It won’t be there for too much longer, but it you can understand Spanish there is a good episode of El Publico Lee at Canal Sur that features Christina Fernandez Cubas.
Author: bythefirelight
Gabriel García Márquez to Continue Writing
I don’t know if this is a real surprize, but El Pais is reporting that Garcia Marquez is going to continue to write.
Noting is certain, but the only certianity is that I don’t do anything else except write.
“No sólo no es cierto, sino que lo único cierto es que no hago otra cosa que escribir”
And coutering those who think he hasn’t published much lately:
My job is not to publish, but to write. I will know when the cakes I am cooking are ready to eat.
“Mi oficio no es publicar, sino escribir. Yo sabré cuándo estén a punto de boca los pasteles que estoy horneando”
Bolaño forever in El País
El País has yet another article marveling at the excitement about Roberto Bolaño in the English speaking world. The author is primarily interested in whether the excitement is misplaced.
I have read that the North American success of Bolaño is due to his premature death and in fact have constructed a cursed legend partly false of someone politically persecuted, on the literary margin, and a heroin addict. I have read the the success of Bolaño is due to the way in a certain mode Bolaño was a North American author whose literary models are North American and whose prose works better in English than in Spanish. I have read that the North American success of Bolaño is because he found a great North American editor that has known how to use all these things to make Bolaño a great success in North America. I have many answers more, but all of them has produced an embarrassing sensation that these have been engineered not only to reduce the merit of Bolaño’s success, which at the end of these stories is unimportant, but to diminish the merit of Bolaño’s works, if they have any. I confess that I don’t understand them.
He leído que el éxito norteamericano de Bolaño se debe a su muerte prematura y al hecho de que se haya construido en torno a él una leyenda maldita y en parte falsa de perseguido político, marginado literario y adicto a la heroína. He leído que el éxito norteamericano de Bolaño se debe a que en cierto modo Bolaño era un escritor norteamericano, cuyos modelos literarios son norteamericanos y cuya prosa funciona mejor en inglés que en castellano. He leído que el éxito norteamericano de Bolaño se debe a que ha encontrado un gran editor norteamericano que ha sabido usar todas esas cosas para convertir a Bolaño en un gran éxito norteamericano. He leído muchas respuestas más, pero todas ellas me producen la embarazosa sensación de que han sido ingeniadas no sólo para rebajar el mérito del éxito de Bolaño, lo que a fin de cuentas no tendría ninguna importancia, sino para rebajar el mérito de la obra de Bolaño, lo que sí la tiene. Confieso que no alcanzo a entenderlas.
In the end he says it is due to the art of Bolaño that he is a success.
The reality is that Bolaño experienced during his life an absolute success. I want to say that the ghostly question is a mistaken question and the question that at first look seems correct also es a mistaken question. Every true writer knows that success and failure (or what tends to be called success and failure) are illusions: the test is that they obtain it, the great writers, the good writers, the average writers, the bad writers, and the terrible writers; or in other words: every true writer knows that what truely is a success and a failure. Cyril Connolly wrote that “the true mission of a writer is create a master work.” There are few writers who get to create one; in my opinion, Bloaño was one of them: he experienced the incomparable intensity of writing not just one master work but more than one. No one that I have known knows better that Bolaño in order to be a writer there is no greater success than to be able in your wildest dreams compare yourself to him.
Porque la realidad es que Bolaño conoció en vida un éxito absoluto. Quiero decir que la pregunta fantasmal es una pregunta equivocada y la pregunta que a primera vista parece acertada también es una pregunta equivocada. Todo escritor de verdad sabe que el éxito y el fracaso (o eso que suele llamarse éxito y fracaso) son espejismos: la prueba es que lo obtienen escritores buenísimos, escritores buenos, escritores regulares, escritores malos y escritores malísimos; o dicho de otro modo: todo escritor de verdad sabe lo que son de verdad el éxito y el fracaso. Cyril Connolly escribió que “la verdadera misión de un escritor es crear una obra maestra”. Hay poquísimos escritores que consiguen crearla; en mi opinión, Bolaño fue uno de ellos: experimentó la intensidad incomparable de escribir no una obra maestra sino más de una. Nadie que yo haya conocido sabía mejor que Bolaño que para un escritor no hay ningún éxito que pueda ni remotamente compararse a ése.
Perhaps only an author would say this, but there is some truth for non writers too.
Flannery O’Connor Discussed on Leonard Lopate and NYRB
A new biography of Flannery O’Connor has led to a lengthy review of the book and an appraisal of her work by Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books, and an interview on the Leonard Lopate Show with the author of the book. Both are quite interesting for anyone who has enjoyed her works.
From Oates’ intro:
Short stories, for all the dazzling diversity of the genre, are of two general types: those that yield their meanings subtly, quietly, and are as nuanced and delicate and without melodrama as the unfolding of miniature blossoms in Japanese chrysanthemum tea, and those that explode in the reader’s face. Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) came of age in a time when subtlety and “atmosphere” in short stories were fashionable—as in the finely wrought, understated stories of such classic predecessors as Anton Chekhov, Henry James, and James Joyce, and such American contemporaries as Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Peter Taylor, and Jean Stafford.
But O’Connor’s plainspoken, blunt, comic-cartoonish, and flagrantly melodramatic short stories were anything but fashionable. The novelty of her “acidly comic tales with moral and religious messages”—as Brad Gooch puts it in his new life of O’Connor—lay in their frontal assault upon the reader’s sensibility: these were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inside characters’ minds, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means.
Javier Sáez de Ibarra Wins the First Internacional Prize for Short Stories
El País reports that Javier Sáez de Ibarra has won the first Premio Internacional de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero (International Prize for Short Stories Ribera del Duero). I don’t know what weight to put in awards, even ones that come with €50,000. However, the article and accompanying interview has some interesting items that makes me want to find an example or two of his writing.
The short story is a genre that is not well esteemed by editors, little ready by readers, and not well understood by critics: there still are those who criticize a story that doesn’t have a surprise. Inovations are not well received.
“El cuento es un género poco estimado por los editores, poco frecuentado por los lectores y mal comprendido por los críticos: todavía hay quien le reprocha a un relato que no tenga efecto sorpresa. Las innovaciones no son bien recibidas”.
He also said that the Internet is helping to save the shor story.
In a certain sense the short story has taken refuge in the Internet. There are many blogs that publish stories and those that criticize stories. An example? El síndrome de Chéjov, Vivir del cuento, Café y Garamond, La luz ténue or the critic Fernando Valls’s.
“En cierto sentido, el cuento se ha refugiado en Internet. Hay muchos blogs que publican cuentos y en los que se hace crítica de cuentos. ¿Algún ejemplo? El síndrome de Chéjov, Vivir del cuento, Café y Garamond, La luz ténue o el del crítico Fernando Valls”
I’m not sure if I believe that in the US we pay more attention to short story writers. He did list a few other autors of note: Hipólito G. Navarro who was on El publico lee and sounded interesing; from Peru Fernando Iwasaki; from Guatemala Eduardo Halfon; from Mexico Pedro Ángel Palou; and from Spain Luciano G. Egido y Juan Carlos Márquez.
20th Century Mexican Authors
There is a great site dedicated to 20th century Mexican Literature called simply enough 20th Century Mexican Literature. Maintained by a professor at Wake Forest University it has a gigantic biography of Mexican Authors. It also contains a blog with somewhat regular updates about Mexican culture. Definitely worth a look. (Primarily in Spanish)
The Watchmen – A Review
The Watchmen is, perhaps, the best comic book movie ever made. It is a large qualification and one that does the movie a disservice, but despite the reworking of the typical comic book themes and an ending that avoids the superhero defeats super villain formula, some elements still cannot escape the genre and make the film a little awkward at times.
Based on the 1986 graphic novel, The Watchmen tells the story of a group of super heroes that were anything but the clean cut exemplars of American culture that Superman represents. Instead, in an excellent title sequence you learn how some were killed in scandalous ways, one ended up in a mental hospital, and others resorted to drink. It is a foretelling of the scandals, immoral behavior and the self righteous crusading. One of the great strengths of the film is to see superheroes as something other than heroic. When The Comedian shoots and murders his pregnant lover in Vietnam because he doesn’t want to have anything to do with her, it is a moment that undoes the whole facade of the heroic and makes the comic fantasies that have come before seem silly. What is worse is the all powerful Dr. Manhattan doesn’t do anything. Superman with his perfect sense of right and wrong has been replaced by a hero who is too unconcerned with the problems of everyday people.
The movie, too, avoids the usual convention where the super villain fights the super hero in a battle that goes on for five to ten minutes and millions of dollars of special effects. For the all the complexity that the super heroes might exhibit, the film in the end comes down to the grand battle, which is really a let down because it seldom has anything to do with the characters the heroes have. The Watchmen, on the other hand, avoids the problem because the conclusion of the film is based in a moral ambiguity: can one kill millions to save billions. Sure there is a fight between the heroes but it comes to nothing and only proves they dislike each other. It is a relief to see the lack of a grand show down, because it makes the movie about decisions, not power. If everything is about one’s powers then it doesn’t matter how complex the character is (or how mopey they are, which seems to be the case usually), it is the luck of the one’s powers, which naturally always tilts towards the good, that defines the movie and the characters.
The Watchmen is an excellent representative of a narrative imagination that was common in the 80’s where the extremes of right leads one to see concentration camps coming any day now. In The Watchmen there is a sense that the government would be completely happy to start building the camps to deal with the restless people. Both the Comedian and Rorschach are quite the right leaning vigilantes who see nothing good in the scum of the world as it has descended in to a cesspool of criminality. It is the same fear that shows up in various American punk bands of the time such as the Dead Kennedys, Black Flag and the Suicidal Tendencies. In each there is a preoccupation with government power that turns fascistic.
The Watchmen, though, has its flaws. Its length is not necessarily one, although some may suggest 3 hours is excessive. The biggest problem is it can’t escape its comic book past. For all the cleverness in rewriting the genre it still uses conventions of the genre. So, at times the narration is weak, a cross between Raymond Chandler and a teenage kid when Rorschach is narrating, and boring when Dr. Manhattan is narrating. Moreover, Rorschach’s insights into human nature are quite tedious, as are some of the flashbacks that describe the various back stories. Silk Spectre II and Night Owl are a little light in the characterization department, and rewriting the way women are portrayed in comic books is certainly not the focus of The Watchmen, which is obvious from Silk Spectre’s costume. Having a lesbian character, Silhouette, only servers to underscore the male fantasy that is at work in the characterizations (granted, she is also the victim of a hate crime). Finally, Silk Spectre I could be quite a complex character, but loving one’s abuser is simplified so much that it suggests if you try to rape someone you may still have chance to have her fall in love with you. If one is going to embrace that theme, you really should dig deeper.
The best comic movie is probably a turn off to those who don’t care about the genre, either in film or the comic books themselves. Yet it is worth seeing if only to understand how far comics have and have not come over the years. Despite the seeming silliness of costumed heroes they are one of the great American inventions.
Vickie Christina Barcelona – A Review
Vickie Christina Barcelona should probably have been called Vickie Christina New York, since Barcelona has little to do with the film and New York, the alter ego of Woody Allen, is really where the movie should have been set. The film is filled with his usual preoccupations: failed relationships and the quixotic quest for happiness in a relationship. While Crimes and Misdemeanors and Deconstructing Harry weren’t necessarily funny, they were more they were more than just the light exotic fantasy that Vickie Christina Barcelona is.
Perhaps if the movie wasn’t so full of clichés it might have been a better movie. The first and most egregious was Penélope Cruz’s dark haired bundle of fire. The feisty, dark haired Spanish woman who is only interested in fighting but who can channel her passions to become the most intense lover, is an old cliché. Perhaps Allen had just seen Carmen when he wrote the movie? Then there is Bardem, the Spanish man, in other words, the Spanish lover who chases anything with a skirt, a cliché that only lets Allen explore his real interest, Vickie and Cristina. He is not interested in Spain, but a stereotype of Spain that lets him play with his real interests.
Unfortunately, the clichés are really the only Spanish elements in the film. Except for the occasional Spanish guitar music (which was often out of place: Catalan music in Oviedo, Spanish in Barcelona), the film might as well have been shot in New York. Yet had the film been shot in New York it would have had its own clichés that still would make the film one of his lesser efforts.
What makes the film weakest is Vickie and Christina are obscured by Bardem and Cruz and never really have a chance to be more than Americans on a lark. One has an affair the other a menage a trois, and both escape from their ordinary lives. The escapes, however, tell you little and though confusing for them, they are meant to be liberating as the women find themselves in the midst of new adventures. The escapes are contrasted against Judy, another American, who doesn’t love her husband. She is the antipathy of Christina—she wants adventure but is afraid to be free. Yet she is the more real character. The other two are on vacation and just as Bardem is something exotic, the freedom they have in Barcelona is the idealized freedom one feels in a city where one neither has to work nor to try to really belong.
In the hands of a lesser director the film would have been terrible, but Allen is able to make the film seem interesting despite the narration that instead of being cleaver, seems banal. Ultimately though, cliché and fantasy sinks the film.
Historic Raymond Chandler in the LA Times
The Daily Mirror, the LA Times blog about LA and LA Times history, has been running a great series on Raymond Chandler on the 50th anniversary of his death. There are some great bits they have found.
- A lost kinesocope of the Long Good-Bye with Dick Powell. I’d love to see that one.
- An interview with Chandler and James M Cain where the reporter says Chandler doesn’t drink. I doubt that one.
- An article on the stars who played Marlowe.
- Review of Farewell My Lovely in the Times.
- Review of the Big Sleep.
- A 1987 look at the geography in his stories. Only really good if you know LA, which I do.
El Santo & Lucha Libre
This is a little bit old, but it is still worth taking a look at. It comes from La Plaza.El Santo was a Lucha Libre legend and this collection of clips from his movies is quite interesting and funny too.
Guatemalan War Photo Exibition
La Plaza reports that an exhibition Jonathan Moller’s photos are on view at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures in Bloomington, Ind.
These are some great photos and are worth a look. Quite troubling, but a good reminder of the problems Guatemala has had. They also remind me of the time I was at Lake Atitlán and came into a town where there was black bows over many of the homes. They were for all the people who had been masacured by the army a week before.
Brief Daniel Sada Interview at El Universal
A brief interview with Daniel Sada appeared in El Universal. It doesn’t get into too much but there are a couple quick quotes worth noting.
In a novel “the characters are the most important, more than the language or the plot” […]
Sada took apart the argument of those who define him as a writer who mainly focuses on the language and that some have called baroque, and affirmed that en the best novels of all time, the characters were the most important.
En una novela “los personajes son lo más importante, más que el lenguaje y que la historia” […]
Sada desmontó los argumentos de quienes le definen como un escritor especialmente centrado en el lenguaje y al que algunos han llegado a calificar de barroco, al afirmar que, en las mejores novelas de todos los tiempos, lo más importante son los personajes.
Having started to read some of his writing (mainly a short story from Letras Libres), it is obvious that he is a great stylist, but he tends to keep his style short and compressed, focusing more on the details, rather than long clause heavy digressions.
He also wanted to note that he isn’t just a northern writer, which if you read Christopher Domínguez Michael’s review in Letras Libres, as I did, you may have that impression.
He also wanted remove what he defined as “the nickname of northern writer” that he always wanted to get rid of it because it guarantees that it limits him a lot and because, en his opinion, “there are many norths.”
También ha querido desvincularse de lo que definió como “el mote de escritor norteño” que siempre se quiso quitar porque asegura que le limita mucho y porque, en su opinión, “hay muchos nortes”.
Zoetrope Featuring the Latin American Issue
Zoetrope’s latest issue focuses on Latin American fiction. It sounds interesting, a kind of post boom manifesto, which if you don’t follow Latin American Literature, it sometimes seems if it is still 1969 and Gabo is just publishing 100 Years. Perhaps that is unfair, but short story collections often show this weakness. (hat tip to MOLESKINE LITERARIO)
The research for this edition of Zoetrope: All-Story began with an anthology called El futuro no es nuestro (The Future Is Not Ours), edited by Diego Trelles Paz and just published in Argentina by Eterna Cadencia. That collection includes twenty writers from more than a dozen countries but does not pretend to be anything more than a snapshot of a Latin American moment. It is not comprehensive—for a region this large and diverse, how could it be?—just as this edition of All-Story isn’t. Still, we have attempted to show some of the talent that exists among this new generation; and it’s no coincidence that the writers here are all under forty years old, therefore born after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Best of Mexican Photo Journalism
La Plaza has a good presentation of the best in Mexican Photo Journalism. There are some excellent photos and a good narrative essay that explains what you are seeing.
The Kindle 2 and Usability – Not There Yet
Jakob Nielsen at UseIt.com has devoted his last two newsletters to reviewing the usability of the Kindle. In the first he talked about the user experience and in the second how one should write for the Kindle. I have seen many articles that talk about the Kindle in terms of free speech issues and the publishing trade, but not too many that talk about how easy it is to use, which is really going to sell the thing.
Nielsen’s take is mixed.
Amazon’s new e-book reader offers print-level readability and shines for reading fiction, but it has awkward interaction design and poor support for non-linear content.
He generally likes it for reading fiction, but finds it clumbsy for non fiction or grahically heavy text.
Kindle works poorly for non-fiction books that have many illustrations or that require users to frequently refer back and forth between sections. Even if Kindle had a color screen, heavily illustrated books would still be better in print because moving around in Kindle is awkward. My own books fall into this category, so even though I’d like to sell more books, I can’t really recommend that you buy them for Kindle. My latest book is available in Kindle format, so you can download a free chapter and try for yourself (and then buy it in print 🙂
His biggest complaint is the way you move around the screen.
Interacting through the Kindle 5-way feels much like many mid-level smartphone user interfaces, though the 5-way is worse than a BlackBerry mini-trackball.
Furthermore, Kindle is slow. Every time you enter a command, it ponders the situation before acting. Even turning the page takes slightly longer than it should, and all other actions are definitely sluggish.
In short: Awkward pointing + slow reaction = a bad user experience that discourages people from exploring and attempting different tasks.
Ultimately it seems that personal privacy issues aside, the Kindle still needs some work and until the book metaphor is done away with, the e-books may be problematic.
The usability problem with non-linear content is crucial because it indicates a deeper issue: Kindle’s user experience is dominated by the book metaphor. The idea that you’d want to start on a section’s first page makes sense for a book because most are based on linear exposition. Unfortunately, this is untrue for many other content collections, including newspapers, magazines, and even some non-fiction books such as travel guides, encyclopedias, and cookbooks.
His articles are definately worth a look.
Seattle PI – R.I.P
Some Thoughts the Spanish Civil War and American Imagination
The TLS had a good review of an interesting book about western Journalists during the Spanish Civil War. It is a good reminder of just how popular the war was as an image of communism, socialism, and fascism. The image would carry that weight for many years into the cold war, long past the books that first spawned those images. Yet those images, too, took on a new life too after World War II, when the cold war began to intensify.
George Orwell, though not American, seemed to best exemplify this. His twin works about the communism, Homage to Catalonia and 1984, are emblematic of an argument that would last until the end of the Cold War. If on the one hand you have the totalitarian state as described in 1984 and Homage to Catalonia , how is it, then, possible to support anything the least bit socialist? Didn’t Orwell show in Homage to Catalonia just how naive he was to support the Soviet side? Although who lost China was a greater rallying cry during the early Cold War, Orwell’s depiction of the perfidy during the Civil War certainly helped crystallize the image of intractableness.The irony has always been that Orwell was still committed to socialism, and throughout Homage to Catalonia is the notion that socialism still has a role in Government.
Hemingway besides giving the reader a grand adventure in For Whom the Bell Tolls, also gives us apolitical novel. The Russian commissar who is so cold and calculating in the novel is a real person and like Orwell, Hemingway is wants everyone to know that the brave were betrayed by the communists. Unlike Orwell, though, he doesn’t really care about defending socialism, just the lost cause and the bravery of man at his finest—at least as Hemingway sees it.
The way a war can change in significance from confused fight between fascism and communism to fight against fascism to fight against communism in the space of ten years is a wonder. It demonstrates a wild swing in politics that I think is sometimes lost when thinking about the American books of that time.
Gomorrah – A Review
Gomorrah is not glamorous; it is the opposite of almost everything that one has come to expect from a gangster film. Gomorrah has one goal: point out that the mafia is anything but good, glamorous or culturally redeeming. And it does succeed quite well. Yet the opposite of glamor—poverty, the mundane, fear—are harder to make compelling and whereas the flashy crime life that is so common in films—Scar Face, Good Fellas, The Godfather—though ending in violence so often, have an allure that is hard to beat. What makes Gomorrah a good antidote to those films, is also what makes it less thrilling to watch. Simply said, problems aren’t as fun to watch as unrestrained luxury.
Gomorrah follows six characters whose lives are affected by the Naples mafia: a tailor who works for a mafia financed dress manufacturer; a man who delivers weekly money to the families of the mafia who have a family member in prison; a young boy who is just coming of age and wants to join the mafia; two boys who want to start their own mafia; a young man who has joined up with a Don who buys toxic waste and dumps it illegally. It is not obvious at first what is happening. The film is a series of interwoven stories and it cuts between each of the protagonists. For half the film the film is a series of snippets from the lives each and if you don’t know exactly what is happening, it is clear that the life they lead is not a good one. If the men are not dead or in jail they hang around the huge tenement on the outskirts of Naples that functions like a mafia housing complex. The tenement is not beautiful (although the architecture is so strange it worth it to see the movie just so you can see the building) and looks more like an Eastern Block apartment complex.
As the movie progresses the stories of the protagonists begin to take shape and if the confusion and seediness of the early part of the film served to undercut in glamor, the lives the protagonists actually live undercut any glamor one might find. It is obvious that those who join the mafia are destined to live at the edge of violence and the wealth they seek may exists for some, but it can disappear so quickly and isn’t that much anyways—€10,000 to kill someone, won’t last more than a week. Swirling through the film is an ever present war. It is not clear who is waring against who, and that, again, undercuts the glamor. All one knows is that someone could get killed at any time and the reasons are completely unknown. For the viewer there isn’t any one or group to bond to. Instead the arbitrariness makes the threat real and anxiety producing. The film is not about the audience bonding with characters, but pushing them away.
Some of the protagonists will survive, others will be killed; some will leave the mafia, some will become even more entrenched within it. Each, though, will find that they will loose something precious. Yet what they loose is in so many ways nothing worth having. One of the characters, Maria, when her husband joins the other side, refuses to leave the apartment the mafia has been paying for. She gets to keep it, but looses all her friends and lives in perpetual fear, and what does she have? An apartment in a decaying tenement that is surrounded by mafia lookouts where gunfire can start at a moments notice.
Gomorrah, as the end credits makes clear, wants to be everything a gangster film isn’t: cold, depressing, sad, fear inducing. It succeeds, yet that success comes at the price of a pleasing narrative, one that pulls you along in narrative bliss. Instead, it is more of a documentary full of uncertainties and the grim realities. While Gomorrah may be the best gangster film ever as our ticket taker said, it is not the most exhilarating one. That is the way it should be, but in a world where Tony Montana is someone to idolize, as the two boys do in the film, Gomorrah may only collect dust. I would hope, as the author seems to, that writing the book and making the movie helps deflate more of those mafia myths that continue to exist.
100% Arabica – A Review
If you want an insightful film that will explain the problems of Algerian immigrants in France, this is not the film. Yet it does have its moments and is a Raï fan’s attack on those problems, which gives it a certain weight. At the same time the film is a was a young persons film, one of those films that celebrates youth culture and asks why the adult world is so afraid of what the kids are doing these days.
The film follows a Raï band as they try to break out of their ghetto and make a living from their music. They are all former criminals and the temptation to steal is strong, especially since there are not too many opportunities in the ghetto. French discrimination of immigrants is quite well known and the film does not shy away from suggesting there isn’t much beyond the ghetto. While the band and the inhabits of the neighborhood try to live in peace, the local imam tries to get rich by imposing a fundamentalist form of Islam on the neighborhood. The imam is completely corrupt and is only interested in getting more people to support him. He works with the mayor, who is only interested in getting reelected and doesn’t care about what happens in the neighborhood, and takes his money to try and convince the neighborhood it should follow him.
The members of the band, fronted by Khaled, fight against all of these problems. They struggle to get money for a show, struggle against the imam who says music is forbidden, struggle with their parents who think they are bums. As in all musicals, though, the music is all powerful and everyone except the imam love the music. In the end, despite the machinations of the imam, the band celebrates with a triumphal show in the neighborhood and and the imam is driven from the neighborhood in a pork delivery truck. Music defeats intolerance.
The film is supposed to be a comedy and in a way it is, but it is seldom funny. Instead it comes off as a problem film with music. It is much better than Blackboard Jungle which is another problem film with young people’s music, because the musicians made the film. It shows the real preoccupations and problems the Algerian youth in France have. Every element, lack of jobs, corrupt officials, fundamentalist Imams, all have their bases in reality, and in this sense the movie is interesting. However, the narrative thread is week and so many characters come and go throughout the film that no character can develop very much. Everything in the film is for the insiders who can fill in the gaps, who know what it is like to live there. If you are an insider it makes for a pleasing film, if not, it makes for a film that is uneven.
The music, however, makes the film worth watching. There are several good performances by Khaled and Cheb Mami of some of their well known songs. The versions are not the album versions. Khaled has several good scenes where they show him working out a song and he is working with just one keyboard player and no mic. The performance is very intimate and well worth a watch.
In all, 100% Arabica is not one of the best movies but it if you have even a passing interest in Raï it is worth it.
Interviews With Juan Rulfo
Youtube can be a wonder sometimes. I found all these interviews with Juan Rulfo. His way of speaking is different, but reflects his writing to some degree.
By The Firelight 