Day two, part one

So here we are on our first morning in Canada, I had trouble with the newspaper machines around the corner and there wasn't much news, the headline in the SUN being that a six-year-old kid was thrown off an airplane at Pearson airport for throwing a temper tantrum. He was going alone and the plane hadn't taken off yet.

Another victory in the war on terrorism!

Speaking of which, American troops accidently killed some Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, and NDP leader Jack Layton is demanding NATO start negotiating a surrender with the Taliban (presumably ours, not theirs).

Now since I've been going to screenings back home and the festival has actually sort of begun, here are a bunch of reviews for films opening at the festival:


Volver

Written and Directed
by Pedro Almodovar

Almodovar is back! Not that he ever actually left, but he's decided to go back to his roots in a charming pseudo-fantasy with a little bit of murder added into the mix.

Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) is going to visit her aged aunt
Paula (Chus Lampreave) with her sister Sole (Lola Duenas) and daughter, also named Paula (Yohana Cobo), in a village out in the boonies. When they get there they find the place surprisingly neat and clean for a senile old woman living on her own with only an occasional visit from her neighbor Agustina (Blanca Portillo), who tells the principles about reports that the house is haunted! Apparently Irene (Carmen Maura), the mother of Sole and Rainmunda, has come back from the dead to take care of her.

When they get back from the trip, the gals discover Rainmunda's husband Paco (Antonio de la Torre) has just been fired and is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, something which leads to a major tragedy, which has nothing to do with the elder Paula's death.

Sole returns from the funeral unknowing that her mom is in the hatch at the back of her car. The most of rest of the film has to do pondering the following question: Is Mom a ghost or a faker?

Until recently, Almodovar has been concerned primarily with the lives and inner thoughts of women, and with this he's back in form. The script is tight, the plot twists logical and exiting, and the acting is superb. Carmen Maura, who has been in a number of his previous films, sparkles as the dead mother, and Cruz gives her best performance in years. The rest of the cast does a bang-up job too.

The film is deep, the scenery beautiful, and except for a little excess misandry, this film is flawless. See it.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon

A documentary directed by
David Leaf and John Scheinfeld

Who is John Sinclair and what does he have to do with John Lennon and Yoko Ono? He was a drug dealer and pot legalization activist, who was busted for selling two joints to an undercover cop. Getting him out of jail through a massive 1971 rock concert was the greatest success of the anti-war movement and it scared the Nixon administration to the bone.

This was the tipping point in the paranoiac Nixon administration's war on dissent. This led to Watergate, the dirty tricks, the whole ball of wax. It also led to the years-long effort to get Lennon deported, which ultimately failed. Nixon's test case for the repression planned for the rest of us.

This is what a documentary should be. It's interesting, it's entertaining, and what most important, it's fair and balanced. That's right, fair and balanced. This is not one of those one-sided propaganda flicks, which gives a false and skewed version of events. No. This actually gives a complete, well-rounded picture of what was going on back in the day, and it's truly illuminating.

The talking heads are pretty much the usual suspects: Yoko, a few family friends, Sinclair, representatives of the far left and far right, Walter Cronkite, John Dean and a few repentant FBI agents. They also have some fascinating clips, not only of Lennon making music and love in bed and other places, and shots of the great anti-war moratorium of 1971 and the Democratic convention of 1968, but John and Yoko taking over the Mike Douglas show, interviewing the likes of Bobby Seale, who were spouting some gawdawful stuff. The lefties were most certainly harassed and bugged by the FBI, but they also were saying what J. Edger Hoover and the paranoiacs in the Nixon administration wanted to hear: These people were definitely WERE trying to overthrow the government, something that Lennon and Ono realized a bit to late. They were dupes to some extent, and this is something the documentarians made quite clear. They also tried to extricate themselves from it to some extent, but it was too late.

The case itself is gone over in a straightforward manner. The lawyer they hired did a great job and if John and Yoko weren't rich, they'd have been booted. This is one of the best docs of the year and may actually get an Oscar nom.

Renaissance
Miramax Films, 105mins, R

Directed by
Christian Volckman

It's a little known fact on this side of the Atlantic, but comics are bigger in France than they are in Japan. Everyone reads them, and BD [for Band Desuneé-comic strips], and quite a few movies have been based on them. The gimmick for this particular film is that the look and feel of BD has been translated onto the screen. It took five years worth of production time to get it to look that way, and you can see every penny.

It's the year 2054. Ilona Tasuiev(Romola Garai), a scientist working for a Big Pharma conglomerate called Avalon, has been looking for a secret maguffin for a while now, and having almost gotten it, has been kidnapped by some nefarious baddies.

Since this is a major case, the Paris police department has assigned top cop Capt. Barthélémy Karas (Daniel Craig) to find her. This isn't as easy as it seems, as the last person to see her alive was her skanky slacker sister Bislane (Catherine Mccormack), and she doesn't know very much.

Avalon senior VP Paul Dellenbach(Jonathan Pryce) seems worried, but is he? And what of Dr. Jonas Muller(Ian Holm)? Is he really the kindly doctor that he seems to be or is there a sinister background to be uncovered? And who are those sneaky men in the invisibility suits working for? But the term “film noir” was coined in France, no?

The question is whether the gimmick works or not. What Volckman and company tried to do is to create a new and different Paris than the one we're used to, one more like the Gothum City of the Batman films, or Roberto Rodreguez's “Sin City” This looks like a comic book come to life, and as such you can accept more of the absurd parts of the SF storyline. On the other hand, the story isn't all that interesting and the twist at the end can be seen from a mile off.

A worth effort: close but no cigar.

Stormbreaker
Weinstein Co., 93mins, PG

Directed by
Geoffrey Sax

What we've got here is a case of self-betrayal. Anthony Horowitz is a children's author who created a character named Alex Ryder, sort of a James Bond, Jr. type who gets to save the world during recess or some such rot. The books, according to the various reviews put up on Amazon are rather good, and he's written several other volumes in the series that seem to be selling well, but the screenplay he wrote for the film version of the series' first book is a bit of a mess.

The film starts rather nicely, with super-spy Ian Rider (Ewan McGregor), being chased by a bunch of nasties, while his 14-year-old nephew Alex(Alex Pettyfer) is reading a report to his class about how he has no parents and his uncle is never there. The chase scene is cute, but seems too much like out of one of the Roger Moore James Bond movies, you know, the ones where we fans of Sean Connery were hoping that MGM would put Mr. Bond out of his misery…well this is sort of like that, and after blowing away a couple of dozen bad guys, our hero calls home to say that he's going to be a little late for dinner. That's when the villainous
Yassen Gregorovich (Damian Lewis) climbs down from his helicopter and shoots him. Cut to the opening credits.

With our young hero orphaned again, so to speak, he and his caretaker/mommy substitute Jack(Alicia Silverstone) discover the truth, and so our hero is dragooned into working for MI6, Britian's spy agency. Unfortunately, this isn't the organization James Bond worked for, but the one Austin Powers did. MI6 boss Alan Blunt(Bill Nighy) and his deputy, Mrs. Jones(Sophie Okonedo) are cartoon characters in human drag, and the bad guy, Darrius Sayle(Mickey Rourke), and his two top flunkies: Mr. Grin(Andy Serkis) and Teutonic ice-maiden Nadia Vole(Missi Pyle), actually dress as if they were. This doesn't help matters, especially due to the schizophrenic nature of the film.

It goes back and forth between cartooniness and actual action-hero stuff, and thus there's really no sense of danger, even when Alex is dangling from a rope at 10 thousand feet. Pettyfer is okay. He's a pretty boy with athletic skills and can actually emote from time to time, it's just the rest of the cast hamming it up that really grates. If you're going to do comedy, do comedy. If you don't: don't.

The fact that the books were full of humor should have informed the director that it should have been jokier, but no. This is as serious as a heart attack with a Snidely Whiplash/Wile E. Coyote plotline, which is why this fails. Maybe it's just as well that there won't be any more of these. I don't know if Alex has much of a fanbase here. We'll see.

Day one, part two

Our first full day in Toronto is consumed with screenings and getting credentials, it's the same as last year and the years before. There's nothing wrong with that. I managed to see a number of flicks yesterday afternoon, and these we now begin the hot and heavy business of seeing so many movies per day as to cause exhaustion.

...good thing I've been working out.


Blindsight
Robson Entertainment 104min, UK

A Documentery
By Lucy Walker

Sabriye Tenberken is an amazing person, having gone blind at the age of twelve, she grew up wanting to be an educator in third world countries, and co-founded an organization called “Braille without Borders” which, among other things, funded her dream to set up a school for the blind, in of all places, Lasa, Tibet. She managed to do this successfully despite the opposition of the Chinese government.

Not only that, she went into the countryside on horseback and recruited students, something unheard of anywhere in the world. The thing is a wild success, especially in Tibet, where the pious Buddhist population believes that blind people are being punished for the awful things they did in a previous life.

Back in 2001, Miss Tenberken read a story on the internet about a
blind climber Erik Weihenmayer, who had just become the first person with his disability to climb Mt. Everest. So, she emailed him with the invitation to give a inspirational talk to her students.

Weihenmayer had other ideas.

What he wanted to do is get a group of the students the school and take them to the Everest Base Camp, from which they would climb Lhakpa Ri, a smaller peak right next to the great mountain, which is still 23 thousand feet above sea level. The ultimate field trip.

The filmmaker goes back and forth between preparations for the trip and interviews with the families of the kids, most of whom thought they had gotten rid of these young burdens, and are quite bemused. The most interesting student is Tashi, who was Chinese, and had been sold into slavery by his parents and somehow wound up in Lasa. The quest to find his parents is almost as arduous as the trek to the Himalayas.

That, despite the fact that even a person in tip top shape would have a tough time with it, is actually the easiest part. True Tashi and some of the girls have problems with altitude sickness, and the mission could very well fail, but the ride is a heartwarming one and this is a very cute film indeed.

KING AND THE CLOWN, South Korea
International premiere

Directed by
Lee Jun-ik

There's no business like show business and that's been true for many centuries. In Shakespeare's time, there were tales of theater troops who have changed history, and the bard, in fact wrote about it in his famous play “Hamlet,” were the melancholy Dane got a troupe to perform a version of the murder of his father.

Apparently, something like that happened in far away Korea just about 80 years before, and this is a far more sinister use of political theater than the bard had in mind, if such a thing can be imagined.

Acrobat and stand-up comedian Jang-seng (Kam Woo-seong) and his pal and foil Gong-gil (Lee Jun-gi), who specializes in female roles, tour the provinces of old Korea doing stylized dancing and tightrope walking to the joy of the local rubes. Gong-gil, also turns tricks as a male hooker, which drives Jang up the wall, and when a rich guy becomes the “straw that breaks the camel's back” Jang takes action, now both minstrels are on the run.

Now one of the best places to hide is the big city, and thus our two heroes head to Seoul, where they come upon a rival troupe, and after a cute contest of skills decide to join forces. Jang is now their captain. It is here that he make a fatal decision, he's going to become a political satirist…Not a very wise idea in feudal Northeast Asia. Especially, with, as the prologue states, the worst king of the entire Chosen Dynasty!

Having the worst king reign over you can be dangerous, but it makes for great satiric fun, and Jang, Gong, and their cohorts, who were starving, are suddenly extremely popular and have full bellies.

However, the government is always present, and our troupe is in the royal dungeon about to get whipped to death, when Jang gets another brave idea. He demands that the king himself watch the show, and if he laughs at it, they're all innocent, and should go free. If not?

Well, we don't have to think about that because both the ruthless King Yonsan (Jeong Jin-yeong) and his ambitious consort, Nok-su (Gang Seong-yeon) both love how they're portrayed. Our heroes are saved! But the king, being a megalomaniacal type, who never got over how the older members of the court had his mother whacked, has uses for the art of political satire, and soon a comedy sketch is a prologue to something not so funny. Not only that, his majesty suddenly has turned queer and is lusting after Gong-lil [who looks pretty good in drag] this new wrinkle makes things even more complicated.

This could have been a really schizophrenic film, going from comedy to thriller and back again, with the psychosexual ramifications of all this oozing into our heads while we marvel at the stunt-work, which is really nifty, and laugh at the jokes, which even though they're possibly five hundred years old, are still very funny. No wonder that this was the second biggest homegrown hit film in Korea last year. The acting is really good, especially Jeong as the evil king. He has a wonderful time chewing the scenery and is one of the most sympathetic monsters in Asian cinema in recent years. Kam is even better, with the “crying on the inside and laughing on the outside” shtick done perfectly. This is really cool.

Toronto day one

We start, as always, with films I have seen at previous film festivals and thus have voluntarily waived their "embargo rights" before heading off to the airport:

Sleeping Dogs Lie

Written and Directed
By Bob Goldthwait

Amy(Melinda Page Hamilton) and John(Bryce Johnson) are a happy young couple in love. She'sgot a job teaching school and he's…well…a newspaper delivery boy. She has a secret that she shouldn't tell anybody, but we know from the first couple of seconds of the film. It really doesn't matter what it is, lets just say that this is rather disgusting.

So what is expected to become of those raunchy teen comedies goes forward when Amy takes John to meet her silly family, which consist of her conservative parents (Geoffrey Pierson and Bonita Friedericy) and her totally degenerate cartoon of a brother(Brian Posehn).

The secret is revealed and everything does to hell in a hand-basket. Now while this may be a really good idea for a TV sketch, where all the characters are one-dimensional cartoons, it doesn't work ina feature where you have the live action cartoons interacting with what appears to be real people with feelings and the like.

While John appears at the beginning to be a perfectly nice guy, he turns into one of the less likeable characters, and his reaction is what would be expected. This sort of thing gets really old after a few minutes. So with John turning into a cartoon, it is Amy has to grow, and she does in a romance with a married colleague(Colby French), which is actually kind of sweet.

But being neither fish or fowl, the thing just doesn't work. However it's a good try, and maybe Goldthwaite will get it right the next time.

American Hardcore

Directed by
Paul Rauchman

Inspired by Steven Blush's book "American Hardcore: A Tribal History," This is a chronicle of the underground hard-core punk years from 1979-86. The fact was that movement was going on for quite a while before that, and the music was for the most part lousy and there was a good possibility of one's getting the crap beaten out of you.

Beginning in 1980, when Jimmy Carter was in office and America was in the grips of malaise, we trace the art form from it's roots in California and Washington, DC all the way to it's ignominious demise in1986, when the artists realized that they were getting to old for this sort of thing. The interviews with the original artists were interesting enough, and the music itself is shown in concert clips, which is all one needs to understand how truly bad it was.

If you are one of the tiny minority who liked that sort of thing, and there aren't that many people who are connoisseurs of old CircleJerk or SSD albums, you'll probably feel nostalgic. If you're not, then it's a mildly interesting historical artifact. Britney Spears fans need not apply.

Snow Cake

Directed by
Marc Evans

Justbecause something is obviously Oscar®-bait doesn’t mean it has to suck. Sigourney Weaver hasn’t been nominated for one since she got two noms way back in 1989,tobe perfectly frank, she could use one. So, since playing disabled people is generally considered a call for help by respected actors who want kudos,this
film is on the very early lists.

It may actually deserve to be.

We don’t really know who Vivienne Freeman (Emily Hampshire) is when we first see her on the screen. We know she’s a neo-hippie, and she’s looking forsomeone special,and she settles on Alex Hughes (Alan Rickman), who’s lookingdepressed although we learn soon enough is a manslaughterer just out of prison.He doesn’t like her, but the force of Viv’s personality forces him to relent,and soon enough they’re on the road headed west, where he’s to drop her offat her home town.

That’s when the unexpected truck plows into the car, and the person who we think is going to be the main character gets killed. (I include this spoiler here because we’re only about fifteen minutes into the film and the rest is about what happens later.)

Viv’s mom Linda(Weaver) is disabled. She’s a highly-verbal autistic person who can take care of herself to some extent, but still acts like she’s about five.[That’s the Oscar®-bait part. Apparently, the voters are supposed to love that sort of thing.] Alex comes over to pay a condolence visit and winds up spending the better part of the week there. There’s a funeral to organize and Linda’s parents are off somewhere having fun.

So we have two great actors doing what they do best, and having a wonderful time not grieving.There’seven a chance for romance between Alex and Linda’s next door neighbor Maggie(Carrie-AnneMoss), who’s a bit of a slut and is a glutton for grownupconversation. That balances off the bizarre goings on at Linda’s.

The best thing about this is the fact that script is so smart and fresh, scribe Angela Pell has crafted something really funny and touching. It should be seen.

The Treatment

Written and Directed
by Oren Rudavsky

Romantic comedy is always better with a little hallucination. Jake Singer(Chris Eigeman) is an English teacher in a fancy prep school where he also assistant coaches basketball. His life is kind of on the boring side, what with his still pining for his lost love Julia (Stephanie March) and all. This torch will have to be put out as she’s about to marry someone else.

This is not that kind of movie. His shrink Dr. Ernesto Morales(Ian Holm) is the last of the great Freudians and won’t allow for that sort of thing. Not only does he give bizarre advice when he’s presiding over his $125-an-hour sessions, but he’s apt to appear at the most opportune moments out of the blue to give sage advise.

This is mostly of no help when he meets the beauteous Allegra Marshall(Famke Janssen), a widow with two adopted children. It’s not exactly love at first sight, but it’s your typical romantic comedy relationship. There are the usual complications. Jake’s father(Harris Yulin), with whom he’s not talking has a major illness and Allegra’s having problems with the adoption agency.

Then there’s the problems with the shrink, who’s more of a pain in real life than as a hallucination. It’s all rather predictable, but the cast is so damn winning, and the script so cute that we can’t help but have a good time watching the romance bloom, crumble and bloom again. The jokes all work and the pathos is just right temperature. This is worth seeing.

Toronto Day Zero

Today is Labor day. Had I not been so cheap, I would have gone up to Toronto this morning and gotten my hotels stuff finished with so I could have started with the movies immediately, but it would have been an extra hundred bucks, so I'm still here in New York...but that shouldn't stop the fun! So let's have a virtual opening Gala...This is a real Toronto gala film, but since it's already opened and closed in New York, I figure that there are no embargoes to deal with:

Never Say Goodbye (KABHI ALVIDA NAA KEHNA)

Written and Directed
by Karan Johar

We open somewhere in New York, where zillionaire Sam Talwar's (Amitabh Bachchan) son Rishi (Abhishek Bachchan) is getting married to his ward Maya(Rani Mukherji). Now, while Rishi is in love, Maya isn't, and while she's contemplating her fate, she meets one
Dev Saran(Shah Rukh Khan), a soccer star and son of the Kamaljit (Kirron Kher) the caterer, who he was going to pick up after the wedding was over. They have a conversation and he convinces her to go forward with the nuptials.

She goes back in the house to wed, He goes onto the street, where he gets hit by a limousine, thereby losing his career as a footballer.

Cut to four years later. Dev is married to Rhea(Preity Zinta), the editor in chief of the number two fashion magazine in the world, and they have a kid named son Arjun (child artist Ahsaas), who despite that his dad is a soccer coach, doesn't have a compeditive bone in his body. Maya, meanwhile, is stuck in a loveless marriage.
They meet in ridiculous circumstances, and soon become friends, advising each other on how to repair their crumbling marriages. This turns into love and love turns into adultery.

This being a Bollywood production, there's lots of dancing and singing [I remember all-singing all-dancing gangster shoot'em'up war movies from there], and lots of comic relief by Sam, who's an old school letch. There are also seem to have hired every out of work blonde in New York as an extra, which isn't actually a bad thing at all. The music is actually rather good, and the production numbers are excellent, although as the film gets more serious, they seem less and less appropriate.

The reason companies outsource to India is that the prices are far cheaper than they are here in North America or Europe. So it's obvious that when Karan Johar decided to film his latest opus in New York, Philadelphia and some suburbs in between that this would be one of the most expensive “Bollywood” movies ever made.

It is also very long at three hours and fifteen minutes, and feels it. This is an epic, even though there are only six characters with more than a few lines. The acting is excellent, [the cast are all major stars in India], especially the kid, but as the film grinds on the audience begins to grind down, and by the end we're trying to figure out all those places which could have been easy to edit out.

If you like this sort of thing, bring a pillow for your butt, you will need it.

Toronto Day — 2: Erasing people from history.

One of the things I had to do before heading up to Canada on tuesday is to change money in order to get from the airport to my hotel in the least amount of time possible, so I did that today.

One of the thing s I noticed is that the foriegn Queen is still on the twenty. They had discussed putting Pierre Trudeau on it, but it seems that the Liberals weren't too thrilled with the idea. However, they did do one thing when they changed the design of the fifty, which still has the face of Prime Minister William Lyon Makensie King. They changed his dates in the de facto top job from "1921-26, 1926-30, 1935-48", to just "1921-30, 1935-48." This in effect erases the prime ministership of Arthur Meighn, who held the job for a few months in Canada's wildest political year, from history.

Now Arthur Meighn was not one of Canada's better PMs, in fact, he was one of the worst, an arrogant son of a bitch who didn't do anything worthwhile during his first government in 1920-21, and who's second term was a truncated disaster, which had the happy side effect of destroying royal power in Canada and moving forward the task of independence, something which wouldn't be finished until 1982's patriation of the Constitution. The fact that he's pretty obscure doesn't change the fact that he did indeed have the job, and while he doesn't have more than the better part of a paragraph in the history books, writing him out completely as they do on the $50 bill is something which is dead wrong.

It reminds me that the US senate refused to have a bust of Spiro T. Agnew in it's hallowed halls after the bastard resigned in disgrace because, well, he resigned in disgrace. But was indeed Vice President and all the others, including two indicted for treason and a couple of other would-be felons, had one, so he deserved it, not as an honor but because he had the job.

There was a debate a couple of years back as to whether Reagan deserved to be on a stamp after he died. Of course, he was president and dead presidents, including the likes of Buchanan and Nixon, got stamps. Governments should aknowledge former leaders even if, like Jimmy Carter, they're schmucks. Thus Canada should at a couple of 1926s on the fifty. There's room.

Toronto: day —2

The weather outside is frightful. The reminents of Hurricane Ernesto are dumping rain on New York City and while it isn't nearly as bad as it could be, it's still dank and drab. I've got to go to the international money exchange in order to get Canadian currency. Then there's the other stuff like laundry and finishing cleaning up the place. I hate that, which is why my place looks like the Collyer brothers'.

The Press screening schedule just went online yesterday afternoon and it was exactly as I feared: all the good stuff is screening simultaniously. It's going to be pretty hairy for the eight days I'm going to be up there. There might not be enough time to do all the updates planned, but we've got no choice, now, do we? I managed to get the reviews for Crank and Wicker Man to the guys at the Greenwich Villiage Gazette just in time. For some strange reason, the only major market where Idiocracy isn't showing is here in New York, but it's showing in Toronto and that'll be part of the coverage, assuming that I could find the theater.

The Commies in Mexico wouldn't let President Fox make his final State of the Nation speech, which shows how they hate democracy. It's sad really, and speaking of antidemocratic tendancies, the British telefilm Death of a President, which looks with glee at the death of President Bush, is making headlines all over the place and is the first big controversy for the Toronto film festival. I'm going to see it next week.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to find a sweater.

"Mother Jones" loses a war.

First I'd like to make a homonym distinction, I don't mean "lose" as in "Losing to Boston 7-2" I mean losing as in "I lost my left shoe."

Mother Jones Magzine has an interactive timeline which claims to show all the lies leading up to Gulf War IV.

Yeah, Gulf War FOUR. The first one was the Iran/Iraq war which lasted from 1979 to 1989, and had been over when the timeline begins. Not included? Fine. However, Gulf War III, also known as Operation Desert Fox, and the events that led up to it are completely absent, at least from the internet interactive timeline. Where did it go? Why were arguments used to blow up much of Iraq's infrostructure the day of Clinton's impeachment and the week following, completely erased from Mother Jones' historical memory?

For the same reason that Bush Sr.'s betrayal of the Democratic revolution he INITIATED surpressed, which is to make Saddam look like an innocent victim.

It's sick.

Toronto: day "—7"

Today, we've got a the last couple of prefestival screenings down here in New York. This might be termed "Indian autumn" as it got down to the fifties overnight and the weather is awful. We're going to start posting reviews on Monday, these will be major films that have already opened in New York, but that's for later.

Meanwhile, I have to change a half a grand to canadian so I could pay the hotel bill in advance as they don't take credit cards. I stayed there last year, and that's the only drawback to an otherwise wonderful little place.

Meanwhile there are three films, the week's big releases that aren't having press screenings, They can't be THAT bad could they?

75.22.74.#

That is the address of the spammer who's been sending me about 89 emails so far this afternoon.

Their next target is Mercury

It's obvious, now that some evil astronomers have "booted" Pluto out of the solar system, their next target is Mercury, which has a famously unstable orbit [it was a proof of Einsteins's theory of relativity] and is smaller than two moons.

They're going to try to get another one folks, and soon we'll be living on an asteroid.

Toronto: day —8

Well, they've announced the full list of flicks and three films that I mentioned were NOT being shown a few days back ARE. They are:

Breaking and Entering
Infamous
A Good Year

So with seven of the major "Oscar-bait" flicks being shown, if not more, we're going to have a pretty good idea who might just make it in.

toronto: day —10

We've got three scheduled toronto flicks to see before we actually got to the festival in a little more than two weeks. Our real coverage will begin a week from monday.

Toronto’s film festival has been famous as the place that where the fall’s Oscar bait generally makes its debut. Last March three of the five the picture nominees had their debut there, and the previous year two. Generally a couple of foreign-language films get shown here get Oscar noms, so it’s a good place to start looking at the field for next march.

Looking at the various Oscar® blogs, the following list is what’s generally considered to be in contention:

Films I’ve seen and have already opened:

A Prairie Home Companion,
The latest from Robert Altman, who's been very irregular in the quality of his output.

World Trade Center
Oliver Stone's most patriotic film ever.

Flight 93
If WTC doesn't make it this will, but both won't.

Inside Man
Spike Lee's best film in years.

Films that we’re sure are opening in Toronto:

Babel
Little Children
The Fountain
Copying Beethoven
The Last King of Scotland
Volver

The above films will probably get nominated for something. Maybe best picture, but maybe not.

Other stuff that’s been mentioned, but probably won't be shown at Toronto:

Breaking and Entering
Goya's Ghosts
Dreamgirls
Margaret
The Good Shepherd
The Good German
Running With Scissors
Fur
Infamous
The Painted Veil
A Good Year
Flags of Our Fathers
The Departed
Youth Without Youth
Inland Empire
Zodiac
Marie-Antoinette

The above is just a list of course, and the most of them aren’t mine. I’ve seen a couple of the films without a link, but that’s because of embargoes and such, and thus can’t comment. We’ll go over everything after the NY film festival is over in October. Then we should have a far better picture of what’s going on.

Planets in size order, assuming that Ceres is upgraded

The international Astronomical union is debating whether or not to add three extra plantes to the official list. The list below includes the moons and Keiuper belt objects that are larger than them.

Radius (miles)

Jupiter 71492 This may not be a planet at all, but a brown dwarf star

Saturn 60268 This may not be a planet at all, but a brown dwarf star
Uranus 25559
Neptune 24764
Earth 6378
Venus 6052
Mars 3398

Ganymede 2631
Titan 2575
Mercury 2439
Callisto 2400
Io 1815
Moon 1738
Europa 1569
Triton 1353
Xena(2003 UB313)
Pluto 1160
Santa(2005 FY9)
Titania
Rhea
Oberon
2003 EL61
90377 Sedna
Iapetus*
90482 Orcus
50000 Quaoar
Charon
Umbriel
Ariel
Dione
Tethys
Ceres

The middle east before the war: Mt Nebo

Oct 13th The Dan Nature reserve, Western Jordan

Our first stop of the day was a crusader castle called Shobar, which was built in 1115 and was captured by Saladin in 1189. The name means “Forest”, which was all chopped down by the Turks in the time just before World War One. You may be wondering why no one has tried to plant a new forest like the Israelis did back in the 1950s. Someone said that the Arabs didn’t like trees…anyway…There are cisterns and a chapel, under which was the bank vault and a winery,

After the crusaders were kicked out, the castle was turned into a village and the structure was until 1955. Sort of like the tombs in Petra, which had the residents thrown out slightly earlier.

After the eviction, the archeologists went to work, and they found plenty of Islamic inscriptions by pious Moslems who wanted to obliterate all traces of Christianity in the region. On the whole, it was not too impressive. Afterwards we went to the visiters center for the nature preserve, got some decent souveniers, and then went to one of the worst looking hotels in the middle east.

Dana six PM

Mistakes can be dangerous things, and although near-death experiences are usually better than actually dying, I should have known that I was too out of shape to go on a nature hike down a 70-degree vertical revine.

Going down was relatively easy, although the guy took us down some difficut paths around a mile down, where we say a blue lizard and pretty much nothing else but the same scenery we saw up at the top. It was all very pleasant until we discovered there was really no way back up except the way we came. At least most of the way. Being out of shape, I was at the rear, taking easy stages, although my body began to give out a quarter way back up the mountain. The guide lagged behind with me and we managed to catch up with Marie, the stewardess from east 83rd street. Three members of the group didn’t bother to go, including one person who cut out about one tenth the way down.

I don’t know exactly why I went, maybe it was macho, maybe it was guilt for not climbing that volcano in Nicaragua earlier in the year, Whatever it was, I was about three quarters the way there when the guide got fed up and decided to abandon me (Marie got a second wind and was gone), taking a short cut somewhere near the cliff face and I foolishly decided to follow him.

There are tales of little old ladies lifting cars to save their loved ones, and after this I know that they’re true. I lost the guide, and there I was at the bottom of a hundred and fifty foot cliff. Looking down, I discovered I was somehow trapped, and so I took off my sandals, put them in my tote bag, and started climbing. I had seen a couple of Israelis climbing a few minutes earlier, and thought it was the way. Unfortunately, I climbed the wrong path and was stuck about ninety feet up with really no way to get down to try again. Death loomed. I’m not really sure how I got down, but I did and I tried the next “path” and scampered up like a little kid making it to the top in no time.

The tour leader was looking out over the scenery for any trace of me when I got there. An Israeli helped me the last few feet, and that’s when my body collapsed from fatigue. It was like the crash after you get really high on some illegal intoxicant, My feet were in tatters and I almost had to crawl up the road to the hotel. It was without a doubt the greatest athletic feat of the past decade. I was a bit delirious and was denouncing myself loudly for the next hour while we waited for dinner.

8PM

After dinner, there was a band and bellydancers and a whole bunch of people from several of the hotels in the area were partying. I wanted to join in but my feet were in tatters and I couldn’t. I wouldn’t be able to walk properly until well into Syria.

Oct 14th

Karak is an another crusader castle which was built on the ruins of the capitol of Moab. It was a Bishphoric during the Byzantine empire, and during the crusades, obviously, the castle was constructed and it’s one of the biggest in Jordan, six stories high. This is a masterpiece of recycling, as most of the stones were cut by previous civilizations going back thousands of years. But what we really wanted to do was bathe in the Dead Sea, known throughout the world for it’s curative powers. The agony of de feet required them.

The extra-salty water stung quite a bit but not as bad as advertised. It also didn’t do much to make my dogs feel any better. After a short trip to cool down in a air conditioned souvenir shop, we headed up to the place where Moses viewed the promised land before he croaked back in the 12th Century BCE.

Famous lookout spot on Mt. Nebo is one of those holy places which is now dedicated solely to tourism. Back during 2000, Pope John Paul II visited and there dozens of commemorative plaques were set up, including one by the anti-Zionist “Danish Palestine Society” which is kind of hypocritical for a place famous for the first Zionist exercise in the history of the world. Aside from the view, allegedly on a clear day you can see Jerusalem, there’s a ruined church with lots of beautiful mosaics. The place is a ruin now, but it’s being restored as a tourist attraction, run by the Catholic church, although was built by the Eastern Orthodox. But then the Pope did show up.

I have a new book out!!!! Don't buy it!

It's called: Discovering the Mysteries of Ancient America: Lost History And Legends, Unearthed And Explored and contains an article by me which I gave no permission to reprint. Also, it was the cause of something resembling libel on the part of the editors and a dozen or more letters to the editor of the original magazine.

The lawsuit should be interesting.

cuba--2004

¡¡¡Silenc-YO!!!

The crowd at the Castle of the Three Kings of the Orient is larger than one would expect for a daily event, but the evening is lovely and there’s really no reason to avoid just hanging out with friends after a hard day’s work, or touring. The sun has just set and the show is starting…

¡¡¡Silenc-YO!!!

A soldier clad in 18th century uniform walks through the crowd wielding a torch, which he juggles like a bowling pin. This is the first part of an age-old ceremony, where the Spanish army would warn pirates that they weren’t welcome. Calling for silence in this solemn event, he’s soon joined by others similar dress. One carries a cannonball, the other gunpowder. They do their job and ker-POW!

That’s it. The ceremony’s over and the crowd begins to disperse, but one cannot help but think that what they were really aiming at was not ancient buccaneers, but Florida 90 miles to the northeast. This is Cuba, America’s nemesis, and forbidden fruit for tens of thousands of Yankee tourists every year. The government won’t let us go. What better reason to try.

The lure of Cuba is everywhere. Look at the travel section of just about any Barnes and Nobel or Borders bookshop, and you’ll find tons of stuff on Castro’s imprisoned island. Insight Guides, Lonely Planet, Frommer’s…and the World History section has plenty of volumes on Castro and Ché and the like.

Why have all this stuff if you CAN’T GO? It’s very annoying.

So it was poster in ‘s travel agency in Greenwich Village that immediately caught my eye. Legal trips to Cuba! For a short time only. I sort of had the money. It might be years before I had another chance. Why the heck not?

The reason why Cuba had suddenly big now right up there on the wall between Aruba and Bermuda, like everything having to do with it was political. It seems that a decade or so before, the state department and a company called Cross-cultural Solutions had made an agreement to issue the latter travel licenses for so-called “person-to –person “ trips.

This isn’t regular tourism, but a kind of diplomatic investigation where regular Americans can see what exactly was going on. The Clinton Administration didn’t really mind, and there wasn’t advertising, except for a few left-wing political journals.

Then sometime the spring of 2003, all that changed. Someone in the Bush Administration found out that much these trips involved a gentle political indoctrination. How the US is evil and all that rot. So, the official thought, if regular tourism is NOT allowed, then why the heck are we permitting THIS? The Treasury department informed CCS that their general Cuban travel license wouldn’t be renewed when it expired on December 31st.

This provided CCS both disaster and opportunity. No more Cuban trips, but before the license ran out they could make a killing on expensive tours and use the profit to subsidize their other projects, like building houses in West Africa. So they got in touch with General Tours and began advertising. The response was HUGE.

“Why are you going to Cuba?”
“For educational purposes.”
Don’t you know that there’s nothing to see in Cuba?”

Continental Airlines has a daily flight to Havana from Miami international but nobody’s supposed to know about. It’s officially a charter for another company and the check-in process is four hours long. Then you have to go on a separate security line and you wait while people going to Jamaica or Cancun just breeze on by. Then when you finally get to the gate, and we’re not talking about the waiting room, but the middle of the collapsible tunnel between the terminal and the plane, government agents verbally harass you and demand to see your license. Trying to make you feel like a criminal is just the thing to inspire solidarity with Castro.

The first thing one looks for when getting out of José Martí International are the famous antique cars. When the embargo was imposed in January, 1961, the importation of jazzy new cars was suspended, so the cars and the only alternative was crappy vehicles from East Germany, so people took very good care of their ’57 Chevys and ’49 Buicks, creating a rolling museum of cruising.

Some of these beauties are still there. They’ve got new engines, now, and the paint’s an inch thick, and the government has turned most of them into taxis, but the sight of a clunker with tail-fins can still bring a lump in one’s throat. But there aren’t that many, Havana has as many new cars as just about everywhere else. Nobody respects the embargo outside the US. Not even Israel.

We were assigned a bus and were told what was to be expected. This is one of those guided tours of the “if it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium” type. One week, four days in and around Havana and a long trip to the quaint city of Trinidad de Cuba: Propaganda and a beach.

After a look at a monument or two in La Plaza de la Revolucion, we headed to our hotel, the “El Presidente” which is called that because the street next to it has statues of every president prior to Castro, except for the first one, who was considered too close to the US, and Batista, who didn’t have time to put one up to himself when Castro kicked him out. The first guy’s pedestal is still there, though. For some reason they couldn’t pull it out of the ground. Weird.

Havana needs a paint job. Except for the big hotels and diplomatic buildings, the paint is peeling off of everything. The government blames the US. They blame the US for just about everything short of the weather, even that, most likely. But the shabbiness gives the city a rustic charm. From the seawall known as the Malacon to the forests in the south, almost every façade has an air of genteel decay.

There is something to be said about group bus tours. If you don’t know the area, it can be rather helpful learning to find your way around. It’s also fun to find out the reasons for people coming on this thing. After all, it wasn’t the beach. Most of the people were on far lefty persuasion. Old veterans of the anti-Vietnam movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, younger anti-Bush activists who wanted to apologize to the Cubans for what JFK tried to do to Castro’s beard back before they were born. Then there were a few oldsters who wanted to see how the place changed since they were there last, sometimes more than half a century before. Also, there were a few like myself who just wanted to see the place.

The first night we went to the Miramar district for a pretty decent dinner of chicken, rice and beans while the band played the officially-designated musical set. Wherever we went, for some reason, we they served us the same stuff, and played the same music. It got so we almost got sick of it. That’s socialism for you. But this was a propaganda tour and the main dish was politics, which was unfortunate, because the world cup of baseball was being played and we couldn’t go as there wasn’t time. We had to go to a lecture on the status of women. There was a clause in the contract that he had to follow the program or the tour company would rat on us and we’d get a ten thousand dollar fine.

There were lots of these, One couldn’t really tell how much we were being told was bull and which was the truth. For example, we went west to the border of Pinar del Rio province, where we were going to look at a “community project.” I guess they wanted us to believe that a bunch of locals were doing some artsy-craftsy type of deal and we’d all go “oo” and “ah” over what they could accomplish without the help of the mean old United States. But noooo!! This small community project, was in fact the quite large Los Tarranzas TOURISM complex, which included a five star hotel, a faux arts and crafts center and a plantation museum, which made up for the who scam with one of the best views on the island. One could see both the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean by just moving one’s head from side to side. The lush, dark green forests went on for miles and miles, one hell of a sight. The chicken, rice and beans were pretty good.

When we got back to Havana, we had the chance to see a recreation of the floorshows like they had back in the bad old days of Batista. Unfortunately, the thing cost eighty bucks and not having enough cash [and US credit cards being unusable], I couldn’t make it. I wasn’t the only one in this situation, so a couple of other people and myself went to a local disco that was recommended. Here we met some Germans who complained what s hole Havana was. When we had our fill of that, we hailed a taxi to get back to the hotel, and that’s when the adventure REALLY began.

The taxi was a beat up old East German thing, and the doors didn’t work all that well. Then the driver, who couldn’t speak more than two words of english began making noises that indicated I should tell the police that we were personal friends. I didn’t exactly know what was going on, but then I looked out the window and there was a cop car with the driver motioning to follow. What had we gotten ourselves into? When the car stopped at the corner, we tried to make a quick escape, but one of the cops pulled a gun and motioned for us to get back in. This was the Cuba I had read about. The fascist police state.

We went to the police station where they took the poor driver inside, while they were browbeating him, we made our own getaway in the other direction. They didn’t follow, and we breathed a sigh of relief.

This was a political trip, so we went to listen to a few political propaganda lectures on how the Cuban system works. Sort of like those timeshare things except you have to pay through the nose. Some of it was quite informative, but not in the way the Castro regime wanted it.

Take real estate for instance. People are allowed to own their own homes, but they can’t SELL them. So instead they swap. Person a goes down to one of the designated park benches in central Havana and looks around for someone who has a larger or smaller house, then they make a deal, pay off the proper official, and then hire some movers.

It’s a way that people avoid profit. Communism, right?

Then there’s the Committee to Preserve the Revolution, whose lecture we missed because the waiters were slow. They’re main job is to make sure that their neighborhoods are politically correct and take out the garbage on time. All pretty innocuous until you remember that they can have people taken away…

Finally, we left Havana and went crosss-country to pay homage at the tomb of Che Guavarra and see the sleepy little town of Trinidad de Cuba. This was interesting.

Cuba isn’t the tiny island it likes to pretend it is. It’s the sixteenth largest in the world and is bigger than the rest of the Antilles combined, not counting Hispañola. We got up at five in the morning and got on the bus for the road trip.

Once you get out of Havana, the landscape turns into that lush, tropical island you dream of. Acres and acres of lush forests dotted with occasional homes and other buildings. Not a factory to be seen. Then back to the politics….

Halfway between Havana and our hotel on the Caribbean, we made the obligitory stop at the tomb of Che Guevarra. It’s a big thing, designed for the mass rallies denouncing the United States or worshipping Castro. It was here a couple of years before the ashes of Che and his men were brought back from Bolivia, where, with Castro’s permission, the heroic image on a million tee-shirts was plugged full of holes in 1967.

The building is topped with a monumental statue showing how Che would have looked if he were still alive and in his 70s. It was so moving, a couple of women in the group cried.

Finally, we arrived in the hotel, which was designed by the Soviets and was in badly in need of repair. The beach was not and was the site of a splendid sunset. There is nothing like sitting on the beach with a rum and coke in your hand watching a sunset.

The reason we went over to this side of the island was to view Trinidad de Cuba, the heratige city of the southeast. This is one of the best preserved places in the Caribbean and is almost too quaint for words. Here, a minor miracle occurred.

I was wandering around looking at the architecture, when one of the locals, a beautiful woman in her late twenties, tried to start up a conversation with me. I had taken Spanish all the way from sixth grade to tenth, and most of it went in one ear and out the other, I could ask for directions and a few other things but a real conversation? No! But she spoke no English and for some reason, I understood what she was saying. My Spanish came back and I was able to have a genuine conversation in a foreign language. I was completely in shock as the words came trippingly off my tongue.

Then a fellow tourist broke the spell and said hi. I forgot everything-BAM!-it was gone. I sand “adios” and headed back to the bus, wondering what the hell had just happened.

We headed back to the hotel for a lousy meal and another beautiful sunset. The next morning we were awakened at around five and saw an even better sunset. We headed halfway back across the island to Havana and left the next morning with rum and cigars.

Since I returned, The laws against travel to Cuba have been tightened. You can still go illegally, via Canada [there are dozens of travel agencies who specialize in the place] or Mexico [two or three flights a day from Cancun] or pretty much everywhere, but it may not be worth it.

We’ll have to wait to wait until after the next election to find out what’ll happen.

The middle east before the war: Petra, Jordan

Oct 11

Sela, Jordan 4PM

Sela, or Artham, is the modern town on the outskirts of the fabled “lost city” of Petra, Jordan’s great tourist attraction. This was the capitol of the Nabitean Arabs for the better part of five centuries, and a major trading center for a few more until the place was flattened by an earthquake early in the Byzantine era.

The great African rift goes far to the north of Africa itself, and the suq, the entrance to the lost city, was allegedly created by a magnitude Ten sometime in the Pleistocene. The tremendous colossal quake wrenched open a crack in the earth so large that a person can drive an oxcart through it. This, as you might remember is where Indiana Jones found the entrance to the temple of the holy grail in the third film all those years ago [most of the hotels are forced to show this film at least once a day, and thus they hate it like poison ]

I’ve been here before, eleven years earlier, I had gone with the first YM/WHA trip here, and saw a much less excavated city. Back then, the suq’s floor was nine feet above where it is today, and it was a dirt road. They’ve gotten down to the paved cobblestone floor, and you can see some interesting carvings and fossils dating back two thousand years.

The Arabs invaded this part of the Middle East around 400 BC, the Babylonians had exterminated most of the indigenous Edomites around a century before. The Nabiteans, legend states, were originally from Yemen a century before that, and set up shop, taking cultural bits and pieces from the locals. They would carve tombs in the rocks on a massive scale, and this is what remains. The regular housing, except for one part of a palace, were all flattened by earthquake of 442 CE, or burned down by the Romans, who invaded in 106 CE.

The two main gods were Bashira, who can see and touch but cannot speak, and his mother Alosia, who was similarly handicapped, not much is known about them, as the Christians and muslims weren’t much into preserving pagan traditions. Finally, we get to the bottom of the Suq, and the famous treasury, also known as Al Fasma, which is almost the symbol of the country. A perfect Greco-Roman façade, which now fronts nothing, however, it was the tomb of a great king. Who he was is unknown.

It’s still an amazing sight to behold.

Walking past the theater and the necropolis, we notice a number of restaurants, some ancient, the Nabiteans liked to eat near their dead, and some modern. It’s hot even in October. Tomarrow, I climb to the top of a mountain with a bunch of other people to the great alter, where the ancients would sacrifice to Bashira and Alosia, then rapidly running out of water head back down to ground level where the lost city of the living was and where the museum is now. That has been rebuilt, but still isn’t all that good.

Inside the tombs is the glory of the area. The natural coloration of the rocks is amazing, resembling modern art. God paints like Chigal here. There are snack bars all over the place, and being thirsty, I purchase lots of water whenever I pass one.

The excavations of the city itself shows that paganism died out here about the time it did everywhere else in the Roman world, and by the time the Muslims invaded, the town, which had never recovered from the fifth century earthquake, was in serious decline, another one in 717 left Petra pretty much moribund, and nobody much lived there afterwards. The locals knew there were magnificent ruins, but the west had forgotten the place completely until a guy named Brukhardt found it again in the 18th century.

“A rose-red city half as old as time”, he said. Yup.

Petra Oct 12

Last night I got a bad case of the shits and spent much of the night on the toilet. Also, the roosters were crowing at all hours. I love colonel Saunders just about now…

I’m back at Petra where I’ve just spent almost, if not over ah hour climbing the endless stair to the high place of sacrifice, I’m not too sure that it’s worth it. There’s a refreshment stand near the top and I just spend a dinar on a bottle of Nestle’s water. Otherwise I ould have died…I wonder how they got all this stuff up here? Helecopter?

Just a bit more climbing to do and we’ll see the remains of the temple here. Then it’s all downhill….I’ll still be too hot, but at least gravity will be on my side for once. On top, my bag broke and I had to fix it. I couldn’t, at first, find the way down, which was scary. Even more scary was the way down, which was about an 80 degree drop—vertigo city— and I was very lucky not to fall down and break my neck, although I fell just before getting to the museum. No real harm done to my person.

I met three people from the group and we took donkeys up to a place called the monastery, which was a giant tomb almost as well preserved as the Treasury. My donkey was in a head-on collision with another donkey. It could have been a sexual encounter for all I know. Yet another near-death experience! But I wasn’t winded.

The Monastery, is almost free of withering and is more Persian in style. Almost everything else looked its age. It’s quite beautiful to look at, especially from the restaurant right across from it. It’s all very expensive, but I’m not complaining.

The people running the place decided that there were enough people interested to put on an extra performance of the weekly light and culture show, which was actually quite fun to observe. The suq was filled with candles and we went down to the treasury we saw traditional dances and heard traditional music.

Then it was back up the suq to find out where the hotel’s van was and get a good night’s sleep at last.

The middle east part two

October 10th

The Petra tourist complex Noonish

This is a pit stop two thirds the way from Amman to Wadi Rum. The trip is about three hours long and we’re been on the road about two of those. The people are pretty nice. We Americans number about five, which is large for something like this…we should be less but this is okay, as most of the women are good looking.

Wadi rum is a beduin nature reserve. We get to stay in a semi-authentic tent, which will add to the experience, I guess. We’ll see when we get there…

Outside is desert, and desert usually looks the same everywhere, except for the species of cactus. There are a few tree farms here and there, which look really weird…

Near Wadi Rum-two-ish

After a huge slog we are now at Wadi Rum, which resembles the Olgas in Australia or the monument valley area in Arizona. Its really impressive. Right now we’re transferring our stuff from the van to this guys’ house, where we’ll get picked up by the land rovers to get to the Bedouin holiday camp, where we’ll spend the night. I don’t really know how long we’re going to stay here ant the transit point, so we sit here and discuss trivia.

Three-ish

We got to Wadi Rum about two, and transferring our stuff from the van to this guy’s house, we got ion the vehicles and headed out to see Wadi Rum’s greatest hits. We mostly saw the amazing mountains, which during the Pleistocene were weathered to look like stalagtiteses in cave.

There are lots of bizarre formations that look like something designed by either Guuldi or Dali, whom were quite beautiful and others were humorous. The area, as was said before, resembles Central Australia or Baja California. The temperature varies immensely between shade and sun. This is a very beautiful and mysterious place. We’ve seen.

Oct 11

Wadi Rum—seven AM or so

The Bedouin Experience® was pretty good. We sat and ate in an authentic Bedouin tent and l slept in another. We didn’t see the stars as it was rather cloudy, except for when ZI had to go piss at around three in the morning. I saw what looked like the whole universe, which was amazing even without my glasses on.

Noonish

On our return to the Rum Village we got a good look at Jebel Rum (Rum’s mountain) the rock they named the wadi after, apparently this Rum guy was pretty important…In the morning we checked out a Nabitean temple. The Nabiteans were the first Arabs to invade the Middle East well before Mohammed showed up. It was not nearly as impressive as the surrounding mountains, and rock formations. Now on to Petra.

The Middle East Before the War: what I should have posted last October

I went to the middle east and was planning to blog it. Unfortunately, there was very little internet access, so I'm only transcribing it now.I should be getting it all up by the end of next week.


Oct 7th

New York City 5PM

So the journey begins…the signs on the posts last week seem to be incorrect. .: there was a JFK train right there when I stepped on the platform. We should be leaving Manhattan any minute now…

JFK airport, Queens New York 6PM
It took less than 40 minutes to get from my apartment to Queens via Brooklyn. This is actually good timing….

JFK 7:45 PM

We’re on the plane and we’re allegedly going to take off quite soon. The plane is far more empty than I ‘d expected, but that may change—this , then is the beginning of the great adventure, with five minutes of boarding left, w are 5732 miles (92224 kilometers) from out destination—we’re going to be on this tub for ten hours at least, and the seats’ already beginning to hurt my butt, but what can we do? We cans till get off but that would be a waste of thousands of unearned dollars. The trip is going to be ten hours and fifteen minutes long, and then four weeks on the ground before getting home at5 last.

JFK 9PM

We’ve been taxiing around the airport for about forty minutes and it seems that we won’t leave the ground any time soon. I guess that the pone call informing me that the flight would be an hour shorter than planned was a bit premature. Who knows? We’ll take off from Macarthur field near the Hamptons at this rate, Jeez!

11: 45 PM, somewhere over Long Island, NY

WE take off at last—ten more hours of this and we should arrive around noon, New York time. I’ll be zombified for most of not all of the day, which’ll start any minute now.—I’m not sure how much sleep I’m supposed to get, as there’s a huge time lag between here and Jordan.

OCT 8th—Day One

7 AM (NY TIME) Somewhere over Europe

The Jordanian Dinar is worth more than a US buck and the visa bough at the airport costs about ten , of them which is affordable, but annoying. Syria is paid for and Lebanon is probably free. But there are exit charges as well and that is something to think about when the times comes. In the mean time I was able to lie down and get about six and a half hours sleep. According to the TV map, we’re over the toe of Italy, and are now heading over the eastern Mediterranean.

We’re going to land in two and a quarter hours, which means that there’s time enough for another nap….

Amman Jordan 7 PM (Moscow Time)

Things started going wrong from the minute I left the terminal. First there are no busses due to Ramadan, then there were no dorm beds due to Ramadan, however there was a hotel room. Then there were no restaurants open due to Ramadan, which is strange as it’s past sundown, and all those eateries should be open by now. I had a filling dinner and met some people from the trip, a new Zealand couple and an Aussie lady who lost her luggage in Bahrain. They seemed very nice. I’m going on a different tour in the morning and be back from the thing by five in the afternoon. This may have been a mistake, but we’re going to have to get back by five if we leave by seven. The guy’s very persuasive, I guess and it’s too late to get my forty bucks back.

Oct 9-Day Two

I had a restless night’s sleep. I kept getting up every whour sor so. I guess it was nervousness or something like that . I tried the internet at the hotel, but it didn’t work. I left my stuff at the Caravan hotel, although ZI didn’t check in as the registrar was nowhere to be found….that expensive day tour ZI shouldn’t have bought strts in about five to ten minutes or whenever that other guy shows up.

NOON:

We’ve been on the road since 7:30 and made about three stops—all archeological sites—Gadara and Pella, and Saladin’s nephew’s castle in Sjura. We’re making a curve around the western end of Jordan going north to the Syria border…at the Gadara ruins we could see the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights. Most of the time we’re just driving. I slept a good part of the time between the northeastern border and the castle. The Gadara ruins were rather extensive, and the castle which is in good shape despite earthquakes and the like, but it’s main attraction is the temperature, which is quite cool. We would have had lunch, but as it’s Ramadan, none of the restaurants are open. There’s a donkey carrying stuff…how Quaint!

Amman 8PM

The orientation meeting has started. Semi-independent travel. They like to use public transport and the group is a maximum of twelve and I’m not the only American here…the local culture is important: appropriate dress, not shorts, although that’s what I’m wearing…Mostly hotels except for the second night where we stay in a buduine tent. In general checkout times ar around eleven or noon. Breakfast is included except for Petra…always take a hotel cart for taxies. Extra incidentals are, of course, extras, and that includes laundry, most of what the guy’s saying are the usual safety precautions…the vehicles are all over the place, water sis scares as it’s a fucking desert, Ramadan is a problem where lunch is concerned. I may lose some weight.

Toronto Report # —3

The official opening press confrence is on the 17th and I won't be able to go 'cause it's in another country and my tickets aren't until the beginning of September.

I've seen one major flick already: Bob Gothwaite's Sleeping Dogs Lie which is a brave attempt to do something important, but fails. It was at Sundance.

Here are some of the rest of the major flicks announced already:

ALL THE KING'S MEN, Steve Zaillian, USA (Gala Presentation)

AWAY FROM HER, Sarah Polley, UK/Canada (Gala Presentation)

DIXIE CHICKS - SHUT UP AND SING, Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck, USA (Gala Presentation)

NEVER SAY GOODBYE, Karan Johar, India (Gala Presentation)
This opens in New York in a week

BABEL, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Mexico (Special Presentation)

THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY, Ken Loach, France/Ireland/UK/Italy/Spain/Germany (Masters)

BERNARD AND DORIS, Bob Balaban, USA, (Special Presentation)

PAN'S LABYRINTH, Guillermo Del Toro, Spain, (Special Presentation)

THE DOG POUND, Manuel Nieto Nas, Uruguay/Argentina/Canada/Spain, (Contemporary World Cinema)

BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!, Guy Maddin, USA/Canada, (Special Presentations)

CONGORAMA, Phillipe Farledeau, Luxembourg/Canada, (Special Presentations)

MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES, Canada, (Special Presentations)

EMPz4 LIFE, Allan King, Canada, (Masters)

The UN resolutions on Lebanon

While there's a war on we might as well have some background:

Resolution 425 (1978) and Resolution 1559 (2004)

Resolution 425 (1978) of 19 March 1978 [1]

The Security Council,

Taking note of the letters from the Permanent Representative of Lebanon [2] and from the Permanent Representative of Israel, [3]

Having heard the statements of the Permanent Representatives of Lebanon and Israel, [4]

Gravely concerned at the deterioration of the situation in the Middle East and its consequences to the maintenance of international peace,

Convinced that the present situation impedes the achievement of a just peace in the Middle East,

1. Calls for strict respect for the territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of Lebanon within its internationally recognized boundaries;

2. Calls upon Israel immediately to cease its military action against Lebanese territorial integrity and withdraw forthwith its forces from all Lebanese territory;

3. Decides, in the light of the request of the Government of Lebanon, to establish immediately under its authority a United Nations interim force for Southern Lebanon for the purpose of confirming the withdrawal of Israeli forces, restoring international peace and security and assisting the Government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area, the force to be composed of personnel drawn from Member States;

4. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the Council within twenty-four hours on the implementation of the present resolution.

Adopted at the 2074th meeting by 12 votes to none, with 2 abstentions (Czechoslovakia,
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). [5]

Resolution 1559 (2004) [6]
Adopted by the Security Council at its 5028th meeting, on 2 September 2004

The Security Council,

Recalling all its previous resolutions on Lebanon, in particular resolutions 425 (1978) and 426 (1978) of 19 March 1978, resolution 520 (1982) of 17 September 1982, and resolution 1553 (2004) of 29 July 2004 as well as the statements of its President on the situation in Lebanon, in particular the statement of 18 June 2000 (S/PRST/2000/21),

Reiterating its strong support for the territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of Lebanon within its internationally recognized borders,

Noting the determination of Lebanon to ensure the withdrawal of all non-Lebanese forces from Lebanon,

Gravely concerned at the continued presence of armed militias in Lebanon, which prevent the Lebanese Government from exercising its full sovereignty over all Lebanese territory,

Reaffirming the importance of the extension of the control of the Government of Lebanon over all Lebanese territory,

Mindful of the upcoming Lebanese presidential elections and underlining the importance of free and fair elections according to Lebanese constitutional rules devised without foreign interference of influence,

1. Reaffirms its call for the strict respect of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, unity, and political independence of Lebanon under the sole and exclusive authority of the Government of Lebanon throughout Lebanon;

2. Calls upon all remaining foreign forces to withdraw from Lebanon;

3. Calls for the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias;

4. Supports the extension of the control of the Government of Lebanon over all Lebanese territory;

5. Declares its support for a free and fair electoral process in Lebanon's upcoming presidential election conducted according to Lebanese constitutional rules devised without foreign interference or influence;

6. Calls upon all parties concerned to cooperate fully and urgently with the Security Council for the full implementation of this and all relevant resolutions concerning the restoration of the territorial integrity, full sovereignty, and political independence of Lebanon;

7. Requests that the Secretary-General report to the Security Council within thirty days on the implementation by the parties of this resolution and decides to remain actively seized of the matter.

We're going back to Toronto in September

in the meantime who's the shit who spammed me with 75 identical posts? Geez!

Fun with SPAM

I just got this a bit lower down.

Your blog is a nice source of dating personals photo related information. I liked reading it.
Regards, Kate @ Top Adult Personals

Katie, please read a bit of the blog before making yourself looking like a complete moron!!!! Jeez!

Superman Returns: A short history

Superman Five

A timeline with commentary

Few films have been in development hell longer than Superman Returns. The whole sordid story is far too long and involving to be done justice with anything less than a book, so what we’re just going to do a timeline, showing the starts and stops on a project that was on the boards for almost 20 years before it actually got into theaters. There were at least two or three lawsuits resulting over the film over the years, hence the title.

The journey begins even before Superman IV hit theaters.

Version 5.1

1984—Supergirl flops. The the father/son producing team of Alexander and Ilya Salkinds rent the rights to the franchise to Cannon pictures, run by the notorious team of Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan.

DC comics kills off Supergirl as part of it’s famous “Crisis on Infinite Earths” housecleaning project.

1986–Christopher Reeve comes up with a politically correct idea to revive the series, and works on a script with writers Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal, who did “Romancing the Stone” and it’s sequel. Golan and Globus say “why not?” and Sidney J. Furie, who did the “Ipcress File” and the original “Get Carter,” is set to direct.

1987–Test screenings for a 134 minute version Superman IV result in over a half hour of film being cut out. Golan and Glubus decide that this excess footage may be used for Superman V, with cheaper actors playing the main roles.

July 24––Superman IV opens to scathing reviews.

1988–pre preoduction begins on Superman V with Captain America (1988) director Albert Pyun at the helm.

Oct 8––Superboy premiers as a TV series. [the Salkinds still have the TV rights]

1989–Cannon pictures goes bankrupt, and Superman V, version one, is cancelled. The movie rights revert to the Salkinds.

Version 2

1989-92––The Salkinds commission Cary Bates and Mark Jones to write a script for a Superman V, version II based on the Superboy TV series. Gerard Christopher, who played Superboy/Clark Kent, on the series since season 3, is set to star, and is slated for 1994 release.

1992—DC comics kills off Superman, and immediately repents by bringing him and three imposters back.

1993–The Salkinds sell Warner Communications, which also owns DC comics, all rights to Surperman., and Version 2 is cancelled. Christopher auditions for Lois and Clark, the next Supes TV show, and is told he didn’t get the part because he was in the Superboy TV show.

2001—In“ Pueblo Film v. Warner Bros”: the corporate successor to the late Alexander Salkind’s interest in the Superman movies says studio intentionally delayed production of Superman V in order to get out of contract turning profits from Superman VI over to Salkind companies. Pueblo also claims that Warners used the extras without it’s permission.

Versions 3, 4 and 5

1994-96—Warners’ gives the Superman V project to producer Jon Peters, who commissions a script from Jonathan Lemkin.

…Lemkin’s script, which was based on the comic book series “The Death of Superman”
is dumped, and the job is given to Gregory Poirier, who had previously done porn.

…Piorier’s script is dumped, and the job is given to Kevn Smith, who after much wrangling and a couple of drafts comes up with something acceptable to the suits. Nicholas Cage is cast as Superman and Tim Burton is hired to direct.

1997—Burton fires Smith and hires Wesley Strick to “re-invent” the whole deal. Pre-production of Superman V, version III officially begins.

DC comics changes Superman’s costume. Fans howl, and blue suit is returned less than a year later.

1997-8— While the various toy companies with licenses try to design various contraptions, there is problems with the script.

Strick’s script is rejected by the WB. Akiva Goldsman is hired to rewrite it. Goldsman’s rewrite was rejected.
Burton hires Ron Bass to rewrite Goldsman’s rewrite of Strick’s script.
Bass’s rewrite was rejected.
Burton hired Dan Gilroy to rewrite Bass’ rewrite.

1998—Despite the chaos, construction of sets begins.

April —With less than two months to go before shooting starts, Warners’ rejects Gilroy’s version and puts the whole thing on hold. At this point, over $50 million had been spent.

April-Nov—Burton, Gilroy and exec Lorenzo DiBonaventura rewrite yet another script.

Dec/Jan 1999—Burton fired.

1999—Peters tries to get, among others, Michael Bay, Brett Ratner, Steven Norrington, Shekhar Kapur, and Martin Campbell to take over as director, none want the job with the Burton/Gilroy script.

Burton/Gilroy script dumped, William Wisher hired to start over.

2000—Nick Cage takes his $20 million pay or play fee and leave the project. Version III is officially dead, however, Paul Attansio is hired to do yet another treatment.

Wolfgang Petersen and Andrew Kevin Walker begin work on Superman Vs. Batman(version V).

2001—WB in negotiations to bring back Tim Burton, but this comes to nothing.

Peters and DiBonaventura hire music video and Charlie’s Angels director on board, this marks the beginning of what we might call Superman V. IV.


The lawsuit is settled for an unknown sum later on.

2002-3—Attansio’s script is rejected. J.J. Abrams his brought on board to give it another go.

The Abrams script is leaked like most of the others. The reaction is vicious, and is made even moreso when Abrams admits that it’s real

McG is replaced by Brett Ratner.

June 2002—Superman Vs. Batman (version V) is announced by Warners’ for summer 2004
Sept 16—Superman vs. Batman is officially cancelled.

2003—Everyone from Bryan Frasior to Ashton Kutcher are rumored to be the next Superman. Justin Timberlanke is reported to have been asked to play Jimmy Olsen.

March 15—Michael Bay’s contract expires.
June—Jonathan Frakes in talks to direct.
July—McG back on board.
Dec—Beyance Knowles rumored to play Lois Lane, not true

Early 2004—Constructions on sets begins sometime in Austrailia

April 13—McG gives presentation to Warner’s brass.
June 10—Brandon Routh tests for Superman.
June 17—Warners’ announces that McG may not actually direct.
June 24— Josh Schwartz signs on to script doctor
July 9—Brian Singer in talks for version IV, agrees to take job if script is dumped and he can start from scratch.
July15—McG leaves project for good, and is replaced by Brian Singer, who brings in Michael Dougherty & Dan Harris to write a completely new script. version IV is now dead, although set construction continues.

Version VI

Sept 15—first draft for Superman V, version VI is finished. It is based on the original movies from the 1970s.
Oct. 20—finished script approved.
Oct 2—Routh gets the lead role.
Nov 5—Superman V, Version V, or Superman Returns is given the official greenlight for a June 2006 release.

March 16, 2005—Filming starts at last.

At this point, Warner Bros. has already spent over $60 Million. The total costs clealy will make it the most expensive film to date.

My review of version six

Superman Returns

Directed by
Bryan Singer

It’s all about suspension of disbelief. A film like this is a success when you can get really into it and don’t really care about stuff like the villain planning to destroy half the world in order to increase his real estate holdings. Sure, it’s ridiculous, but this is fantasy, and an iconic one at that. This is the result of decades of work and hundreds of millions in development costs. If Bryan Singer and company can’t make you believe a man can fly, then its all a waste.
It’s not a waste at all.

Okay, Clark/Supes(Brandon Routh) has been gone for five years on a pilgrimage to the remains of what was once the planet Krypton, and when we get past the wonderful opening credits, we see his return to Earth, crash landing in his adoptive mother’s(Eva Marie Saint) farm in Kansas. Then we have what, in my opinion is the only major screw-up in the entire film, in a flashback, the teenaged
Clark(Stephan Bender), has glasses. He doesn’t need a disguise yet, why the heck does he need glasses? I mention this because the rest of the film is near perfect.

Clark/Supes then heads back to Metropolis, where he gets his old job back. It’s good that Singer decided to base the film on the Chris Reeve versions because it has a familiar lived-in look. Perry White (Frank Langella) looks like Perry White and Jimmy Olsen(Sam Huntington) looks like Jimmy Olsen, they even brought Jack Larson out of retirement as a bartender for comparison purposes. The acting is indeed dead on. Kate Bosworth is sooo good as Lois Lane that she makes you forget that Margot Kidder ever had the job. The conservatism of the film’s design is one of its strengths. We don’t have to get used to anything really new.

There’s obviously new stuff, of course. Lois is a mother to an illegitimate kid named Jason(Tristan Leabu) and has been engaged to Perry’s nephew Richard White(James Marsden) for years. Rich is actually one of Supe’s greatest rivals for Lois’ affections because he’s actually a wonderful guy, close to being a super-hero himself.

The other not-so-great thing about the film is Parker Posey as Kitty Kowalski, Lex Luthor’s(Kevin Spacey) love interest. It’s not that Posey is BAD in the role, far from it, it’s just that Spacey’s Lex is a genuine villain this time, not a cartoon from the old “Batman” TV show like Gene Hackman was. Lex’s henchmen look like thugs, even the one(David Fabrizio) who does a piano duet with Jason. Luthor’s plot to take over the world doesn’t seem as completely silly as it does when first mentioned in various spoilers. It actually makes some sense in a twisted sort of way.

The special effects are perfect. As Peter O’Toole once said, the power of the computer has finally gotten strong enough to replicate the human imagination. The action sequences are all that one hopes for. Brian Singer has hit one out of the park.

What is the right temperature?

Okay, if you go here:

you'll see an article about global warming, where it says that temperatures are the warmest in over four hundred years. It also states that there was an unusualally cold period called the little ice age which lasted through most of the late milleniumn.

Hence, so what? what is the proper normal temperature for the earth, the long, extreme winters the world suffered during the 14th-19th centuries, or now and the midevil warmspell?

Do you really want snow in September?

fun with New Mexico politics

J.R. Damron, the Repubican nominee for Governor, withdrew from the race. Exactly why this happened hasn't been made public. There's something very weird about that. I mean he went to all the trouble to win the primary and everything.

Strange.

fun with fan mail....

I got this in my inbox this morning:

In criticizing An Inconvenient Truth (http://www.nycny.com/movies/inconvenient_truth_an/index.html by calling Al Gore a “big fat liar,” Eric Lurio demonstrates how the “skeptics” of global warming make up their own analysis to prove their points. His statement that the film cites “a bogus survey of scientific papers on global warming in order to show that there's no disagreement on the subject” is not supported in any way, which is because it is completely without foundation. His “bogus survey” was published in one of the world’s leading scientific publications (Science magazine, volume 306, p. 1686) by a reputable scientist (N. Oreskes with the Department of History and Science Studies Program at the University of California in San Diego) only after careful peer review. Clearly, Mr. Lurio’s work never passed through such a peer review process, but truth and accuracy does not seem to concern “skeptics” like Mr. Lurio. Andrew Gunther ----- Andrew J. Gunther, Ph.D. Executive Director Center for Ecosystem Management and Restoration 4179 Piedmont Ave, Suite 325 Oakland, CA 94611 voice: (510) 420-1570 fax: (510) 420-1345 email: gunther@cemar.org ----- The author is a member of the Board of Directors of the Union of Concerned Scientists

There were clearly problems with the survey, and these complaints have been quite public. Notice that he doesn't mention the Little Ice Age, which Gore expicitly denied happening despite every single climatologist in the world aknowledges.

This is fun, especially how the personal attacks have nothing to do with anything.

Brooklyn FF: Day 8

This is the penultimate day of the festival, and there may or may not be some free screenings depending on the weather, which at the moment is rather good. Here are two more reviews, and they might be the last of the bunch depending if I decided to go to this evening's screenings:

Little Fugitive

Written and directed
by Joanna Lipper

There will always be a Coney Island. New York’s historic amusment district has seen both better and worse days, but that is neither here nor there. There’s an allure which will never leave, because even during it’s nadir during the 1970s and ‘80s, you could still feel it. But this film isn’t about that. This film is about hopelessness and desolation. To say this film is bleak is an understatement.

Joey’s(David Castro) family is about as dysfunctional as you can get. his father Sam (Peter Dinklage) is in prison and his mother Natalia(Justina Machado) spends all her time working or hanging out with her friends. Joey’s old brother Lenny (Nicolas Salgado) hates Joey, and when we meet them, he’s watching some bullys beat the crap out of his baby brother. Mom is furious when she finds out, but she doesn’t care all that much. She has a day off on Lenny’s birthday, and celebrates by going to Atlantic City with some friends, leaving the two brothers to care for themselves.

Being seven, Joey follows Lenny to target practice [illegal guns and that sort of thing], and the latter decides to pull a nasty practical joke, which leads him to became the title character. Lenny of course is filled with remorse and goes looking for him with their friend Destiny(Raquel Castro). Joey has some innocent adventures and fights off a predator(Brendan Sexton III). Then, just as the happy ending is on the horizon, the system gets them.

Exactly what Joanna Lipper wanted when she decided to do this remake [the 1951 version is considered one of the first modern “indies”] is unclear. This isn’t exactly a slice-of-life type flick, and it’s not all that entertaining. The ending is really a downer. The performances are fine, but not great enough to make up for the horribly depressing script. Don’t waste the bucks.

The OH in Ohio

Directed by
Billy Kent

Marilyn Monroe was wrong. Diamonds aren’t a girls best friend, her vibrator is. That’s to some extent the message of this silly trifle, which is about as lewd as you can get without actually getting just beyond PG-13 territory.

Screenwriter Adam Wierzbianski and first time director Billy Kent have attempted to make a new kind of sex farce, and while they’ve made some stabs in the right direction, they didn’t quite make it. Mores the pity.

Priscilla(Parker Posey) is what you might call…frigid. Her husband Jack(Paul Rudd) has been trying for years, but he’s never actually made her achieve orgasm. Out of frustration, he leaves her and moves into the garage. This may have been the best thing that has happened to them. Each gets to go on the classic “hero’s journey.”

Jack, a biology teacher is saved by Kristen(Mischa Barton), one of his students. Rarely has this sort of thing bee shown in such a positive light. The fact that she’s hot and looks about five years older than the character she portrays, makes the situation palatable. Priscilla’s journey on the other hand, is longer and more complex…

First she goes to a seminar on masturbation, signifying the cinematic comeback of Liza Minnelli in a delightfully over the top performance. Then she gets the abovementioned vibrator from
Heather Graham’s lesbo sex shoppe. Had it not been for the graphic subject matter, this would be something out of a mediocre TV sitcom. Don’t get me wrong, most of the jokes actually work, but this is too clever by half, and a bit too cutesie to boot.

Danny DeVito’s Larry the Pool Guy is not necessary to the movie. While Devito himself is terrific, he’s more of a dues-ex-machina than a real character. The ending isn’t all that well thought out.

This is a cute beginning, and Kent has a future ahead of him.

Brooklyn:In between screenings

It turns out that they are having a reception here in between screenings: selling munchies and red bull for about twice the price you can get the stuff in a supermarket, but that's what sponsers generally do. I just saw The oh in ohio, and it wasn't half bad. Wasn't all that great either. They also have a comptuer here for no real reason.

The shorts weren't that bad either. There was one about an old radical couple having sex. Not all that great, although some people find that humorous.

Now for home....

Brooklyn International film festival day seven

I haven't really been doing all that much when it comes to the festival for most of it, there's too much "normal" stuff to do, but I did go to see some more starting wednesday. The trip from Times Square to the Brooklyn museum isn't nearly that arduous and I managed to get into at least three more films. Here are two of them:

Lower City (Cidade Baixa)

written and directed
by Sérgio Machado

Salvidor, Bahia is in northeastern Brazil, south of the Amazon river. Here, rather than a tropical paradise, we’ve got a kind of tropical hell, where people live an existence of quiet, or in this case, loud desperation. Welcome to Brazil.

Karinna(Alice Braga) is a prostitute flitting from one big city to another, looking for work as a stripper and turning tricks when that’s not exactly available. She’s on her way to Salvidor and has just missed the bus from another city on the river, when she negotiates a deal where for 40 cueseros and a screw for both of them, Deco(Lázaro Ramos) and Naldinho(Wagner Moura) will give her a ride on their trawler.

Love is in the air. So is hate. We’ve got a classical love triangle where everything’s in the shit beforehand. Karinna now works at a strip joint, while her two “boyfriends” haul freight and commit petty crimes for a local hood named Sergipano(José Dumont). Deco, who aspires to be a fighter, and Naldinho, who aspires to nothing, fight and make up, screw Karinna, and fight over her all over again.

Meanwhile, she’s preggers, and we don’t know who the father is. It’s typical for this kind of thing, but then despite the fact that none of these people are the least bit nice, we find ourselves invested in them. That’s what good moviemaking is all about. The local doesn’t seem as exotic as are some films of this type, mainly because it’s urban and to some extent, the slums of most cities seem the same.

This is nothing really special, but it gets the job done.

THE LAST QUEEN OF THE EARTH

Written and Directed
by Mohammad Reza Arab

A simple yet powerful film about a young Afghani immigrant who works in a in Iran. As a US-led attack becomes...

When in doubt, blow stuff up. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb. Especially when the filmmaker is completely inept. The reason we have this thing at the Brooklyn film festival is that it’s exotic as hell and taking us into a different world is what film is all about. However bad acting, editing and dialogue doesn’t balance the positive values of seeing the alien out.

It’s somewhere in eastern Iran. Our hero is dreaming of his wife on the Afghan border and wonders what became of her. One of his supervisor confesses to withholding our hero’s letters from home in order that he would stay at the Henna grinding factory.

But the guy is forgiven and our hero sings a song. However, it turns out the date is 9/11/2001, and the World Trade Center has just been taken down. So he has to go.

Arab doesn’t have much of an imagination. Sure the guy gets robbed, but he gets help to find the robbers from some friendly thugs, who get the crap beaten out of them offstage, He crosses the border “illegally” and the Iranian police shoot a straggler. The Taliban arrests him, but one of them is a friend of his….

It’s all typical obsolete melodrama with lots of explosions. Lots of people die even though our hero is pretty much unscathed. The climax is really dumb, too. Fortunately nobody will ever see this again.

The Brooklyn International Film festival day one

So with Staten Island out of the way [too much rain!], we head to the Brooklyn Museum, where for the ninth year in a row they've got a film festival. This year, they're actually going to have a bunch of stuff which is actually going to get distributed. The first selection was followed by a party where they served Red Bull and beer.

The Former didn't work, as I went fast asleep as soon as I got home and it wasn't even that late, however it was raining cats and dogs, so to speak...same thing with the entire weekend so far. Here are a a couple of the films...[okay I saw one at Sundance...you've probably forgotten, so I'm putting it up again]

Sangue - La Morte non Esiste

Written and directed
by Libero De Rienzo

Yuri(Elio Germano) and Stella(Emanuela Barilozzi) are half siblings. The former came into the world as the product of rape and is a symbol of original sin. He’s needy and a bit of a moron, but Stella loves him anyway even though she refuses to tell him. She’s headed to New York to study ballet and he’s headed nowhere, but in the meantime, there’s a rave to attend…

The film is set in three acts. The first is all about Stella, who has errands to do and people to see. At first she seems pretty normal, or at least sane. She loves practical jokes, and plays at least one on Yuri. We don’t know where exactly this film is going. Are the two going to break taboos and screw? Will they go to their uncle’s wedding? Do we really care? All we know is that Yuri is an incompetent drug dealer and is paranoid. I’m not sure we feel for him, as he’s such a baby, and we are rather happy that Stella’s getting out of there.

Then they get to the rave, which is a complete waste of time. Yuri breaks down, proclaims he’s gay, and preens, while Stella gets some advice from a hindu guru(Libero De Rienzo) and doesn’t actually get it. It’s kind of a metaphor for the whole film. There’s another chapter, which is about Yuri trying to figure life out in the early morning hours while he and she detoxify themselves. This is actually the boring part. Apparently auteur De Rienzo is bored too, because he sends in the Nazi storm troopers to break everything up. Stella and Yuri escape only to discover that there’s a guy named
Bruno(Luca Lionello) sleeping in the back seat.

I guess it’s the boredom and pointlessness of the first two thirds of the film that inspired De Rienzo the car chase. This is a movie, you have to have a car chase right? Especially with guns blazing. Then there’s the final chapter, entitled “Comic Finale,” which basically changes the film entirely, from a philosophical exercise in cinematic navel gazing to slapstick comedy. This is actually rather funny, but seem a bit tacked on. It doesn’t fit even though it’s the best part of the film. What a waste.

The question is whether or not there’s any entertainment factor here. Until the last section, there really isn’t any, but one can see how Europe has decided to tackle the decline of it’s culture in the first decade of the 21st century. Feh!

Factotum

Written and Directed
by Bent Hamer

Hank Chinaski (Matt Dillon) fancies himself a writer. That he may be, but for the most part he’s a bum. Going from low-paying job to low-paying job, while he and his girlfriend Jan (Lili Taylor) screw and drink. This cannot last, and they part. Then our hero takes up with Laura (Marisa Tomei), who’s being kept by Pierre (Didier Flamand), who runs a home for wayward floozies.

Welcome to the world of Charles Bukowski, the greatest slacker of the 20th century.

Exactly, why should we care about this loser? Because Hamer has used the exquisite prose of Bukowski to the maximum advantage, making Hank and his useless friends somewhat interesting. Also, we have bravura performances by Dillon and Taylor, which are Oscar quality, but probably won’t get much kudos because the characters and the story are quite pathetic, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

Watching this film is sort of like watching a train wreck, it’s horrible, but you can’t take your eyes off of it. Which means that it’s probably worth the bucks for a bargain matinee. This is one of the best bad movies of the entire year.

The Staten Island Film festival

Does Staten Island even deserve a film festival? With the abuse the distaff boro has given us in Manhatten for the last century or so, probably not, but on the other hand, everyone else in the world his having one, so who's the right to actually complain about it?

The fest began in the beautifully restored St.George theater, just up the hill from the ferry terminal. The people were very nice, and there it ends, for the opening night film is among the worst of the year. If the rest of the flicks are anywhere near as bad, then God help it.

Here's the review:

The Celestine Prophecy

Directed by
Armand Mastroianni

It’s an old technique: “a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down.” Coat your philosophical crapola with a fictional veneer, preferably an adventure story with lots of sex and violence, and you’ll at least get the general public to think about the stuff.

That is what made James Redfield’s silly book a best seller a decade ago, and with “The Da Vinci Code” being adapted into a film, Redfield obviously felt left out, so he financed a movie version himself.

One would think that since the book sold 14 million copies, Hollywood would have bought the film rights waay back then (they might have, I dunno), but they didn’t. After seeing this turd, I can understand why.

John Woodson (Matthew Settle) is a teacher at a parochial school somewhere in the ‘States. He gets “laid off” due to budget cuts, and when he gets home to mope, the phone rings. It’s an old friend(Robyn Cohen), who tells him about some ancient Jewish texts found in of all places, Peru, so with nothing better to do, he gets a flight out the very next day to check it out.

Well the Catholic church and the Peruvian Junta don’t like the idea of a New Age cult taking over the world, so semi-evil Cardinal Sebastian (Hector Elizondo) and very evil Mr. Jenson(Jurgen Prochnow) have decided to wipe everyone involved with the texts out. John is saved by Wil (Thomas Kretschmann), and the two of them flee to the rain forest, where they meet the rest of the cult in a luxurious mansion…

What follows is philosophical discussion punctuated with gunfire, and believe me when I tell you, there’s nowhere nearly enough of the latter. There is nothing in this movie that is anywhere near interesting, the acting is wooden, even though much of the cast can actually act, the plot far too contrived [actually, the contrivance is part of “insight #2,” or something like that], and writing is horrid.

There is no sugar coating here, and this may actually qualify for the Razzie awards, yeeesh!