plays the underage character was over 18, though).
• The father of the underage GIRL having dirty thoughts about her.
• Dysfunctional families, and common fellows in general as heroes. For some reason, Hollywood has had a long infatuation with rich and powerful characters. Movies about common people are becoming the exception rather than the norm.
• Southern conservatism portrayed as a potential source of violence and conflicts; when Southern conservatism is portrayed today, if it is portrayed at all, it is as a motive for mockery.
• The idea that provocative women deserve to be raped. (I actually think that the term "promiscuous women" has been kicked out of the U.S. media completely, in great part thanks to Sex and the City).
• Derogatory comments about being raped by black men in jail.
• Dirty, rough, and rude men. Actors like Robert de Niro have nothing to do in Hollywood today.