Author: bythefirelight

Kanchivaram – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Kanchivaram (A Communist Confession) is a beautiful and sad film, but not an oppressive film of endless sorrow. And despite the foreshadowing of doom that the frame story creates there is humor and a resolution, that dark, is in the end hopeful.

The SIFF guide describes the film quite well:

Every Indian bride dreams of wearing a delicate Kanchivaram sari on her wedding day, no matter her caste. On the day of his daughter’s “first feeding,” Vengadam (Prakash Raj) promises her one of the same expensive saris that he weaves daily for the highest caste in India. Despite resistance from the village community and fears that an unfulfilled promise will lead to a curse, Vengadam risks his livelihood to steal individual vivid silk threads from his workplace. Every night, he secretly and patiently weaves his daughter’s sari. As his daughter’s wedding day approaches, a communist activist initiates strikes against the mill owners, preventing Vengadam from completing the sari and from keeping his promise.

Ultimately, Vengadam, who is the leader of the strikers, ends the strike so he can finish the sari before his daughter’s wedding day. In doing so he breaks the bond between the two families and when the father of the groom attacks him for his cowardice in ending the strike, the mill owners discover he is stealing thread. He is sent to prison and only release for two days to see his daughter who has fallen down a well and is paralyzed. Seeing she has no future in a land that neither respects the poor, nor women, he poisons her. Although, he could not provide her the sari on her wedding day, he can provide it for her funeral. The last we see Vengadam he has sunk into madness and is pulling the silk sari that is to short to cover her whole body from her head to her feet over and over, unable to realize he came close to giving her a silk silk.

What makes the film intriguing besides its will written story is the politics of the film. Although they live in misery and poverty, Vengadam has a bicycle and they make enough to eat. They do not live in the starkest of poverty, yet they do earn much from their highly skilled labor. While the organizer is a communist and has pictures of Lenin the workers only are interested in forming a union or a cooperative. The workers suffer for months during the strike, some even die. Yet they are all committed to the strike. Vengadam suffers the least because he had a little money saved up. In a film with such political leanings, the locus of the film is in the personal and for Vengadam the personal is where one suffers. At the end of the film after Vengadam has gone mad, the film makers note that just a few years latter after independence, the state voted communists in and the workers formed cooperatives that exist today and pay the workers well.

Kanchivaram is part history and part political work. It borders on the misery of the poor, yet it is a film that is also of those who should not be poor, those have skills. So in this sense the film is tragic and hopeful at the same time. Sad for one family, but hopeful for the weavers as a whole. This mix distances the viewer some what from the brutality that comes from poverty and makes the film seem lighter than it should. Adding to this is the framing narrative of the bus ride which adds comedy. So after watching it you don’t have so much a sense of injustice exists, but it is too bad for that one family. That shift in focus makes the politics more subtle and ultimately the film more interesting.

Kanchivaram (A Communist Confession) is a beautiful and sad film, but not an oppressive film of endless sorrow. And despite the foreshadowing of doom that the frame story creates there is humor and a resolution, that dark, is in the end hopeful.

The SIFF guide describes the film quite well:

Every Indian bride dreams of wearing a delicate Kanchivaram sari on her wedding day, no matter her caste. On the day of his daughter’s “first feeding,” Vengadam (Prakash Raj) promises her one of the same expensive saris that he weaves daily for the highest caste in India. Despite resistance from the village community and fears that an unfulfilled promise will lead to a curse, Vengadam risks his livelihood to steal individual vivid silk threads from his workplace. Every night, he secretly and patiently weaves his daughter’s sari. As his daughter’s wedding day approaches, a communist activist initiates strikes against the mill owners, preventing Vengadam from completing the sari and from keeping his promise.

Ultimately, Vengadam, who is the leader of the strikers, ends the strike so he can finish the sari before his daughter’s wedding day. In doing so he breaks the bond between the two families and when the father of the groom attacks him for his cowerdice in ending the strike, the mill owners descover he is stealing thread. He is sent to prison and only release for two days to see his daughter who has fallen down a well and is paralized. Seeing she has no future in a land that neither respects the poor, nor women, he poisons her. Th

Stunning colors punctuate this strong Tamil-language narrative, where the setting acts as another character in the well-woven script. Though history contextualizes Kanchivaram it’s Vengadam’s strong desire that drives the film’s mystical tone and sensitive approach to the social realities of India’s caste structure.

Four Chapters – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Four Chapters is one of those films where you have the feeling that you might have gotten just a bit more if you were from the country of origin. While meditative, well shot, and having a slow beauty, the spiritual search seems distant and troubled, as if something is missing. And perhaps that is the point—spiritual journeys are never easy.

Based on Rabindranath Tagore’s Four Chapters, Sachish is a young man who breaks with his father’s Hindu religious beliefs to follow his reformist uncle who is willing to feed poor Muslims, which scandalizes the family. When his brother’s young mistress becomes pregnant and is abandoned by him, Sachish offers to marry her to save her from the street. Again, it creates a scandal and the mistress kills herself before the wedding can occur. His uncle then begings a hospital, but soon sucumbs to a fever and dies, leaving Sachish grief stricken. He joins an ashram where he has given up all worldly attachment and follows a guru. Sachish’s friend comes to the ashram seeking to convince Sachish that the guru is a fraud, but, instead, he stays with Sachish to see if faith could be better than the skepticism of his uncle. While they are with the guru they meet Damini who is a widow and a ward of the guru. She sees Sachish and wants to break him free from his allegence to the guru and marry her. Although she tries, he is unwilling. Eventually, they leave the guru so Sachish can find an even deeper faith. Damini who has no other options marries Sachish’s friend who has grown attached to her. Damini and her husband return to the world of work while the last we see of Sachish he is staring at the sea watching singing Sufis walk by.

Four Chapters is even handed in the way it looks at faith. At first it seems as if the guru is going to be a corrupt man, more interested in the physical world than the spiritual. He does need money to run his ashram, but he doesn’t seem to spend it on himself. He is a patriarchal man who thinks women need to be taken care of and supervised. Instead, the criticism is aimed more at the rich families who invite in the gurus, pay them for personal advice, then continue their profligate lives. The gurus are just answering a call. This is why Sachish has to leave the ashram and find something even more spiritual, something that leaves the work of the guru behind. At the beginning of the movie it is Sachish’s father who is spiritual but also doesn’t want to have anything to do with poor Muslims. Sachish who first takes on the asceticism of social reform is natural upset by this and distances himself from his family. It this initial conflict that frames the search for spiritual meaning against the use of spiritualism as something to make you feel better about yourself.

Four Chapters is also interested in looking at how women are treated. Damini has no freedom. As a widow she is dependent of the guru who received her husbands estate, an estate which Damini’s father gave her. She becomes a prisoner in her own estate. To find freedom she must marry again. This is why she trys to attach herself to Sachish. Damini is in a similar position to the woman that Sachish was going to marry at the beginning of the film. She, too, didn’t have any options for life without a man.

Four Chapters is a good film that blends the search for spiritual faith with that of social criticism. It is interested in the subtleties of hypocrisy rather than out and out castigation. That stance makes it a subtle and, at times, slow. Nevertheless, it is worth seeing.

Inland – A Review

~ bythefirelight

The mistake I made in selecting this film was not paying attention to the last line of the review which said the film ” compared to Antonioni.” Oh, the tedium for this loose (which is kind) and boring film. When you read the description below you might think it has potential but only when you get one hour into it do you even know why Malek is in the country side. But what was worse were all the long scenes of almost nothing, just the country side going by. Perhaps there was 20 minutes of dialog in over 130 minutes. Definitely not worth seeing. The only saving grace was the five minute Raï party, which gave you some idea how a traditional party might go. Otherwise not worth the time. If only someone had written a better movie to go along with the synopsis.

Malek is a reclusive topographer who accepts a commission to survey a remote part of western Algeria in order to extend the electrical grid. He arrives to find the area has been decimated by religious fundamentalists who have only recently cleared out. Malek meets the local police, the shepherds who are beginning to return, and villagers who invite him to a makeshift party. In the middle of the night, he is awakened by the sound of explosions. Not to worry, explains a local man. When the cicadas land in the sand, it’s enough to trigger off the buried booby-traps. But as Malek soon realizes, it isn’t cicadas setting off the mines, but refugees trying to reach the coast and a boat for Spain. The next day he finds a young woman, exhausted and terrified, hiding in a corner of his shack. Malek decides to drive her to the border, and together they set out toward some indeterminate vanishing point on the horizon. These present-day realities are interspersed with flashbacks to the idealistic political debates of his youth, and set against a soundtrack that mixes alternative rock, Nigerian Afrobeat, and Algerian Rai. With his minimalist approach to plot and dialogue, and mesmerizing cinematography, director Tariq Teguia has been compared to Antonioni. (from the SIFF site)

The Admiral – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Picking a movie because it was the most expensive Russian film ever made may not be the best way to go. While the Admiral is full of epic battles, the mixing of the love story which seemed wooden and more foreordained than an element of discovery made the movie an epic cliché.

The Admiral is about Admiral Alexander Kolchak who was a Russian Admiral during World War I and after the revolution the supreme leader of the White army. Kolchak is a brave man and an expert naval officer whose prowess leads him to command the Baltic Fleet in the last days of World War I. He is a tough religious man who doesn’t hesitate to put himself in harm’s way. He is also a ladies man and the movie also follows his love affair with the wife of one of his junior officers. The mercurial romance is interspersed throughout the battle scenes and in time they can’t live without each other and she follows him to his eventual execution in 1920.

While the combat scenes were put together well and the opening naval battle is impressive, the film is more concerned with the epic than the characters. It seemed as if the film makers had a series of known historical moments they needed to show but didn’t understand how to create characters to make those moments flow together. History didn’t move the characters against a back drop of action; instead, history moved action against a backdrop of characters. If there were less battles and more scenes between the characters, the story might have held together better. Considering how much time the film makers spent following a Cossack army that was going to save the Admiral, it is obvious that the epic was more important. It is even more obvious when they had his lover read letters out loud while showing combat scenes, making a perverse and clichéd mix of love and war.

Looking at the film as a product of Russia and not just an epic, it becomes obvious that there is a certain amount of hagiography at work in the film. Kolchak is a fervent nationalist and a man who believes in a strong hand on government. When offered the command of navy from Kerensky he says only if he can have strict discipline. In combat he fearlessly leads his men putting himself where he could be killed and leading them in prayer before each battle. He is the perfect mix of the ideal non Soviet Russian: brave, religious, and strict. What is even more interesting is what is missing from the movie: his insistence on exterminating rebellious groups; his execution of 25,000 Russians who rebelled against him; his inability to keep his allies, the Checs and the Poles on his side. Instead of a complicated picture of yet another Russian dictator, the film makers have created a hero of the lost cause. In Putin’s Russia, perhaps this is the model of the new Russian hero.

While the Admiral is steeped in clichés, it is certainly put together well and is an interesting look into what Russia thinks of its past.

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Jorge Volpi Wins the Debate-Casa de América Prize

~ bythefirelight

El País reports that Jorge Volpi won the Debate-Casa de América prize for his work El insomnio de Bolívar. From the description it sounds very interesting, a little like News From the Empire. All I need to do now is find a copy.

The history of Latin America from its mythic past to an imagined future is what El insomnio de Bolívar touches. With this work the Mexican writer Jorge Volpi won the Debate-Casa de América prize yesterday. This book, acording to the jury, is “well documented, avoids an academic tone and contributes with humor, irony and great literary skill, to the understanding of the American continent.” The winning work was selected by the jury from among 42 works.

The writer was in the US when he received the news of the award. “I imagine an American future with enormous problems and challenges and with the dream that all of America, including the English speaking, will form something like the European Union.” Volpi has written an essay divided into four parts about the identity, democracy, narrative, and the future of Latin America. “The las part I have added some bits of fiction,” said the writer.

La historia de América Latina desde su pasado mítico hasta un futuro imaginado es lo que aborda El insomnio de Bolívar. Con esta obra, el escritor mexicano Jorge Volpi (México, 1968) se hizo ayer con el Premio Debate-Casa de América. Este libro, según el jurado, está “ampliamente documentado, escapa al tono académico y contribuye, con humor, ironía y gran oficio literario, a la comprensión del continente americano”. La obra ganadora fue seleccionada por el jurado entre un total de 42 trabajos presentados.

El escritor se encontraba en EE UU cuando recibió la noticia del premio. “Imagino un futuro de América con enormes problemas y desafíos y con el sueño de que toda América, incluida la anglosajona, formase algo parecido a la Unión Europea”. Volpi ha escrito un ensayo divido en cuatro partes en el que se acerca a la identidad, la democracia, la narrativa y el futuro de América Latina. “A la última parte le he podido añadir algunos tintes de ficción”, señaló el escritor.

A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature – A Review

~ bythefirelight

A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature truly is a brief introduction, but for anyone who is unacquainted with modern Arabic Literature, this book is a good introduction. The book covers literature from the 20th century and primarily from the eastern part of the Arabic speaking world. The book focuses heavily on Egypt followed by Lebanon and Palestine, while other countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Syria rate an occasional mention.

The book traces the development of modern Arabic literature from the early 20th century, finding its first exemplar in Taha Hussein in Egypt. What makes the literature modern is its break from Arabic poetry, which was the primary form of literature, towards prose based, in part, on western models. The early works, especially in Egypt, were concerned with defining what the new Arab states would be like and what is the role of tradition and western influence. Usually these works were written in a realistic manner. Illustrating that point, the book focuses on the works of Mahfouz and shows how his earlier works fit that model.

Latter as disappointment and dissolution came to the Arab world, it too was reflected in the literature. Authors like Al-ghitani began to use more post modern (although in his case he goes to much earlier times for source material) approaches to describe the problems besetting the countries of the authors, such as the the power of the west, the despotism of Arab regimes, and an uncertainty about the future.

Each author he covers, with the exception of Mahfouz, receives about a page or two of coverage. A Brief Introduction sticks to works, primarily novels and short fiction, available in English and originally written in Arabic. This approach leaves out authors such as Assia Djebar, who writes in French, and doesn’t examine the breath of a writers work which would be useful to non Arabic speakers. However, in reading the book a reader will find a great list of books to read, if the reader can find them.

While A Brief Introduction is a useful introduction its brevity makes for some choppy sections and the inclusion of poetry, a subject in itself, seems forced and might have been left for a different book. That said, his descriptions of the books he does write about make for a good guide and should arouse one’s curiosity.

Animated Enemies with James Forsher

~ bythefirelight

This could have been better if the technical problems that kept the films from playing hadn’t happened. Instead, only 4 or so American propaganda cartoons were shown, most of which I could have seen on the Internet. Forsher knows his stuff and has some interesting things to say, but it wasn’t really worth the price and I would have liked more cartoons. We did get the chance to see two Private SNAFU cartoons that used racist imagery, and one Warner Brothers called Tokyo Jokio which is full of terrible caricatures. He also show the first animated short ever filmed and the ending that is seldom seen which features Jewish and African American caricatures. I think I would have preferred more from WWII and a little less talking, but so goes the SIFF.

The Maid – A Review

~ bythefirelight

The Maid is one of those claustrophobic movies that seldom roams into varied locations and keeps to one character almost all the time, yet feels open and finds in the littlest of actions an expansive interior world. The interior world for the viewer, though, is a mystery, because it is unverbalized. The Maid is a visual movie, almost seeming like a narratorless documentary. It is in the subtle scenes and excellent acting of the actor who plays Raquel that makes the anything but dry.

As the movie opens that employs Raquel is trying to celebrate her 40th birthday.  She is unwilling to celebrate it with them, though. Is she shy, or afraid? It is not clear. What is obvious is she is a quiet, pensive character. She goes about her work quickly and efficiently, but also disturbs the older daughter while sleeping in a fit of vindictiveness. She protests to the mother of the family about bringing in another maid to helper, saying she has always taken care of the family for 20 years. When a maid is brought in anyway, she locks her out of the house. When another maid is brought in she locks her out of the house too. Through all this strange behavior, though, the family keeps her. Finally, though, what ever was bothering her leads to her collapse and she ends up in the hospital driven in a panic by the family as if she was their own child. While she is in the hospital the family brings in a new maid, Lucy. Lucy is unlike the other maids and when Raquel returns to work and tries to lock her out of the house instead of trying to get back in the house, begins to nude sunbathe. It breaks the ice between them and they soon become friends and Raquel goes with her to her family’s farm for Christmas, something it is implied she hadn’t done since she’d lived with the family. When Lucy leaves, Raquel is disappointed, but instead of retreating into her old shell, takes up one of Lucy’s hobbies, jogging. As the movie ends Raquel is running down a street in listening to music and dressed just like Lucy when she went jogging.

Raquel is a mystery. What is bothering her and why is she taking it out on the family? What is apparent is her need for a wider experience, not so much in adventures in the world, but among friends. She has lived with a very paternal family that appreciates her, but does constrain her. She has lived with them for 20 years and has known almost nothing else. She is cut off from her family for a reason that  is never explained but obviously bothers her. She is part child that has never grown moving into the family at 20 and a perfectionist who can no longer stand the exactitude. When she goes to Lucy’s she goes to bed with Lucy’s uncle but is unable to consummate the night probably because it is outside her experience. Moreover, the family she lives with is very religious with crucifixes in every room and prayers every night. Between her youth, her inexperience and the family she lives with, she is struggling to grow up. When Lucy comes, she presents a new avenue, not just another maid just like her. The final scene of the film is of Raquel taking on not only the persona of Lucy, but a new persona that is free of the house and her past.

The even handedness of the film as it finds Raquel and Raquel finds herself is what makes the film so good. It is a search without the conventions of search; a movie of self discovery without the clichés of self discovery. It is a movie where the questions you are left with will begin the search and extend the film beyond the theater—the mark of a good film.

Apron Strings – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Apron Strings is a family and identity drama from New Zealand that tells the story of two families, one of British origin and the other Indian. Mixing food and the questions of identity, Apron Strings is a nice, if some what light, film that explores broader topics of identity through the familiar.

The British family has worked in the same neighborhood for years and watched it change and become more multi-ethnic. The proprietor of the shop, a woman of 62 years, is frustrated by the changes, particularly the garlic that comes from the shop next door. The proprietor’s son is a gambling addict who is in hock to the owner of a Vietnamese bakery who wants to buy his mother’s shop. At the same time, her daughter has just become a single mother, giving birth to a black baby, which does not please her. Eventually, the mother realizes that her son has to be kicked out of the house because he is only taking advantage of her. Despite the problems with her son she is able to reconcile with her daughter.

The Indian family is composed of two sisters, one who has a curry shop and is part of the Sikh community, but still single at 40, and the other who is a famous TV chef who has not seen her sister in 20 years. The son of the TV chef takes a job in the curry shop without telling his aunt who he is. The son begins to learn about his past and begins to turn against his mother some. When his aunt, though, finds out he is gay, she shuns him. His mother comes to see her sister and they reconcile and she convinces her sister to accept her son.

The strength of the movie is its even handedness. There are no monsters, just the little slights that life has: TV producers that want to make the chef into the sterotype of an Indian goddess; the familly that shuns the gay son; the mother unable at first to accept a mixed race grandson. In this sense the film veres away from long arguments and fights about identity and chooses a quieter, more meditative path. There are a few moments of violence and shouting, but in all the film tries to show identity affects the family. Every family member brings a different identity and each family member must deal with those as best they can.

In Apron Strings, though, the strength becomes a bit of a weakness in that all the problems within the families are resolved at the end of the movie. The resolution lightens the questions it did have, because in resolving an issue in a film, the audience is left with nothing to take away: resolution leads to niceness. Nothing ever resolves that easily.

Apron Strings spends quite a bit of time contrasting of food cultures: the curry shop, the macrobiotic diet of the daughter, the proprietor’s great cakes and bland British style cooking. I wish this had been a little bit more in the forefront. It might have made the movie just a bit more memorable.

Apron Strings is a good film with a nice story and worth watching if it ever comes your way.

Star Trek – A Review

~ bythefirelight

You have a few options when thinking about a movie like Star Trek. You can either lambaste it for the silliness of the action genre, or try to think about it on its own terms, within its own genre. Certainly the former can only lead to disappointment, because this is a pure action movie filled with explosions and malevolent characters that create a black and white element. As an action movie, Star Trek is typical: characters without depth, or are action standards such as the troubled hot head. Granted Star Trek relies on a back story with forty years of history that fills in the gaps, but take that away and the movie is easily summed up: bad guys come to town, brave hot head saves everyone.

Thinking about the movie in its own terms as sci-fi or part of the Star Trek family the movie does improve, but not really that much. Sure, a fan of Star Trek has to see it to know what is being done with the story, but it doesn’t have much more to offer. What made it weak wasn’t so much the rewriting of the Star Trek time line, but the silliness of it. How can a bunch of cadets become captains, etc. so quickly? For good or bad, Star Trek had the logic of a different world where there were rules that lead one to where they are. In this movie, to get Kirk to be the captain, the film makers had to jump him from cadet to captain in five minutes. It seems like a quibble, but it was the kind of shortcut that is typical of an action movie: a nobody saves the day.

I will skip tiresome introductions and pet phrases of the supporting cast, something that seemed to be required, but was usually tedious and seemed to be more about pleasing the old Trek fans, than creating a more plausible story. I suppose Wrath of Khan was probably the best of the films, most likely because they were able to balance the characters so much better. Besides possibly the Borg Queen, is there a memorable villain from another Star Trek movie?

The movie is two hours of time spent, nothing more, even if you are a fan of Star Trek.

New Los Noveles Is Available

~ bythefirelight

Edition number 34 of Los Noveles is now on-line. I haven’t had much time to read it, but it does look promising with a mix of fiction and essays.

Jetlag – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Jetlag by Etgar Keret is a short but fascinating collection of five short stories set to drawings by five different Israeli artists: Mira Friedman, Batia Kolton, Rutu Modan, Yirmi Pinkus, Itzik Rennert. Keret, one of Israel’s best writers, creates what might be better called fables. His stories are brief and always have an element of unrealty to them. The unreality, though, is designed to turn the reader back to the strangeness of reality.

The first story is about a magician who suddenly begins to have trouble pulling the rabbit out of the hat. One time he pulls a bloody rabbit’s head from the hat and in a another he pulls a dead baby. But the audience seems to love it and a child keeps the bloody head of the rabbit as a memento. Instead of magic revealing the wondrous, the unfathomable becomes the way the audiences accept death and the grotesque as entertainment. The magician gives up his trade, and finishes the story saying,

…I don’t do much of anything. I just lie in bed and think about the rabbit’s head and the baby’s body. As if they’re some clues to a riddle, as if somebody was trying to tell me something; that now it’s not really the best of times for rabbits or for babies. That it’s not the best of times for magicians.

In the story Jetlag the narrator finds himself on an airplane where a flight attendant is paying extra attention to him. At first it seems as if she wants him to join the clichéd mile high club with her. A ten year-old girl at his side tells him he should go have sex with her, then claims she is a 30 year-old dwarf smuggling heroin. Eventually, the narrator goes to the back of the plane to talk to the flight attendant. She doesn’t want to have sex with him, but instead, wants to give him a parachute because the plane has orders to crash. The flight attendant says they crash a plane every year or two so that passengers will take flight safety seriously. As the story ends he says, the rescue looked quite heart warming on TV. Again, Keret takes liberties with a reality that has become all too common—the disaster coverage on TV—and uses it as an opportunity to look at it as a fiction, switching genres to make it observable. What should be a horror, becomes just entertainment.

In each of the stories Keret is able to say something about modern society, its violence, its loneliness, its spectator culture, and question how it effects us. His stories are marvels of compression and an unreality that seems real.

Chef’s Special – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Big Night meets the Bird Cage might be the best way to describe this gay cooking comedy. It was funny in the way that slapstick and exaggerated characters can be: fun for a while, but not good for a repeat viewing. It was an at times funny movie filled with stereotypes that were played well: the flamboyant gay man, the ex-punk, the desperately lonely woman, the parents who are unable to understand the gay son and either make constant jokes or are constantly praying to God for his salvation. Mix all those together and you’re bound to get some laughs. At times, though, the movie seemed a little slow, in part because it is more than just comedy. The chef also has two children with whom he has a bad relationship. In particular, the relationship with the son is troubled and the film is much more serious. In these scenes the film slows down and could have been treated a little better in serious film. The real problems between the two are somewhat distracting and would be better served in a less comedic way where the topic is respected more.

The description from the SIFF guide describes the part of the film quite well: “Maxi is a master chef who wants a Michelin star so badly he can taste it. After years of toiling in his chic Madrid restaurant, he feels he’s on the brink of culinary superstardom—that is, until Maxi’s two estranged children show up on his doorstep. Not only are the children grieving over the recent death of their mother, they must now come to terms with their father’s openly gay lifestyle. To complicate matters further, Horacio, a sexy Argentine ex-soccer star, moves in next door, diverting the attentions of both Maxi and Alex, the restaurant’s unstable maître d’.” The soccer player, though, is in the closet becuase he is afraid of the homophobic sports world.

In all it is a light romantic/family/food comedy that has its moments.

The Anarchist’s Wife – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Every war once it begins to be committed to film has its own cliches. The Anarchist’s Wife from film makers Marie Noelle and Peter Sehr is full of those from the Spanish Civil War as it attempts to tell the sweeping love story of a young wife who stands valiantly by her husband’s side. Really it is always the risk with a war film because if it is not out and out propaganda, then it is easy to fall into the passion trap. The passion trap is where the passions of the war filter into construction of the story and infect the story with either heart wrenching shouting or overly emotive writing.

Unfortunately, The Anarchist’s Wife piles on the cliches and the shouting and the crying so that by the end of the movie you wonder did they leave anything out? Probably the most glaring cliche, or, to be kind, simplistic device, is the complicated political alliances of the family members. The wife’s brother is a Republican, her husband a Republican, and his brother and his wife a Fascist. To make it hear wrenching the sister-in-law is summarily executed by a Republican and the the young brother is executed by the Fascists. While all of this could have happened, it seems the film makers had to make sure they explained each side had its savage moments and that if someone dies on each side the emotion can be greater.

Eventually, the anarchist has to flee the fall of the government and goes into exile in France where he is put in a concentration camp.The wife waits for him and suffers the privations of the losers in the war. The wife is a fighter, but she comes off as a spoiled brat more annoying than anything else, wearing her old mink coat from when she was a rich anarchist, and unable to understand times had changed. Ultimately, though, she is allowed to go to France to reunite with her husband. At first it is happy, but then a mystery seems to swirl around him. Why is he so secretive? What is the relation with the French-German woman? Oh, they are plotting to bomb Franco from a small plane, that’s all. This is when the movie really lost its focus and really began to take on the cliches. Naturally they fail, but at least the wife and husband are together. Perhaps if the film had been about just this or without the assassination plot it would have been better.

Finally, the ending of the film was terrible. The last minute of the movie is closed by the narration of the daughter who says when Franco died Spain moved into democracy without out any problems, which isn’t true. Then she goes on to say everyone who knows a survivor must talk to them. A laudable goal, but a difficult one too. More importantly, though, it makes the film too self important. After sitting through the assassination plot that weakens what every power there was in the film, the ham handed command to talk to the survivors is just silly.

War films, easily to overloaded with passions and plot, are best left simple and shouldn’t try to encompass every last detail as The Anarchist’s Wife did.

Manga, Genre and Osamu Tezuka in Words Without Borders

~ bythefirelight

Yani Mentzas makes some interesting points about how one should view the work of Manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka, and how in general the graphic novel should be approached when trying to make it more serious.

Narrative comics can mature in two diverging ways: either by jettisoning the juvenile framework in favor of standards borrowed from realism, or by staying within the framework to analyze and foreground its themes, especially the controlling one, “that which exceeds man.” My personal preference is against the former path, which leads to comics that give an impression of wanting to be art, cinema, or literature rather than comics and that indeed seem only the more shame-faced the better they are. I believe the latter is the royal road of intelligent comics in that it sees the merits of cartooning’s openness to caricature, acceptance of absurdity, and unflagging curiosity about that which exceeds man.

I’m not sure I agree completely but he does have a point. However, I think there is a mistake in equating the medium, pictures and words, with the genre, superhero or fantastic stories. Having tried to read Charles Burns’ Black Hole, a richly drawn work, I couldn’t stand the fantasy element. On the other hand, Shortcomings a fine graphic novel is so chatty perhaps it would have been better as a play.

He does make an interesting point about the transition to or the search for more serious work. A market does need to develop for everything:

What’s more striking in fact is the comparable paucity of these elements in the early oeuvre of the master who’d eventually come to employ them so deftly. We could attribute this difference to the fact that aging tends to inculcate a greater interest in spirituality, but Tezuka’s mature phase began when he was in his forties, which is hardly old. The better answer has to do with intended readership; to simplify a little but not much, in his early period before 1970 Tezuka wrote for children, while he had grownups in mind after the seventies due to an immense demographic shift in manga buying.

Mario Benedetti Has Passed Away

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Uruguayan author Mario Benedetti has passed away at age 88. As El Pais said

Muere Mario Benedetti después de una larga vida de lucha contra la adversidad y en defensa de la alegría

Mario Benedetti died after a long life fighting against adversity and defending joy

Jose Sarmago has a short reflection in El Pais.

The work of Mario Benedetti, friend, brother, is surprising in all aspects, in the expansiveness of the varied genres he touched, in the density of his poetic expression as much for the extreme conceptual liberty that he uses. The language of Benedetti has deliberately ignored the supposed existence of poetic words and the others that are not. For Benedetti, language, above all, is poetic. Read from this perspective, the work of the great Uruguayan poet presents us not only as the sum of a vital experience, but over all, as the persistent search for and the reaching a feeling, that of a human being on the planet, in a country, in a city or in a village, or simply in his house or in a collective action. There are many reasons that bring us to read Benedetti. Perhaps the best is this: the poet has become the voice of his own village. Or better, a universal poet.

La obra de Mario Benedetti, amigo, hermano, es sorprendente en todos los aspectos, ya sea por la extensión en la variedad de géneros que toca, ya sea por la densidad de su expresión poética como por la extrema libertad conceptual que usa. El léxico de Benedetti ha ignorado deliberadamente la supuesta existencia de palabras “poéticas” y de otras que no lo son. Para Benedetti, la lengua, toda ella, es poética. Leída desde esta perspectiva, la obra del gran poeta uruguayo se nos presenta, no sólo como suma de una experiencia vital, sino, sobre todo, como la búsqueda persistente y lograda de un sentido, el del ser humano en el planeta, en el país, en la ciudad o en la aldea, en su casa simplemente o en la acción colectiva. Son muchas las razones que nos llevan a la lectura de Benedetti. Tal vez la principal sea ésa, precisamente: que el poeta se ha convertido en voz de su propio pueblo. O sea, en poeta universal.

If you read Spanish you can read about him at Clarin also.

News from the Empire – A Brief Review

~ bythefirelight

I just finished Fernando del Paso’s News from the Empire which I will be reviewing for The Quarterly Conversation in the fall. However, I do have some brief thoughts. It is a sprawling novel that is worth the read. It may help if you know something about Mexican history. A quick read of a few pages a Wikipedia would suffice. To call it a novel, though, might give the wrong idea. A better name might be fictive history. A times the book is purely novelistic, at other times it reads like a history book. Either way the breath of the novel is impressive and is an achievement.

When a Blogger Dies, What to Do with the Blog?

~ bythefirelight

When a blogger dies what should you do with the blog, and more importantly do you owe the readers of the blog something, such as a time or a place to grieve like you would with friends and family?

A friend, elswinger, and avid blogger died a month ago after a series of long illnesses. It was sudden and surprising, but not unexpected. Since he had no family many things fell to me, such as notifying friends he had passed, planing the memorial, and cleaning up his apartment. He had discussed all his last wishes with me over the years and had committed some to paper.

When he died, though, one of my first thoughts was what about the blog? He had told me he had readers and had made a few friends through his blog. Would they like to know? Moreover, in his blog he explained in graphic detail all the medical problems that had affected him over the years. It seemed that his readers or anyone who stumbled on the blog in the future might want to know what happened with his illnesses.

Ultimately, I felt there was a duty to let his readers know. Although they could be anywhere in the world, if they were interested enough to read they would like to know what had happened. It also seemed liked an unspoken last request, the coda to a hard life that would have a weight, though fleeting, more important than a headstone, which he was not going to have.

As soon as I published the death notice I received several queries from readers and from The Stranger, where he had been an avid commentator. From the outpouring of responses it was obvious that the readers did want some sort of closure. His blog was well written, but also had a narrative sense (as every life does) that would have left readers wondering what happened.

I don’t know who will be reading the blog five years from now, but it is obvious that a blog that is about an individual needs to be closed when a writer dies. In the same way that friends and family want a memorial, readers need a virtual memorial, or, at least, a way to close their reading.

For the survivors and heirs of a blogger, you do have an obligation to say something, even if it is Rest In Peace. And if your blog means that much to you, you should tell someone what you want to have happen in case of the unthinkable. Your readers will appreciate it.

New Urban British Fiction in the TLS

~ bythefirelight

The TLS has a good write up of some interesting first fiction from Britain. It sounds interesting, perhaps because the themes and settings resonate with an image on Britain I have from the 80s.

Coventry, the setting for Mez Packer’s witty, fast-paced thriller, Among Thieves, was settled by Jamaicans in great numbers in the 1950s and 60s thanks to the opportunities for work. Jamaican ska music, a speedy jazz-tinged shuffle-beat, took off in Coventry, as it did elsewhere in urban Britain, and before long its driving, dance-floor rhythms attracted groups of skinheads and scooter- riding Mods. (Sometimes, if suitably dressed in Crombies and sharp Trevira suits, Jamaicans were even allowed to join the skinhead gangs.) Ska was, triumphantly, a Commonwealth music, which brought together the poor whites and poor blacks of Britain. In the late 1970s it was revived in Coventry by local “2 Tone” bands, such as The Specials and The Selecter, who sought to emulate the Jamaican ska legends Derrick Morgan and Desmond Dekker.

Packer’s novel unfolds in the Midlands city in 1984, at the fag-end of the 2 Tone period when, as the author tells us, it was “cool to have black mates”. Jez, a ska-loving “Cov lad” and a wheeler-dealer, is sent to Spain with a Jamaican rude boy associate, Bas, to change a suitcaseful of fake dollars; the counterfeit money came from a disastrous drug deal made with IRA gangsters back in Coventry. As it charts ever more dodgy Spanish business, the novel recalls Robin Cook’s cult crime memoir The Crust on its Uppers (1962), about a similarly doomed attempt to smuggle counterfeit notes abroad. Packer, like Cook, crams her novel with comic characters such as the murderous Albanian Mehment Lucca, whose Balkan sense of justice leads him to commit an eye-for-an-eye revenge killing. The other bad hats include Pads and Andy, middle-class Coventry students who deal in drugs and credit card scams when not studying Politics and Sociology. The novel is spiked with Jamaican vernacular (“raasclot”, “bwoy”) and a rich criminal slang. Packer lovingly evokes Coventry in the 1980s, a city on the point of disintegration, it seems, its theatres and social clubs closed down – as conjured by the Specials in their hit single “Ghost Town”. Packer, who has a gift for quirky conversational description and social satire, is a promising new novelist.

Ghost Town by the Specials

Rolando Hinojosa-Smith In Seattle 5/12/09

~ bythefirelight

Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, the Chicano author of the Klail City Death Trip Series including Kali City y sus alrededores, will be in seattle on 5/12/09.  He will be speaking at the Physics-Astronomy building Auditorium on the University of  Washington Campus from 5:30-7:00PM.