VULGARmarxism has a great post reminding us about the occupations taking place in colleges around the UK regarding Gaza, some are still happening some have finished. The ones which are still going on need our support and solidarity. VULGARmarxism includes the links to the blogs that have been set up.
Btw: I just love your name, VULGARmarxism…. it brought a big smile to my face when I first saw it and the name alone deserves a link!
I like going to the cinema, always have. It is a place to lose and distract yourself from the real world. To become absorbed in another reality, a story, another life, for whatever length of time. So for the past week or so I have been binging on cinema. Now I have seen 3 out of the 5 nominated for Best Film Oscar. And to sorta quote Marlon Brando, they could be all contenders!
Frost/Nixon is about the interaction between 2 men. One a chatshow host on the wane desperately trying to make it big again, the other a disgraced corrupt former president. It is based on the stage play. There are parallels between boxing and these interviews. It is all about strategy, psyching out your opponent, spotting their weaknesses and exploiting them. And who will finally triumph. But never underestimate your opponent.
Nixon is adept at these manoeuvres while Frost is a novice (Frost expects the interviews, early in the film, to be a ‘cascade of candour’) and constantly lets Tricky Dicky off the hook. And the interactions and the sparring between the two doesn’t always rely on dialogue sometimes facial expressions, which are just as powerful as words. And I think that this one of the strengths of the film and the superb performances by Michael Sheen (Frost) and Frank Langella (Nixon). Excellent performances from Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell as the two American researchers, frustrated with Frost’s interview technique but who provide the ammunition for Frost to lob at Nixon. Kevin Bacon too as Nixon’s loyal aid gives a good performance.
I liked the film, two big performances and director Ron Howard develops tension with skill (will Frost ever sucker punch Nixon?). Though Frost’s love interest played by the talented Rebecca Hall is wasted completely and is just there really as eye candy…..
I reviewed Milk last week.
Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Danny Boyle is a likable film. But since watching it I have wondered if my heart strings were needlessly pulled. And with the producers being the very people who make Who Wants to be a Millionaire….. I really enjoyed it originally but what was the political essence of the film? Boyle shows us the utter grim reality of grinding poverty in Mumbai, how people have to get by to just exist. The horrific scene of the pogrom against Muslims where Salim and Jamal witness their mother being beaten to death, later being exploited by a gang of criminals, escaping. Jamal and Salim going their separate ways, how people make hard choices under adverse conditions . These experiences are linked to the questions the older Jamal is asked on the show.
But a lot of the politics has been diluted, there was a lot more social and political commentary in Boyle’s Trainspotting. It doesn’t get to the guts and savagery, the underlining reasons that underpin global exploitation. But it is a ‘feel good film’ and that’s the trajectory of the film. And yes, I was desperate for slumdog Jamal to win the money and to run off into the sunset with his ‘lost’ childhood love, Latika (gee Harpy, you old romantic fool….). And even with my criticisms, contradictorily, I wanted a happy ending …..for once!
The acting was exceptional especially the young children played Jamal, Salim and Latika (although now the makers of the film have themselves, ironically, been accused of exploitation!). There are so many positive human qualities in Dev Patel’s Jamal, that you relate to him and care about what happens.
The cinematography is exceptional. It shows the beauty and squalor equally of Mumbai (but then I am sucker for the visual).
I haven’t seen The Reader as many of the reviews have put me off (wait for it to out on DVD). I read the book when it was first published and it doesn’t sounds like a true adaptation. Also, I am not too keen on the work of Stephen Daldry.
Oh, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed by David Fincher, isn’t released until next week.
If I had to choose my favourite out the films I have seen so far, it would have to be Milk, a thoughtful film with a heart and a political understanding of fighting back.
This following article from Artnet is very interesting and has given me food for thought about art criticism at a time of economic crisis. And in conclusion Davis returns to Trotsky on art:
Now is as good a time as any to return to the writings of Leon Trotsky on art. In 1938, deep into the wreckage of the Great Depression, he helped pen the manifesto “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art” with Andre Breton and Diego Rivera. It is, true to form, a polemic, informed by an analysis of the crisis of art in that moment, faced with assaults on the avant-garde by both fascism and Stalinism. Yet underneath this is a more general idea about art.
And I really like the following:
To realize oneself as an individual is one of the most cherished dreams that society holds out, and art is a major conduit for this desire. And yet this same society throws all kinds of roadblocks in the way. It suffocates the individual and degrades the imagination. Art is therefore not political because it adheres to some particular “critical” program. It is critical in its DNA. The esthetic flows into the political without the one being the other.
Well, I must dust off my copy of Trotsky on art……
This is an extract from Henry Siegman’s Israel’s Lies from LRB. It is worth reading the whole article.
I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.
Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’
