TV Viewing Diary: all sorts

TOTP - There could have been no better litmus test of my cultural estrangement from the UK than the Christmas and New Year editions of Top of the Pops. It's an almost Einsteinian effect.... as if I am now resident on a plane of existence that is travelling at a different speed relative to Great Britain, such that popular culture there appears to belong to a quaintly different time and cultural space. How hard it is not to see most of the acts there performing as essentially parochial and silly. Could anyone anywhere else in the world watch Duffy or Elbow perform and not snigger (or snarl) at British pop's retro pretensions and pervasive slacker chic? How ludicrous, how pompous, is the cultivated scruffiness of Coldplay...

The Diary of Anne Frank - all previous documentaries and dramatisations have had me in sniffles pretty quickly, but this one I had to stop watching after just one episode. Ellie Kendrick was proving to be so annoying in the lead role that I had started to entertain dark thoughts along the lines that she might have had it coming to her...

Swarm, Nature's Incredible Invasions - is a dazzling new BBC series on swarming behaviours in nature, all so beautifully shot...even the firey pogrom carried out against Africa's multitude of crop-depleting weaver birds. The stars of the first episode were the Periodic Cicadas of Cincinnati which emerge for 3 weeks every 17 years. In the second part we come across Rome's winter starling swarms, in which each bird can simultaneously monitor the location of seven others, thinking ten times faster than the average human, and the amazing shape-shifting shoals of fish which make use of their lateral line to detect small changes in pressure waves. The result is a kind of collective mind, which left me wondering what this all means for selfish gene theory? How do emerging group behaviours evolve? And Can the explanation for this be linked to Lovelock's Gaia theory?

David Tennant provides the commentary, droping the cheeky mockney personality he adopted as the Doctor. I rather think that Timelords would say vortices and not "vortexes" though.

Nip/Tuck — the show which looks at itself in the mirror of televisual postmodernity and asks "Am I gay?"Judging by what I've seen of the latest set of episodes it's becoming increasingly hard for it to answer in the negative. The careful mix of depth and superficiality is fascinating, as is the way it dips opportunistically into other genres. Christian Troy is the pivotal character here, an instinctive bastard with a troubled past who is occasionally forced to explore his inner softy. V got me into this and we'll soon have seen every episode there is to see, so I guess we're going to have to switch our attention soon to something similar like M.D. House.

Heroes Season 3 — This is becoming ever more like a web than a series. I'm getting the feeling it doesn't really matter any more what order you watch the episodes in. With each new season the main villain has been supplanted by a new, supposedly even badder one. Meanwhile in the crowd around him, the secondary heroes and villains swap roles bewilderingly. The result is a brain-ache even worse than Lost.

Yet although I can't claim to recall all the narrative redirections and misdirections within Lost, understand everything I can remember, I don't feel the need to resort to a boxed set just to re-orientate myself every time a new episode is broadcast. With Heroes the temporal

— and ethical — contexts are constantly being scrambled, and the worst part of it is that one has the suspicion that much of this is down to the writers advancing up a creative cul-de-sac and then having to ignominiously retreat out of it.

Dexter Season 3 — Had such a slow start that I was beginning to think that the show's writers had run out of new ideas for taking this character forward without re-treading old ground. But in the end this turned out to be the best Dexter yet. The way multiple sub-plots were developed and interlaced was especially masterful: each advancing at a different pace, some every episode, others every two or three episodes. One was left open from the first episode to the very last. The way that Dexter's intriguing relationship with Miguel Prado was wrapped up at haste over the course of the last three episodes was a source of disappointment however.

Antiques Rogueshow — a great little hour-long drama from the Beeb about the Greenhalg family in Bolton who hoodwinked the experts into giving them hundreds of thousands of pounds for forged artworks. These were produced in the garage by middle-aged misfit Shaun, portrayed sympathetically by Jeremy Swift. He's presented to us as a kind of naive genius living entirely under the thumb of his avaricious octogenarian parents.

The main conceits of the show were 1) that these crooks were in a sense working class heroes and their crimes victimless 2) that Shaun's 4-year prison term was an unfortunate fate but not as bad as what happened to proper recognised artists like Van Gogh, Delacroix, Toulouse-Lautrec, Beardsley etc and 3) that what really matters in the Art World is provenance and that this is what determines a given expert's willingness to pay rather than innate measures of quality. Shaun's father (played with a wicked glint by Peter Vaughan) is the family's resident bullshitter, informing the police at his arrest of his membership of a sect which prohibits all forms of mendacity.

iGod

This little device, widely advertised on Latin TV channels, makes it easier to fit a 26 minute rosario into your busy schedule. (Though it has to be said most of the consumers testifying to its usefulness in the ads don't exactlly look as if they have particularly busy schedules.)

It includes 7 pre-recorded prayer settings for each day of the week and an integrated portrait of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

"For those who want the pleasure of prayer accompanied by an angelical choir."

"...only one on/off button."

The total cost is $104...a snip at just twice the price of the 1GB iPod Shuffle (240 songs).

Digital Marketing explained...

Etymologist's Atlas

This is one of a series of maps published in Der Spiegel showing 'natural' place names.

Personally I'd have translated Honduras as 'Depths' and El Salvador as 'The Saviour'.

As for 'Guatemala', there are some doubts as to its origin. You can choose between two indigenous words Quauhtemellan ('land of the eagle') and Uhatzmalha (`mountain where water gushes').

Yucatán or "I don't understand you" is apparently what the Maya said to the Spaniards who asked them "what land is this?". (You can see why they thought this was real information, as in Spain the generic term is more usually "Eeeeh?")

Excommunicaaaate!

You could write a long and fascinating thesis about the relationship between violence and the Catholic Church in Latin America, especially gang/drug-related violence. Over the years I've mentioned in this blog the unique cult of the Virgin maintained by Colombia's sicarios (hired killers) and we saw in The Crime of Padre Amaro a fictionalised account of how members of the priesthood in Mexico have become clients of the narcos.

Another thesis idea would be how out of touch the Popes of the last century have been...

Hecho Sushi

The lesson here would seem to be don't bring a stun gun to a knife fight.

Funny, I recall you don't have to add a gratuity in French restaurants...

Quote of the Day: Adorno Series (5)

"Everybody must have projects all the time. The maximum must be extracted from leisure ... The whole of life must look like a job, and by this resemblance conceal what is not yet directly devoted to pecuniary gain."
Theodor Adorno (1903-69)

Darwin and Religion - 2

Yesterday we learned that modern practitioners of revealed religion can hold onto their faith by maintaining a distinction between believing in and believing that.

In other words one needs to believe that most of the stuff many readers of the Bible before Darwin sincerely believed in, is not necessarily true — in the sense that people who habitually handle factual information understand the concept of Truth.

For Christians this means that they can permit themselves the luxury of believing that the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection etc. are all meaningful fables, without apparently sacrificing their belief in the overall spiritual message of the New Testament.

But why torment oneself with these intellectual gymnastics?

I can see how it would be possible to simultaneously believe in an uncreated creator and that the resulting creation was not entirely random and purposeless. From that point I would try to build up a metaphysical (and an ethical) system which assumes that it's best to hold my ins and thats together as much as possible.

The alternative - reverse engineering centuries old 'authority' so that it somehow corresponds to the ideal one has of the alphas and omegas of human existence is hardly laudable.

Che Part 1

Gripping, but we were glad we didn't have to sit through Part 2 straight away after a 15 minute interval like those audiences in Cannes last year.

During the Cuban campaign sequences one gets the impression of Che that an embedded journalist might have picked up. Slighty distant, devoid of any really private moments. (The score too is used sparingly.)

Instead of the full prose of Guevara's own words from the Reminiscences, we get close-up snippets of 60s interviews which he handled like an actor at a press junket.

It's as if Soderbergh wanted to avoid the kind of explicit hagiography that Walter Salles indulged in with The Motorcycle Diaries, and deliver a more factual, eye-witness portrait, and yet what we end up with is an even more idealised agent of revolutionary action.

And, perhaps even more strangely, Che himself is the least interesting thing on screen. The movie is a collection of understated but powerful landscape vignettes and engaging snippets of Cuban banter.

Again it's as if script-writer Peter Buchman was striving to avoid a melo-dramatised account of partisan leadership (of the kind we saw just recently in Defiance) and so chose to lay down a trail of witnessed incidents, leaving his audience to gather them in sequence and to thereby intuit the undisclosed dramatic structure beneath the chronological, journalistic thrust of the story.

It was a little disorientating at first, but ultimately enthralling. Even V, who doesn't care for either war films or westerns, was giving it her full attention.

What a pity that what Soderbergh now calls the Che 'trilogy" (including Walter Salles's first installment) lacks any coverage of Che's moment of transformation in Guatemala, which would have provided a bridge between the idealistic young doctor and the mature revolutionary we see here.

Roll on Part 2...eventually.

Grade: A-

[It's a shame the IMDB page on this movie has no entry for filming locations. The final battle scene in Santa Clara stoked my curiosity in this respect.]

New Year in La Antigua Guatemala

This is how we marked the arrival of 2009 in the Calle del Arco...

Slumdog on a roll...

Time to celebrate Slumdog and Danny Boyle's triumph at the Golden Globes last night...with a big mention to A.R. Rahman for his winning soundtrack:



[This guy also does an umm.. video critique of the movie.]

Darwin and Religion

I tuned into an interesting discussion on Radio 3 the other day in which representatives of the three Abrahamic traditions explained how they had managed to achieve an accommodation with Darwin and natural selection.

Listening to them it's not hard to see the appeal of the head in the sand, "not listening" approach favoured by the majority of American Pentecostals.

The barriers that the three have erected against the agnosticism implicit in modern scientific theory had the superficial appeal of appearing watertight, but it's really not hard to see in each instance how the baby is inclined to go out with the bathwater. For example...

- The bells and smells Christian said that Creation used to be an act, but now it's a process and surely that makes it even more wonderful?

- The evangelical Christian observed that science provides the how while religion provides the why and he couldn't personally see any reason why the two should run into conflict. (He did also point out however that he has been denied full membership of his own church because this requires a statement of faith in the inerrant nature of the Bible on matters like history and science.)

- The Rabbi, predictably enough was the canniest; Jews have a long history of working within a secular tradition. She noted that the Reformation had created a serious breach between physics and metaphysics, but that now things were starting to come together again. (Was the evangelical listening and wondering what this could mean for his tidy separation?)

- The Islamic scholar (and scientist) stated proudly that medieval Muslims — the sort that actually lived in the middle ages — had anticipated evolution in their own thinking, but then went on to admit that the dominant theology within contemporary Sunni Islam is committed to atomism i.e. a pre-Newtonian take on causality. He then added that 'Science' originally meant knowledge in the widest sense, not just the kind you get from the empirical method...we do actually have other faculties for acquiring knowledge, such as Revelation.

My new chums the Zoroastrians are in better shape really, because they claim to believe in a fundamental conflict between the truth and order of Creation with background forces of chaos and disorder. It's an eschatology which allowed for process from the outset.

The others can't change the fundamental tenets of their system, so instead they resort to all kinds of specious nonsense to convince us that the theological ship hasn't really been holed beneath the water-line: i.e. there's a difference between believing in and believing that, opined the Rabbi. You don't have to believe in the literal truth of Genesis, but you need to believe that it more or less encapsulates your value system.

Perhaps Evolution as Darwin explained it isn't fully incompatible with an uncreated creator. What;s certain however, is that's it's incompatible with the type of uncreated creator described in the revealed texts of the three main monotheistic religions.

Anona

I have a new favourite tropical fruit...the anona.

This one was plucked from a tree at the finca by my nephew just before New Year. (The parasita on the right was one of many that cover the branches of the anonales up there.)

The pulpy flesh inside is thick and creamy, slightly lumpy or even gritty on the tongue, hence the English name, custard apple. At their best, the taste might be compared to that of an oddly lukewarm ice-cream.

It's rich in carbohydrates, potassium, phosphorous and calcium.

Supposedly first cultivated in the Yautepec river region (in modern Mexico) around 1000BC, the name anona comes from the Taíno word annon.

My Chilean friend tells me that down there they call them chirimoyas. (I've seen some sources which assert an Andean origin for the fruit. There are certainly many different varieties.)

Defiance

This is Daniel Craig's second stint as a vengeful Jewish warrior following his portrayal of Steve in Spielberg's Munich.

He's since become a much bigger star and fully justifies this status in Defiance with a superb performance which camouflages some of the made-for-TV production values, especially in the combat scenes.

Liev Schrieber and Jamie Bell also fully contribute to the quality topping.

Director Edward Zwick is also something of a specialist: action movies with a conscience. His portfolio prior to this having included Blood Diamond, Glory and The Last Samurai. This is yet another one of those stories which somehow needed to be told, though I understand that the version we're given is a little free with the facts.

Here the underlying matter of concern has more to do with the history of Hollywood than the history of WWII — the fact that we hardly ever get to see Jews kicking Nazi butt. And as a result it feels less like modern-day issue-tainment than a good old fashioned war yarn.

I'd have to say that as with Blood Diamond this movie just worked for me, in spite of the various flaws which occasionally poke through.

Grade: A--

A further point of note: The Jews here speak the local Slavic lingo (Belarusian/Russian) with the local Slavs but their own dialect (Yiddish) has been rendered as English. Mark Kermode didn't seem to get this when he reviewed the film on Friday...

Zwick might have done a Gibson and put together a cast of little-known Yiddish speakers, but this movie really needed a mainstream star like Craig to function properly.

Quote of the Day

"Some seem to have a deeper understanding of the mess than is believable."
Carlos Fuentes on his country's politicians, in The Eagle's Throne

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Stars Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Julia Ormond. (Remember her?)

The plot comes from a 1921 comic short story by Scott Fitzgerald in which a man is born old and goes through life, physically at least, backwards.

I found myself zoning in and out of wonderment here — more out of it than in during the last hour. Compared to say Brokeback Mountain, this probably wasn't the sort of short story with narrative potential that naturally expands to 159 minutes of feature length entertainment.

Director David Finch (Fight Club, Zodiac) appears not to have been entirely sure whether to pursue a fantasy or a realist aesthetic, and so we get a bit of each...both done beautifully for sure. But V and I both ended up feeling that this is one of those movies where the lights are on but nobody's home.

What's the message here exactly? We see Benjamin as an old-young man discovering himself in India and hear him pontificating in his diary about how it's never too late or too early to do something with your life. But does going round the life-cycle counter-clockwise really alter the way possibility presents itself to us?

There simply weren't enough moments where the conceit was put to effective use to make us think about the existential issues it might be packing as a payload. The only one that has stuck in my mind is the scene where the wrinkly adolescent surprises a hooker with his enthusiasm in the sack. Is a man's vitality at base physical or mental seemed to be the question being asked there.

The romantic component to this tale didn't really work for us either, in part because Blanchett's mumbling old lady was such a tiresome presence. The script also seemed less awkward about an old man hitting it off with a young girl than vice versa, which helped to dull our interest in the origin of these love-lines fated to converge somewhere in the middle.

As Hurricane Katrina drew ever closer I was convinced it was going to have some relevance to both plot and meaning...but then it didn't. By then I was seriously disinclined to think deeply about the significance of that ruddy hummingbird.

Grade B+

Quote of the Day

"If there are ten worse films than Bride Wars this year then... I quit."
Mark Kermode (9/1/09)

Chekhov's Stories (2): The Kiss

At the start of this story it is May, and "all six batteries" of a Cossack artillery brigade have halted for the night in a village called Myestetchki. Following an invitation delivered by a servant on horseback, nineteen officers make their way to the home of retired general Von Rabbek.

Chekhov gradually introduces us to certain individuals within this pack. There's Lieutenant Lobytko, "renowned in the brigade for his peculiar faculty for divining the presence of women at a distance", and the lynx-whiskered Ryabovitch, whose conduct in company betrays his consciousness of a lack of physical distinction.

At one point in the evening Ryabovitch slouches after two of his fellow officers who have been invited to play billiards in another part of the house. He watches a while but feeling somewhat ignored, decides to head back to the drawing room, but manages to take a wrong turn and winds up in a darkened room.

Suddenly there's a feminine presence in there with him. She whispers "at last", throws her arms around him and kisses him, before recoiling with a shriek. He too flees the scene in haste.

It's a chance event, most probably experienced as an embarrassing mishap by the lady in question. But for Ryabovitch it is transforming.

"Something strange was happening to him...His neck, round which soft, fragant arms had so lately been clasped, seemed to him to be annointed with oil; on his left cheek near his moustache where the unknown had kissed him there was a faint tingling sensation as from peppermint drops, and the more he rubbed the place the more distinct was the chilly sensation; all over from head to foot, he was full of a strange new feeling which grew stronger and stronger..."

The 'unknown' is clearly something more than just an anonymous young woman. Emerging from the dark room, his whole outlook on the life he has yet to lead has been touched with some powerful positive magic.

For Ryabovitch his first kiss has awakened within him Love, but as this emotion is to have no definite object - rather an imaginary compound of all the women he finds back in the drawing room on his return there - Chekhov is able to show how we often experience love as a heightening of our senses, which alters our perceptions of time and space and our scale of meaning.

Ryabovitch and the other officers move off with their batteries the next day. Eventually the awkward young officer summons up the courage to share his story with his peers, but however minutely he describes the incident, its magnitude evades his narrative capabilities.

"In the course of that moment he had told everything, and it surprised him dreadfully to find how short a time it took him to tell it."

Worse still, Lieutenant Lobytko then lets on that "a similar thing once happened to me." He was on a train and had drifted off beneath his rug. "I opened my eyes and only imagine - a woman. Black eyes, lips red as a prime salmon, nostrils breathing passionately - a bosom like a buffer..." This analogue of course serves only to debase the founding myth behind Ryabovitch's own passion.

The brigade eventually makes its way back to Myestetchki, presumably in the Autumn, and Ryabovitch's sense that a return to the point of origin will allow him to re-kindle the flame within his soul is destined for disappointment.

Perhaps the author is suggesting that love can be rather like the disciplined and insincere smile of La Señora Von Rabbek "which instantly vanished from her face every time she turned away from her guests."

Chekhov wrote this story when he was 27.

Quote of the Day

"It takes real guts to see the hopelessness."
John Givings in Revolutionary Road

Revolutionary Road

After the way that poor old Anthony Mingella crapped on Cold Mountain I am hardly going to take the trouble to read Charles Frazier's novel.

This is the trouble with movie-adaptations of well-loved books, especially keenly felt here I suspect, because Revolutionary Road is one of those perpetually nearly discovered gems of twentieth century literature, the kind which both readers and writers cherish and pass on in a chain of word-of-mouth recommendations. Now it will be fixed in the mainstream consciousness as thjat middling to good movie where Kate and Leo got back together.

This isn't an entirely unlikeable film, but it belongs to a class of movie-making that generally repels me. It's an even more hyper-stylised period piece than Changeling, but in Clint's flick the stylisation wasn't trying to fill the gap left by literature.

In Cortázar's Rayuela (it too set in the 50s) Horacio claims to have had enough of purely descriptive literature, which for him is like a script without the rescate of images. But here Sam Mendes provides enough proof that ficiton doesn't have to bend itself into something unrecognisable in order to escape the challenge of the all-powerful moving image. Indeed it is the latter which shows itself as inadequate here — meros imágenes sin el rescate de la literatura.

In truth I sensed that the drama of the piece was getting steadily better as it progressed, but the mis-steps at the start were always going to be hard to overcome. For instance, the fight in the car - Chapter 2 of the novel - is absolutely crucial. It has to be properly nasty. As Yates put it:

"Then the fight went out of control. It quivered their arms and legs and wrenched their faces into shapes of hatred, it urged them harder and deeper into each other's weakest points, showing them cunning ways around each other's strongholds and quick chances to switch tactics, feint and strike again."

The author doesn't need to provide us with the actual dialogue and that of course presents a serious challenge for the would-be screenwriter. Justin Haythe simply dodges it, leaving April a rather passive figure in the tumult, which in turn means that Frank has to be made to be more constrained.

The director needed to make the audience feel uncomfortable in their seats, but in this he fails, and then he skips the equally excruciating silence that follows this squall the next day. So when Frank goes back to work and into bed with Maureen we haven't seen much of the lingering "stare of pitying boredom" that April has been treating him to during their first gathering with Shep and Milly, a scene that Haythe has omitted entirely. Viewers could be forgiven at this stage for thinking this is a story about a neglected housewife and her slimebag husband.

April's proposal for a move to Paris also comes out of the blue, because the script hasn't worked hard enough to show us why both Frank and April suspect that their essence is entirely out of step with the post-war American dream, that "they alone were painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture." Mendes actually makes the suburban life look appealing. (Was he afraid to repeat himself after American Beauty?)

The scene where Frank marches through the Grand Central concourse amidst a host of similarly atired and behatted salary-men is memorable, but for me also encapsulated the way Mendes has emphasised the temporal distance between us and Frank's working existence, when in fact one of the great pleasures of the novel is the contemporary resonance of Yates's satire on cubicle life. And it's incredibly funny; whereas I don't think I even sniggered once in this movie. (Frank's celluloid workmates here barely register as worthy of our attention.)

Michael Shannon from Bug has a nice turn as John Givings; he seems to specialise in engaging loons. Somehow I felt these two interventions in the Wheelers' lives may even have worked better in the film than they did in the novel.

Still, it seemed an appropriate sort of book to be reading very shortly after finally extricating myself from "a life I couldn't stand", and the messed-up mathmo's weary opener that "if you want to play house you have to have a job" is really just the beginning of the journey of self-examination that Yates is usually able to send his readers on. Mendes meanwhile seems oddly reluctant to unsettle his 2009 audience in quite the same way.

One last observation. The funny thing about Di Caprio is that with each movie he does, I always seem to start off thinking he's been horribly mis-cast and end up more or less completely convinced how right he was for the role. Winslet is perhaps a bit too soft for April, but then she's the director's moll.

Grade B