Pandemonium

Time seems to last longer these days. Hours seem to plot to slow down their seconds, and everything seems to move in slow motion, as in an aquarium. Maybe I am already feeling impatient because my cast will come off on July 24, two weeks before they said.

Still, things happen, as the landing of the iPhone in Spain, that became known as the iBrick since the iTunes servers to activate them are down. :)

I also saw a very interesting, very sad documentary. It’s called “The Bridge” and it’s a daily recording of the Golden Gate, place favored by people who desire to commit suicide, that we see jumping off the bridge.

I ascertain the huge pain suffered by those who stay behind. Also, I seem to perceive remorse for the action taken, once it’s too late. It’s tragic and totally sad.

Just a quick note: I am starting to notice an improvement in my bad leg, the one affected by the B12 deficiency…

P.

They say flying has always been one of Man’s dreams. I believe this dream has become smaller with all the technological advances in the 20th century. Nowadays we fly in groups or alone, crossing oceans and continents with surprising ability and speed.

The truth is that we often raise our eyes to the sky following the flight of birds (by the way, a vulture appeared yesterday near Real Madrid’s stadium).

Flying is becoming more of a common place for me. But what truly moves me is the possibility of space, that I’ll never see fulfilled. I often watch Star Trek and I believe what I see for a few seconds.

Same thing happens with Galaxy Quest, a movie that makes me laugh quite a bit and hold my breath in awe when they open doors to send the interstellar pod.

This is just nostalgia for unadulterated spaces.

P.

All writers come to a point when doubts arise about how good they are. For the longest time, only their eyes will judge what they write. Sometimes the writer is amazed by something s/he wrote at any given time. Nevertheless, most writings are forgotten, without readers to appraise them, or end up in the bottom of a wastepaper basket. Writers’ baskets are filled with the waste of their work, with words that didn’t get to articulate quite what their minds perceived so clearly.

The writer is always playing in his/her mind with images s/he could express. That moment is critical: either paper and pen (or PC or typewriter), or oblivion. The terrible thing about forgotten images is the fact that writers never retrieve them back and will forever chase ghosts.

In part that’s the reason for the title of this entry. Not because it is just work, but it also becomes a task. Add in that writers always feel the desire/need to write, and disaster is served.

When you spend years agonizing about a novel and finding excuses not to sit down to write it while you obsessively explore it to the last detail, you need a trigger to start writing. I haven’t found mine yet.

Two writers find their motivation in this movie: a young writer in the making, with some ideas and not too much life experience, and an older writer, who has already earned his readers’ recognition, embittered, who hasn’t written for the past 20 years and is afraid of doing so, but whose mind is still overwhelmed by images he might express at any time.

If you throw in the histrionics of Italians and the sun in the Tuscany, with its life in slow motion and its faded, charming houses, it will be a sure success.

It’s billed as a romantic comedy because “boy meets girl”, of course, but the older writer’s advice is quite good, actually: using a manual typewriter instead of a PC since the writing process is much slower and you have some time to think what you are writing.

Anyway, an enjoyable movie.

P.

PS: Whenever I start a short story, I always handwrite in a specific notebook I have for this purpose. After a while, my fingers require my keyboard because ideas start flowing faster. If I stop writing at this point, the short story will remain unfinished.

It is not a secret I like comics.

Seeing “Sin City”, a harsh comic of a degraded world, where white blood became overwhelming, was a small revelation because I was not used to comics that were so realistic and violent. The comics I had grown up with were geared to space/future, the medieval age or superheroes.

I saw “300″ at last, the movie based on Frank Miller’s comic on the 300 Spartans that fought the Persian army in the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.

Without rushing into polemics as to whether it was just 300 Spartans or Xerxes’s looks (present-day Iranians have already complained about it), I must say the movie is true to the comic, and as such it deserves my praise.

This time I read the comic before I saw the movie. The comic is a color comic this time, very stylized. The images on the screen recreate the vignettes in the comic, with their flowing narrative and voice off-screen (”We march, we march, to death we march”), incorporating the excessive resources to present characters from the comic (Xerxes looks like a 15-feet giant, but his hands look huge too)…

Some memorable quotes:

Spartan, come back with your shield or on it (uttered by the Spartan queen to her husband Leonidas, king of Sparta)

Then we will fight in the shade (in response to the threat that Persian arrows will darken the sun)

It’s an aesthetic exercise thanks to special effects. If you like comics, you are in for a treat.

P.

I love catastrophic movies. The more ridiculous, the more I like them. The more special the FX, the more entranced I sit before the TV set while I watch the death of humankind. I like catastrophic movies because I know all the dead will rise at the end and demand the monies they are owed.

One of my favorite movies is “Armageddon”, because it’s likely to be the worst I remember. I also love “Deep Impact” with that impossible tsunami.

Well, it seems real life mimics art and we will “witness” a catastrophe that looks like a cross between those two movies.

There is an asteroid called Apophis heading toward Earth. Around 2029 it will come so close that it will get trapped in our orbit. Seven years later, it will hurtle into the ocean, where it will open a gash of several kilometers, causing the largest tsunami imaginable (the asteroid has an 800 ft diameter).

So here comes Pedro Duque, Spanish astronaut who retired recently. He has founded a company to deal with these petty details and to launch satellites. The initial plan takes two spaceships: one will blast into Apophis (either breaking it or offsetting its trajectory) and the other spaceship will track the asteroid’s progress…

Don’t get me wrong, but I’d feel far more confident if we had Bruce Willis on board. :)

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While the Oscars Gala is taking place, it would almost constitute a crime not to talk about movies. But instead of writing about major productions, I am going to write about two documentaries that have really caught my eye.

“An Inconvenient Truth”, by Al Gore. All generations need a boogeyman to threaten the annihilation of the human race. In the case of our parents, their particular boogeyman was the Soviet Union, the cold war, and long-range missiles. Who hasn’t seen apocalyptic movies where someone presses the button… when the rightful place for that finger was his owner’s nose.

But in fact our boogeyman is the fearsome climatic change. In other words, Earth tries to get rid of us and “invents” creative ways to do so: filoviruses, avian flu, the poles melting (20 ft increase of sea levels), famines, droughts… In case we were not enough for self-destruction, we have created the fearsome boogeyman of climatic change.

Please, don’t get me wrong: It’s a terrible problem. The documentary is quite interesting, very entertaining (I almost failed to recognize Gore, being so “fun”), illustrative, educational. It’s good, even if we set boogeymen aside.

The second documentary has made me feel quite apprehensive: “Jesus Camp”. Intolerance is dangerous, no matter the ideology behind.

I recommend both, even though you will need an extra dose of patience for the second one so that you don’t start screaming at the screen.

P.

I admit it, yes. I like James Bond. I like his ludicrous movies where he averts a global catastrophe in the last second. I like Q’s inventions, those imaginative gadgets that put science to the service of global welfare. Because Bond is a charitable angel in the government of Her Gracious Majesty, that works for everybody else.

It is a finished character, no rough edges, a little bit flat, with a coating of sophistication that is just that, a superficial layer.

But I forgive him and I devour his movies the way they are, a little bit loud and prone to fantasizing; probably because of that, because I can mentally accept them (and discard them) in a flash.

There was even a time in the early 90’s, that I wished I was majoring in Cinema, so that I could write my PhD thesis on James Bond’s minimovies, those initial 5 minutes that have no connection whatsoever to the rest of the movie that constitute in themselves a completely finished piece.

When I read in the news that Craig would be playing Bond, that blue-eyed blond left me unmoved and I thought we would be spiraling into another à-la-Dalton period, i.e. those movies “I don’t mind missing because there is no incentive”. I was so wrong!

So it happens this bland blond makes you forget the color of his hair and his blue eyes and makes you understand why Bond is a cold and superficial playboy. In “Casino Royale”, Bond doesn’t exist yet. Don’t get me wrong, he does exist, but his character is not developed. What the movie portrays is that bondification process itself.

He has just received his license to kill (007) but he still has to overcome some personality hurdles. He is haughty but not too cunning (he kills a terrorist in the African embassy that has granted him asylum and, to top it all, he does so before a working surveillance camera), he seems to be a seducer when he is in fact a boy toy (he falls into the trap set by his female counterpart, who also works for the British government, who deceives him in the end, although she repents, poor thing, and then she dies to atone for her sins), he is smart but somewhat defiant (he sneaks into M’s home and almost says her real name on screen) and he decides to leave everything behind in the name of love.

This is not a James Bond movie, no way. This is the protoplasm that generates Ian Fleming’s universe. It’s quite believable and enjoyable.

P.

(IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE, STOP READING. THIS ENTRY IS A LITTLE BIT OF A SPOILER.)

I was dying to see “Apocalypto”. I had read both good and bad reviews, nobody was indifferent about this movie. And finally I have seen it.

It was shot entirely in Mayan, and I have read about it in the Internet Movie Database to make sure it was about the last days of the Mayan Empire.

The movie is wild, savage, full of color. I like it very much indeed, the plot is good. I have not even missed the sound of a recognizable language.

What leaves me totally out of place is the end of the movie. What the hell do those three caravels do near the beach if Columbus never set a foot in America (the Bahamas Islands, to be precise) until 1492? If this is the end of the Mayan Empire, by the time the Spaniards arrived in America, their Empire was long gone. At that time, the ones who held the power were the Aztecs. By the 16th century, Mayans were an advanced civilization, already very past their prime, and they were known as traders at that point.

These last three minutes spoil a superb movie.

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I just saw “The Black Dahlia” a few days ago. I was looking forward to seeing it; well, in fact I was dying to see it.

I don’t know what’s the matter with movies lately. The truth is that it takes me quite a few movies to see one I like (I loved “The Legend of 1900″, because it has a certain quality of magic realism I like a lot and the script was wonderful).

“The Black Dahlia” belongs to the so-called film noir and it recounts the story of a murder. The atmosphere, the set, the make-up, and the wardrobe are magnificent and have been taken care of to their last detail (there are some minor anachronisms, like a ball point, when in fact they did not exist in the 40’s).

The story is based on a real murder that went unsolved. The novel explores the murder and assigns culpabilities where there were none. Of course, the movie is based on the book.

When I think about the genre, I cannot fail to see the great ladies in the film noir, such as Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. And this 22-year-old kid (Scarlett Johansson) lacks presence and stature to play a gangster’s girlfriend and then a cop’s. What’s going on? Was she weaned on men?

She lacks presence and savoir faire, she lacks age, she does not even know how to hold a cigarette holder and smoke without batting an eyelid while smoke gets in her eyes.

I give the movie 1 point out of 5, just for the atmosphere it has. The rest of the movie is a waste of time. By the way, what do they do with the dead cop’s corpse? Does he get incinerated on the spot???

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I usually like subtitled movies. Long time ago, I discovered that Hollywood artists did not speak plain Castilian. Around that time I also discovered that banks were not gigantic warehouses filled with shoe boxes to keep clients’ money. I was quite naive, indeed. Of course, in my world cathedrals had the choir at the back of the nave and the main entrance was on one side. This is a disadvantage of growing up in Plasencia, which Gothic cathedral is unfinished (they started building it on the same site where the Romanesque cathedral stood, which was being demolished, so both of them are unfinished…). The first time I saw a finished cathedral, I was taken aback by the choir in the middle of the nave, putting another obstacle between men and God… Oh, well!

Yesterday I sank lower than I thought possible, because I saw Dustin Hoffman chattering in French (dubbed, of course)…

I can’t wait to see “Perfume: The Story of a Killer”, one of my favorite novels. I am a little afraid, though. The translation into English was not that good…

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According to the dictionary, a synonym is a “word which has approximately the same meaning as another”.

Let me introduce today a brand new synonym: new law of cinematography = piracy. Let me explain for those of you who are not aware of this. Here in Spain it is not enough to subsidize the “splendid” (to call it something) Spanish movies. It is not enough to pay some fortunate people’s visual follies from our own pockets. Now they intend to punish movie goers that choose Hollywood flicks. Yes, indeed, movie tickets will be more expensive depending on the nationality of the movie you want to see.

Man, I thought a good way to promote Spanish movies would be to cut ticket prices in half… There is a more radical approach, of course, that consists of making good movies…

I am totally puzzled when I see a Spanish movie I like. The last one was “El método”, based on a play, that it would probably be a success in the US. Since then, I have not seen any thing worth it (I must say I do not try too hard either).

Last night I saw a good movie, “Tiempo de valientes”, from Argentina. A comedy that was smart, funny and sometimes hilarious. Not even one naked woman (Spanish directors, jot it down, I am already fed up of seeing so much naked flesh).

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After a few strange days, in which I start thinking 1984 should be titled 2006, for that Big Brother that watches you, leaves nothing untied, and rewrites history, I’d like to talk about the movie in the title of this entry.

It is based on a play called Novecento by Alessandro Baricco (well-known for his novel Silk), and Giussepe Tornatore (also known for “Cinema Paradiso”) takes advantage of a limited but magnificent landscape to create a story that may be summed up in a melody. His landscape is the ocean, specifically a cruise liner from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th that transported massive amounts of immigrants from an impoverished Europe to the USA, a country of opportunity.

In one of those cruise liners, Novecento is born and abandoned by his mother. He will be raised in the boiler room and will be given that name because he is found in 1900 in a fruit crate on the piano.

He will learn to play the piano by himself and will become a superb pianist that livens up evenings for first-class passengers, although he also finds the time to delight the immigrants on board.

The story is told as a flashback by Novecento’s only friend, a trumpet player who will work in the liner for a few years and then will move on, although he will never forget his friend and will meet him again.

In my opinion, the most magical scene is the moment when the friendship between the trumpet player and Novecento is forged. After an uneventful start, the sea gets rough and the trumpet player is feeling miserable. He hears music in the middle of the night and decides to check its provenance. He finds Novecento in the first-class ball room, playing the piano. Novecento asks him to remove the piano stops and sit with him on the piano stool. With the rolling of the ship, the piano moves around the dance floor, as in a waltz, with our two characters on the stool, dancing with the liner.

What can a man do without identity nor papers? What Novecento does: remain aboard. His explanation is that on land there is a keyboard with countless keys and he couldn’t find his melodies in it, that that keyboard belongs to God.

A movie of magical moments and good stories, like the piano duel.

:-) I won’t spoil the end, I still know mercy…

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It looks like the formula for a new anti-dandruff shampoo, but in fact it’s the name of a concentration camp in Cambodia, from the time of the Khmer Rouge.

I saw a 2-hour documentary about the S21, spoken in Cambodian and subtitled in English. One of the most remarkable things is that guards and prisoners were interviewed together. In fact, one of the ex-prisoners was asking the reason for their cruelty. They were hiding behind their indoctrination and their own fear.

The prisoner, who was an artist, tried to reason with the guards, but there was no reason possible. You could only see how his reasoning hit the silent wall of the savagery exercised by those ex-guards.

It was a painful documentary. It hurt.

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When I was still into literature, I was taught that the great topics the Renaissance and the Baroque inherited from the Classical tradition were “Ubi sunt”, “Memento mori”, “Carpe diem”, “Beatus ille”, and “Tempus fugit”.

Being a lot simpler, I reached the conclusion that world literature stems from two driving forces, i.e. love and death, that the sacred duty of authors is to tell us a well-known tale in a different fashion. Obviously, in my view authors do not innovate in topics but in their treatment.

I admit it is a very medieval concept of originality, that once the Bible was written, all stories had been told, that the only thing authors can do is to take care of the wrappings and trappings of a story.

I recently saw “Tristan and Isolde”, and I didn’t like it that much, it was slow and the actor seemed like an Egyptian sculpture: not much going with his expression. On the other hand, I also saw “Keeping Mum” and it surprised me, it made me laugh and it amused me. It was just that, love and death beautifully wrapped in black humor.

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