The Filtnib’s Progress

French wine and the danger of a warmer climate

September 6, 2009 by estherbintliff

The Rhone river, seen from a Domaine Vernay vineyard

Christine Vernay was on holiday in Missouri when she got the call. It was August 12 2003 and the French vineyard owner was not due to return home for 10 days; the harvest on her Rhône valley estate would begin in late September. But then a friend from Condrieu called her husband’s mobile phone.

“The grapes have ripened early. You need to come home now,” he said.

France was sweltering in the most extreme heat wave on record. Christine and her husband, Paul Ansellem, caught the first flight back but by the time they reached the vineyards most of the grapes in their 18 hectare estate had shrivelled on the vine.

Instead of rows of plump, light golden fruit, the couple found shrunken berries, burnt brown by the sun. “We’d never seen anything like it,” says Christine, a petite 52-year-old mother of two, who took over the renowned Vernay estate from her father in 1997. She scrambled to arrange a harvest within three days of their return. Even so, the vineyard produced only half its usual volume of wine that year. The grapes were simply too desiccated.

Ms Vernay’s experience offers a stark preview of what scientists say could be the future of the wine industry in southern Europe. Heat waves like that of 2003 will occur with increasing frequency in coming decades, they predict, while average yearly temperatures will continue to rise.

Martin Beniston, a senior climate scientist at the University of Geneva, and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says: “Current research suggests that by the end of the 21st century, one summer out of two will be at least as hot as 2003. Which implies that certain summers may be even hotter. Where one heat wave summer can have a beneficial effect on some grapes, several in a row would take a heavy toll on all but the most robust species.”

Since 2003, every summer but one – 2007 – has been hotter than the average of the 30 years before, according to France Météo, the meteorological office. This summer was France’s fifth hottest since 1950, with the average temperature 1.3° C above normal.

In August, for five days in a row, temperatures in southern France reached 40° C; in Languedoc and Beaujolais, grape-picking began in late August, while even in northern France wine growers are preparing for a premature harvest.

“It will be a very early vintage, without a doubt,” says Jean-Louis Vézien, director of CIVA, the Alsace organisation of wine growers and handlers.

Franck Thomas, European sommelier of the year in 2000, believes the result is already altering French wine “profoundly”. “If you harvest earlier . . . the alcohol content is higher [and] it unbalances the wine. For instance, with red wine, you have the maturity of the alcohol but not the tannins coming from the skin. So you lose the freshness, and the wine becomes tart and unpleasant.”

He is not alone in his concern. In August, Thomas and 49 of France’s top chefs, sommeliers and wine producers wrote to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, arguing that climate change was threatening the survival of the wine industry and pushing for France to demand a 40 per cent cut in global carbon emissions by 2020 at this December’s Copenhagen conference.

“French wines, jewels of our shared, cultural heritage, elegant and refined, are in danger,” they wrote in the letter, which was published in Le Monde. Their fear is that rising temperatures in southern Europe could render centuries-old practices of wine growing irrelevant. Grapes across the Mediterranean would roast on the vine before reaching full maturity.

France’s position as a revered producer of wine is thanks to centuries of cultivation, after the Greeks and the Romans imported techniques of viticulture into the Burgundy, Bordeaux and Rhône regions. But it rests on the delicate balance of climate and soil.

“France’s primacy at the top level of winemaking is an accident of nature,” says Alun Griffiths, wine director at Berry Brothers & Rudd. “France just happens to be in the perfect position to make a range of fantastic wines. It’s considered a reasonably marginal climate – just a bit farther north in Britain it’s not quite hot enough; Africa is too hot.”

If that changes, the specificity of certain wines could be destroyed for ever, according to Franck Thomas. “In 2003, the wines lost their identity. It was very bizarre. Wine from the Loire valley tasted like wine from the Rhône. If we don’t do something now, in 30 years we will have that problem every year.”

The village of Condrieu is about 40km south of Lyon, and overlooks the wide Rhone river at its only turn. Curving upwards from the Rhone are rounded, lumpy hills; not terribly high, but steep.

As far as the eye can see, vineyards stipple the light brown hills with green. The vines grow in orderly, narrow rows, defying the inclines, as if someone has combed the hills with a green-fingered brush.

Ms Vernay’s father, Georges, made 54 harvests before handing over the running of his Condrieu estate to his daughter. In all but two of those years, the harvests fell at the end of September. Now that has changed.

“Since I took over we’ve had 10 consecutive years in which our harvests have been about 10 days earlier than normal,” says Christine Vernay. “The vineyards are a witness to climate change as it is happening now. Of course we can think of ways to adapt in the short-term, but it’s most important that we start stopping or slowing down the change in climate. Otherwise we are facing real catastrophe.”

This article was first published in the Financial Times, here.

Posted in Travelling, acclimatizing | Tagged climate change, climate change and wine, domaine vernay, financial times, french wine | Leave a Comment »

Bon Iver Forever

September 2, 2009 by estherbintliff

I got a bit of a shock the last time I decided to check out the 25 most played list on my ipod. In the two years that I’ve owned it, a number of key tracks have jostled for space there; every so often I’d download an album or a few songs, and from those, one or two tracks might make it.

There were the stalwart inheritance tracks; the music that I work to; the music I go to sleep to when my brain’s still working. Let’s just say the churn rate was very low.

Imagine my surprise when one artist and his one and only album managed to supercede every other track on my ipod after just three months, taking not just the no.1 and no.2 and no.3 spot in the most listened to list, but every other spot until the album runs out.

If you know Bon Iver, and his 2008 solo debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, you may understand. It’s an incredibly beautiful album.

It’s not brash or pushy. The first time you hear it, it doesn’t get you in a stranglehold; it’s more of a gradual, stealthy bewitching. By the third and fourth times you don’t really want to hear anything else. I didn’t consciously listen to the whole entire album on repeat hundreds of times, but that’s what must have happened.

The ‘Iver’ in Bon Iver is pronounced like the French ‘hiver’ for winter. His real name is Justin Vernon, and the story of For Emma – how it came about, from what pain and solitude it sprung – is beautiful and worthy of myth-making in its own right.

You can learn about it here, in a short, sweet video interview Vernon did with the Guardian, that includes an acoustic performance of one of the album’s best tracks.

You can also listen to track 3 on the album, Skinny Love, here.

Posted in Listening | Tagged bon iver, for emma forever ago | Leave a Comment »

Why guardian.co.uk keeps getting better

August 13, 2009 by estherbintliff

The Guardian’s latest audio slideshow: a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the set design for A Streetcar Named Desire, which is currently playing at London’s Donmar, starring Rachel Weisz. It’s informative, beautiful and brief enough to enjoy in a coffeebreak at work. Plug in your headphones and press play.

Posted in Listening | Tagged audio slideshow, behind the scenes, streetcar named desire, the guardian | Leave a Comment »

Trailer of the Week: Lorna’s Silence

August 7, 2009 by estherbintliff

Very few directors make successful films about poverty, or about the people whose lives are spun out in its shadow. It’s not only that Hollywood producers have little interest in the subject, the blame also rests with us, the audience. It’s rare that we feel inclined to watch truth in all its hopeless chaotic injustice.

Perhaps this vacuum exists because the stories behind contemporary poverty seem too familiar, too inevitable. Because we know there are no simple solutions and therefore happy endings are unlikely.

In 19th century England, many outrages were brought to light through parliamentary lobbying, popular fiction or local campaigners. In Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies we meet Tom, a child chimney sweep, who

cried half his time, and laughed the other half. He cried when he had to climb the dark flues, rubbing his poor knees and elbows raw; and when the soot got into his eyes, which it did every day in the week; and when his master beat him, which he did every day in the week..”

The book proved a partial catalyst in the passing of the 1864 Act for the Regulation of Chimney Sweepers. Dickens’ Oliver Twist helped usher in reform of the workhouses.

Perhaps these past social wrongs – child chimney sweeps, malnourished orphans – were in some sense easier than ours: easier to identify, to condemn, to regulate. The abuses we are left with seem truly obstinate. If you watch Lukas Moodysson’s heartrending film, Lilya 4-Ever, about sex trafficking – one of the worst scourges of our society – you will be left feeling not only traumatised but also powerless: there are already laws against it, there are whole police divisions working on it, and yet still women are being trafficked for sex.

All of this is partly why the Dardenne brothers are cultural heroes of our time: they make films that star the poorest and most marginalised of our society. The other reason is that they are simply outstanding film-makers.

Their latest film, Lorna’s Silence, is about an Albanian immigrant in Belgium, who wants to open a snackbar with her boyfriend. In order to do this, she must become a citizen. So she marries a heroin addict, on the proviso that after some time, they will divorce. The problem is, the heroin addict starts to get better. And her underworld handler, who arranged the marriage, has another scheme: Lorna is to marry a Russian mafia member who also needs citizenship, and if necessary, kill her addict husband. Talk about moral dilemmas.

Exploring the limited options of impoverished people in tight corners is a Dardenne speciality. Their 2005 film, L’Enfant, which won the Palme d’Or, is shocking because it shows with brutal honesty what happens when a ‘child’ – someone who, though adult, has been given no moral or ethical guidance – conceives their own child. It is a film that, like Moodysson’s Lilya, is difficult to watch, yet it manages to be compelling, and more extraordinarily, to make us care deeply for its damaged protagonists.

These are filmmakers on the outskirts of the industry, and their films are only ever given limited release; they do not promise escapism. But still we should be grateful they exist at all.

Posted in Watching | Tagged Dardennes, L'Enfant, Lorna's Silence, poverty in film | Leave a Comment »

Deconstructing Tarzan

July 26, 2009 by estherbintliff

When Edgar Rice Burroughs was 35, he decided to try his hand at pulp fiction. He’d already been a soldier, a railway policeman and a pencil sharpener wholesaler. Inspired by the pulp magazines in which his pencil sharpeners were advertised, he concluded that he could write stories “just as entertaining, and probably a whole lot more so”.

His first novel, serialised in 1912, was set on Mars. For his second, he chose another “alien” territory: the African jungle. Burroughs, who lived in Chicago, had never been to Africa. Nonetheless, one of the most enduring fictional icons of the 20th century was born.

Tarzan was a sensation, swinging effortlessly from novel to comic book to cinema screen. Since 1912, Tarzan and the Apes has been translated into 56 languages, while the character has spawned almost 15,000 comic books and 42 feature films.

A new exhibition at Paris’s Musée du quai Branly tracks Tarzan’s impact on popular culture. Curator-anthropologist Roger Boulay spent 18 months amassing hundreds of items, ranging from first editions of the novels, which he acquired on ebay, to a stuffed crocodile and a tunic made of panther fur from Mali. He is most interested in the power of association: how cultural iconography is played out in different eras and media.

One of the first objects in the display is an arrangement of glossy miniature toys: a plastic Batman, a Catwoman and a Tarzan glued together like an ultra-contemporary triptych. Boulay made this himself, and has placed it close to a painting of Hercules by Toussaint Dubreuil, dating from 1618, and some suspended Disney figurines.

Clearly, they are related, these strapping, sinewy superheroes. The overlapping genres – painting, sculpture, promotional toy – testify to the easy translation of myths across time, the appeal of an archetypal figure, in this case the superhuman navigating a hostile natural world.

The highlight of the exhibition is a treasure-trove of original comic storyboards, including those by the master illustrators Hal Foster and Burne Hogarth, alongside a room devoted to the Tarzan films. The hand of the censor is evident in both media, as the eroticism inherent in the myth became too outrageous for regulators. There is a beautiful scene censored from the 1934 film Tarzan and His Mate, in which Jane swims naked underwater, while a 1947 comic storyboard showing a topless Jane appears with the revised version, in which she is more modestly attired in a leopard-skin bikini.

Elsewhere, a huge figure of King Kong, borrowed from the promotional department of Peter Jackson’s 2005 film, signals not only our post-Darwin obsession with primates, but also the repetition of a familiar scenario played out in Tarzan and the Kong narrative: the vulnerable white woman snatched by a primitive beast. A more explicitly transgressive version is also on show, a first edition of the 1925 erotic novel Ouha King of the Monkeys, in which a millionaire’s daughter falls in love with an orangutan.

Edgar Rice Burroughs and Elmo Lincoln Disappointingly, Boulay does not interrogate the disturbing context of these images. As Alex Vernon points out in his book On Tarzan, they reflect a deep-seated anxiety over interracial relationships, extending from colonial times into the mid-20th century. Burroughs (pictured right) neutralised the issue by making his ape-man the descendant of British nobility, allowing Jane a relationship with a primitive “other” while protecting her from its real implications.

Raymond Corbey, an anthropologist and specialist in the ape-man phenomenon, says that if the exhibition does not unveil the “true” Tarzan, it is not necessarily Boulay’s fault. “These images of Africa as the ‘other’ are deeply ingrained in European cultural identity,” he argues. “It’s very hard for a curator to overcome that. The rhetorical force of the images is so strong it can overpower any attempt at deconstruction.”

The exhibition is in many ways fun; visually exhilarating and light-hearted. But in celebrating a western pulp version of Africa, Tarzan! seems at odds with the ethos of the Musée du quai Branly, which opened just three years ago with the express purpose of displaying non-western art. Boulay insists this is the point: his focus is the myth of Africa as perpetuated by the Tarzan stories, not the reality.

But the museum has surely missed an opportunity in bypassing Tarzan’s more troublesome elements. The ape-man character and his continued popularity is ripe for deconstruction; in 1999, Disney created a Tarzan who exists in an Africa without Africans. Black characters were entirely removed from the narrative. The studio seemingly didn’t know what to do with the deeply racist presentation of Africans in Burroughs’ novels. In itself, this cultural evasive action is fascinating, and could have been usefully explored. Instead, the exhibition ultimately schools us in nothing but the power of myth itself.

This was first published in the FT arts section.

Posted in Going Out, Thinking | Tagged edgar rice burroughs, king kong, musee du quai branly, tarzan, tarzan and the apes | Leave a Comment »

Pre-pre-pre trailer: Fair Game

July 22, 2009 by estherbintliff

In terms of telling complex stories to mass audiences, film is the most effective communication medium we have. So I’m pretty excited about this new film: Fair Game will document the Valerie Plame affair.

It’s a story that truly deserves to be immortalised on celluloid, providing an astonishing insight into the depth of iniquity reached by the Bush administration and the ruthless power of a corrupt political machine.

Directed by Doug Liman, who made The Bourne Identity, Swingers and Go, it also stars two of my favourite actors, Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, and is due for release some time in 2010.

Posted in Watching | Tagged fair game, judith miller, naomi watts and sean penn, valerie plame | Leave a Comment »

Michael Sandel on markets and the common good

July 4, 2009 by estherbintliff

The last of this year’s Reith lectures by Michael Sandel, professor of government at Harvard University, is fascinating and incisive, going straight to the heart of the dilemma facing our political leaders today: how to learn from the financial crisis and find a new way of governing.

Sandel manages to make his analysis accessible while instructive; as one listener wrote on twitter: “Listening to podcasts of Sandel’s Reith lectures on way to work is like taking my brain to the gym”.

You can listen to all four of the lectures on the BBC iplayer.

Some highlights here:

For three decades, the governing philosophy of the United States and Britain was defined by the faith that markets are the primary instrument for achieving the public good. The financial crisis has put this faith in question.. The era of market triumphalism has come to an end. But we have yet to find our way to a new governing philosophy. Even President Obama has yet to articulate one…”

As a governing philosophy… the task of correcting market failures is too humble and too narrow. Democratic governance is radically devalued if reduced to the role of handmaiden to the market economy. Democracy is about more than fixing and tweaking and nudging incentives to make markets work better…”

The flight from moral judgement and moral argument in politics predates the era of market triumphalism. It found expression – on both sides of the Atlantic – beginning in the 1950s and 60s, partly as a reaction against fascist and communist ideologies, and partly as an attempt to spare politics from becoming embroiled in religious strife. And it also reflected a growing faith in economics as a value-neutral science.”

Posted in Listening | Tagged iplayer, michael sandel, reith lectures | Leave a Comment »

Trailer of the Week: The Hurt Locker

July 3, 2009 by estherbintliff

Bomb disposal scenes are a surefire shortcut to suspense. Doom-laden while at the same time full of hope; engrossing but maddeningly tense. The pared-down simplicity of the narrative – after all, there are only two possible endings when a bomb is within inches of your protagonist – is easy for audiences to grasp and even easier to hold onto. And the tiniest, momentary actions, the snip of a coloured wire, weigh heavy with potential catastrophe.

All this should help Kathryn Bigelow’s new film The Hurt Locker, which follows an elite bomb disposal unit in Baghdad, escape the curse of unpopularity that’s beset Iraq-themed films thus far. Her refusal to wade into the ideology of the war could also make the film slip down a little easier with patriotic americans.

The film promises to be more than just a succession of mindless set pieces: Bigelow is an artist who studied painting before moving to Hollywood; she’s also an intriguing, provocative aesthete of violence, whose first short film in 1978 showed two men fighting, accompanied by an academic voiceover deconstructing the scene and its significance. That fascination with destruction as art – the “cinematic heart attack” – translates into incredible film-making. You can have a peek at her style – courtesy of the NY Times - here.

And, obviously, in the trailer below.

Posted in Watching | Tagged jeremy renner, kathryn bigelow, the hurt locker, trailer of the week | Leave a Comment »

Home by Yann Arthus Bertrand

June 5, 2009 by estherbintliff

This is an incredibly beautiful film.

You can see it, all 90 minutes of it, on youtube, for free.

It took 2 and a half years to make, with 500 hours of footage filmed across 54 countries.

It may make you cry.

In 50 years, in a single lifetime, the earth has been more radically changed than by all previous generations of humanity”

An hour and a half might seem a long time to devote to a documentary but I promise you every single perfectly shot image will show you something you have never seen before, have never contemplated or never fully understood.

Posted in Watching, acclimatizing | Tagged climate change, home, yann arthus-bertrand | Leave a Comment »

Climate change: Come back and tell me when you’re sure?

June 3, 2009 by estherbintliff

“Climate change is not something that is waiting to happen. It is having a real impact, on communities and individuals around the world. Some of them are losing their islands. Others have lost their farmland”

So says Kofi Annan in the short film “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis“, released to coincide with a new report on the human impact of climate change by the Global Humanitarian Forum last Friday.

The report’s headline figure – 300,000 people are already dying each year because of climate change, and that number will rise to 500,000 deaths a year by 2030 – sounds scary enough to provoke some kind of action. But then again, that’s what the Stern Review was meant to do in 2006. Unfortunately, precious little has been achieved in the intervening three years, despite the added impetus of the four IPCC reports in 2007. Which begs the question: why are all these reports falling on deaf ears?

Richard Cable, writing in the BBC’s Blog of Bloom, is scathing about the GHF effort, complaining that the report:

“contains so many extrapolations derived from guesswork based on estimates inferred from unsuitable data sets that you have to ask some serious questions about the methodology.”

Pretty strong criticism. The calculations in the report are based on data provided by the World Bank, the World Health Organisation, the UN, the Potsdam Insitute For Climate Impact Research, major insurance companies and Oxfam. The GHF report admits in its very first pages: “These figures represent averages based on projected trends over many years and carry a significant margin of error. The real numbers could be lower or higher.“

Of course it’s essential to interrogate the information we are fed, and for that reason Cable is doing us a favour by questioning this report’s accuracy. Not all predictions are created equal. And I don’t know enough about prediction methodology to evaluate the value of GHF’s numbers, but I do know that in 2000, climate change killed 150,000 people, according to the UN and the World Health Organisation. Which is enough to make it a pretty big killer.

Aside from that, I find Mr Cable’s criticism interesting and enlightening in itself, because his problem with the report exactly pinpoints why we typically find it so difficult to engage in the climate change issue. So much of climate change science is about projecting into the future, and thus – inevitably – relies on “guesswork” and “extrapolations”.

I first got a sense of this problem in 2007, when researching an article on climate refugees. The leading expert on the subject is Professor Norman Myers. He told me he’d struggled to get anyone to listen to his concerns on the phenomenon since he first wrote about it in 1995. He explained:

I feel (environmental refugees) is one of those sleeper issues that is bubbling away in the background and gathering pace. It’s very unfortunate. It’s against all humanitarian instincts and yet it’s as if the global community has turned its back on this…

This is a prime example of what I call scientific uncertainty and public policy. In many ways we know there’s a big problem out there but we don’t have any exact objective figures as yet. But we do know it’s in the many millions. At the same time we almost certainly know it’s not a hundred million.

If you go to a policymaker and say we’ve got a big problem, they say, tell me about it, tell me an exact number… and if you say well we’re not quite sure yet, they’ll be so pleased, they’ll say “Come back and tell me when you are sure“. Because that’s a good way for them to sidestep the issue.

“Come back and tell me when you are sure” is shorthand for what the world has been telling climate scientists for decades. No-one likes being wrong, and no-one likes spending time, money or energy on a threat they don’t believe in. So far, so human. But how much evidence do we need? Now that actual climate refugees are knocking on the doors of developed nations and asking for aid, Professor Myers’ expertise is back in demand, and funnily enough his figure of 200 million refugees by 2050 – which he first suggested in 1995 – is now being promoted as news. Myers himself has admitted this figure is based on “heroic extrapolations”. For now, it’s the best we have. There’s a lesson here.

Faced with possibilities, probabilities and very few certainties, we’re forced to make informed judgements, based on a set of questions such as:

* why would this person or organisation lie to me? One of the reasons governments took Nicholas Stern’s report so seriously was because he was not an environmental activist but an economist, and he looked at climate change in order to predict its likely economic cost.

* What qualifications does the predictor have, and what is their track record? The Met Office, for example, publishes statistics on how accurate their weather forecasts are – pretty darn accurate, actually.

* And, is there a consensus view that we can compare this prediction against? For instance in the climate change debate, the IPCC’s exhaustive Nobel Prize winning reports are a pretty good scientific consensus to work from.

Based on the criteria above, I have personally come to the decision that climate change is real, is spectacularly urgent, and is a threat to the survival of the world in the coming century if we don’t act now. It’s of course possible that if we do, we will avoid the worst case scenarios that scientists have begun to predict. Which would be great. Bonus – we get a healthier, more sustainable planet AND we don’t face global catastrophe. Hmm. Somehow I’m more concerned that the human tendency to wait til the last minute, even deciding to ’sit out’ projected disasters in the hope that they’ll never happen, could yet retain the upper hand.

Posted in Thinking, acclimatizing | Tagged anatomy of a silent crisis, blog of bloom, climate change, norman myers | 2 Comments »

Trailer of the Week: Terminator Salvation

May 23, 2009 by estherbintliff

Sometimes trailers don’t do justice to a film. Other times, they showcase a certain magic that the actual movie sadly never attains. I have a feeling that might be the case with Terminator: Salvation, which has been notching up some pretty miserable reviews since it was released on May 21st in the US.

Stephanie Zacharek in Salon complains the film has “no brains and no soul; it’s just a mass of stiff, creaking metal joints”, while the Hollywood Reporter says it’s “terminally sullen”.

More supportive – while riffing playfully on the same robot theme – is A.O. Scott in the NY Times, who starts off by calling it “sturdy and serviceable” – hardly ringing praise – but goes on to applaud the film’s “brutal integrity”:

With its clanks and creaks and broken-down contraptions, this movie is a battered Wall-E to Star Trek’s sleek and seamless Eve.

Which is fitting, since part of the point of the Terminator movies is to register ambivalence about technological progress, which fills our lives with all kinds of cool, convenient stuff that somehow brings an intimation of our eventual obsolescence.”

I quite like the sound of that, but as with any cult franchise, there are of course many purists squirming in horror at the idea of the ridiculously named McG trying to steer the Terminator behemoth into glory. As my interest in the films was fairly late acquired (I was far too scared to ever watch them before I was officially allowed to aged 18, and only then because my dad told me they were works of considerable cinematic achievement), I don’t feel too concerned about where the franchise goes next – I’m just happy the others were made, and so well. I am however, slightly put off Christian Bale after I heard his ridiculously aggressive on-set rant against the director of photography on the film. Unbelievable scenes.

Terminator: Salvation is in UK cinemas from Wednesday 3rd June.

Posted in Watching | Tagged christian bale, terminator salvation, trailer of the week | Leave a Comment »

Crazed folk pop hits Eurovision

May 15, 2009 by estherbintliff

As I’m sure you’ve already pencilled in your diary, the final of the Eurovision song contest takes place in Moscow, tomorrow night.

The UK has somehow made it into the final despite the appalling dullness of its entry, It’s My Time, sung by Jade Ewen. I wouldn’t bother clicking on the link if I were you. Much more entertaining is Norway’s entry, written and sung by a 23-year old called Alexander Rybak. It’s appropriately eurovision-awful but in the best way possible.

Mr Rybak, who looks roughly eleven years old, is like some kind of demonic violin-playing elf crossed with Dan Radcliffe. His lyrics are hilariously bad (“That was then, but then it’s true”) while his background dancers seem to be enacting a scissor-kicking mythical narrative that bears no relation to the song itself. The whole effect is curiously pleasurable.

Posted in Listening | Tagged Alexander Rybak, eurovision 2009, eurovision norway, fairytale eurovision | 2 Comments »

Rodrigo Rosenberg: If you are watching this message, it’s because I was murdered

May 14, 2009 by estherbintliff

Rodrigo Rosenberg was born in Guatemala in 1962. After completing an undergraduate degree at Rafael Landivar University, he studied international law at the University of Cambridge, and later took a masters in commercial law at Harvard.

In 1987, Rodrigo Rosenberg co-founded his own law firm, Rosenberg Marzano Marroquin-Pemueller & Asociados. He had four children. He was appointed Vice Dean of his old alma-mater, the Law School at Rafael Landivar.

Last Sunday, while Mr Rosenberg was cycling through Guatemala City, he was shot dead.

In the video Mr Rosenberg made predicting his own murder, he does not come across as a deluded conspiracy theorist. Dressed smartly, he enunciates clearly, explaining why he believes his impending death would be the work of the Guatemalan president, Alvaro Colom. The urgency of what he is saying is clear only in the way his lips purse when he finishes a sentence, in the careful calmness he keeps, as if understanding that anything too agitated would undermine his case.

According to the Wall St Journal, the video was made last Wednesday. You can watch it here:

While hundreds of Guatemalans took to the streets to call for Colom’s resignation after the video was shown on local television, the President held a press conference to vehemently deny the claims, saying:

The death of attorney Rosenberg has been used by political opportunists and traditional conspirators linked to organised crime to confuse public opinion and attack the top authorities.”

President Colom has requested that the FBI and the UN help investigate. Yesterday, the FBI arrived in Guatemala. A full English translation of Mr Rosenberg’s written message is available here.

Posted in Listening | Tagged Alvaro Colom, Guatemala, Rodrigo Rosenberg | 3 Comments »

Expenses

May 12, 2009 by estherbintliff

Anyone else tired of reading the depressing details of MPs expense claims?

For the last word on this subject, read Philip Stephens.

The scores of MPs who abused the House of Commons’ allowances system cannot expect sympathy. The refrain of ministers that claims were “within the rules” only stokes popular disdain. The gaming of the system was at best morally reprehensible and at worst downright sleazy.

But enough is enough. It is time to call a halt to the media show trials. These are misdemeanours rather than high crimes. The fulminating humbug of their well-heeled media tormenters – not least at the publicly-funded BBC – has become as distasteful as the chicanery on the part of MPs.”

As someone raised on the belief that democracy was the last great hope of civilization, the petty corruption of our elected officials is pretty dispiriting. Obviously, the sooner the system is cleaned up, the better. But what is more worrying to me is the ever-widening “disconnect between politicians and citizens” that, as Stephens points out, only gets worse when a sensation-loving media “ignores serious political argument and amplifies personal frailties”.

We are less than a month away from one of the biggest trans-national elections in history. In June, 763 officials will be elected to represent 27 member states of the European Union. But how many of us will vote? As Peter Hain warns, the cost of not voting is serious: the British National Party, and other far-right groups across Europe, will gleefully win ground where others lose. I’m pretty disillusioned with all the main parties at the moment, but I’m certainly voting, if only to make my voice heard against the extreme right. If you haven’t yet registered to vote, find out how here.

Posted in Reading | Tagged European elections 2009, MP expenses, philip stephens | Leave a Comment »

Tanya Gold, the new Charlie Brooker

April 23, 2009 by estherbintliff

I pretty much love Charlie Brooker. Something in his Guardian columns nearly always make me laugh. But when the media get hold of a personality they know people like, someone who can trade on his name alone, there’s always a risk of saturating the market. That’s why I was excited to read two excellently acerbic columns by a writer I’d previously never heard of, Tanya Gold.

The first was a scathing attack on the general public for their assumptions about Susan Boyle, the 46-year old woman who’s become a youtube phenomenon after her performance on Britain’s Got Talent. I didn’t agree with everything Gold said, but I agreed with a lot of it, and more importantly, it felt invigorating to read: like a splash of cold water on the brain. Gold pins down and interrogates our social mores, and she does it in such fearless fashion that you can’t help but admire her guts.

The second, also in the Guardian’s Comment is Free, is about the multitude of Nazi references in popular culture. It starts off and it’s kind of jokey, like one of those rants about something that doesn’t really matter, just a rant for the sake of it. But half way through, Gold makes a really perceptive point, and it’s all the more powerful because it’s couched in comedy.

There is a point to all this Hitler porn, you may say. Snoopy Versus the Red Baron has a valuable lesson to teach us about tyranny. Cats Who Look Like Hitler have something to meow about the dangers of genocide. Bollocks, I say. There are genocides happening today, and they are being shot off the front pages by Nazi cows – Nazi cows! – and interviews with Mortensen talking about playing a depressed Nazi: “I spent a lot of time in Germany just looking at people.” Really? Five million have died in the Congo in the last 10 years, in a war for the minerals that we use. And Heil Honey I’m Home! has nothing to say about that.

On doing a bit of research (i.e. looking at her profile page on the Guardian) I discovered Ms Gold’s not new at all – she’s been writing for them since 2004. She does a nice line in experience features – going on the cheapest package holiday she could find (£99); speed dating; a series where she tries to give up smoking; taking diet pills (“I swallowed the small blue pill. It was like waiting for war to start“) and learning how to survive an apocalypse. I also found a hilarious if chilling piece she wrote for the Daily Mail, about auditioning and getting to the last rounds for Big Brother.

It says on the Guardian website that she’s freelance, and maybe that’s a personal choice which allows her to write for loads of different publications and cover a wider range of subjects. But regardless, the Guardian should snap her up while they can and commission her to write about all sorts of things in her inimitable style. Maybe even the five million dead in the Congo.

Posted in Reading | Tagged charlie brooker, comment is free, susan boyle tanya gold, tanya gold | 9 Comments »

Trailer of the Week: Coraline

April 21, 2009 by estherbintliff

If this wasn’t stop motion I might actually find it too scary to see. Then again I am a bit of a wimp when it comes to the uncanny, even when featured in a children’s film, and this one looks so full of Freudian dissonance it practically redefines das unheimliche.

Coraline is a little girl whose parents don’t really have time for her. She finds a door into another world, where some very nice people say they are her “other” parents, and shower her with gifts. But there’s something a bit weird about them. For one thing, they have buttons where they should have eyes.

The original 2002 novel by Neil Gaiman won the Bram Stoker Award for Young Readers, which should tell you something about its horror credentials.

But Gaiman himself points out:

As a general rule, Coraline the book is much creepier for adults than it is for kids, who tend to read it as an adventure. I suspect that this will be true of the film as well.”

All the same, the distributors clearly cottoned onto the fact that some of the more macabre aspects of the film e.g. doppelgangers who also happen to want to pluck out children’s eyes, aren’t particularly kiddie friendly.

So they’ve created two trailers, one that’s got a nice reassuring voiceover and one that – well – doesn’t. It’s fun to compare and contrast. The latter is more scary, though also a better trailer, so that’s the one you can watch below.

Gaiman’s comment on the fact that sometimes children can cope with frightening things better than we think actually tallies with the theory of a book I’ve been reading, The Uses of Enchantment, by the controversial child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim’s views on autism have been roundly discredited but his thoughts on the importance of fairytales – and their darker aspects – are interesting:

Children may be faced with deep inner conflicts and anxieties but more often than not are unable to express this verbally, so they may end up expressing fears indirectly, by fear of some real or imaginary animal, or fear of the dark, or such.

Parents may belittle these fears or altogether overlook them. Much of modern children’s literature may do the same.

But fairy tales confront these problems seriously and provide ways of facing such problems. Fairy tales can provide an outlet to anxiety. They frankly confront problems such as the fear of losing a parent or fear of dying. They also give hope that no matter how bad things may now seem that there is still hope of a happy ending.”

Adding to its allure, Coraline was directed by Henry Selick, a man with a proven talent for teasing the bizarre and beautiful out of fairytales – he previously made The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach.

Coraline is in UK cinemas from Friday 8 May.

Posted in Watching | Tagged coraline, neil gaiman, stop motion animation, the uncanny, trailer of the week | Leave a Comment »

Presidential Pets

April 14, 2009 by estherbintliff

The news we’ve all been waiting for.

Bo, the portuguese water dog, has finally landed at the White House.

If the shot on the left isn’t enough to sate your understandable curiosity, the Guardian has a mini-gallery collating all available photos of the fluffy hound. All five photos! Including one when he was just six and a half weeks old.

Meanwhile, the Daily Beast has a photo gallery of presidential pets, past and present. My favourite, aside from Bo, has got to be the adorable Feller Truman – see below.

Posted in Watching | Tagged bo, feller truman, obama pet, portuguese water dog | 1 Comment »

In the Valley of Elah

March 23, 2009 by estherbintliff

We all know the story of David and Goliath. David was the brave messenger boy who used a tiny catapult to defeat a giant that no-one else dared fight.

The place where the fight occurred is probably less familiar. According to 1 Samuel 17:

Saul and the Israelites assembled and camped in the Valley of Elah and drew up their battle line to meet the Philistines.

The Philistines occupied one hill and the Israelites another, with the valley between them.”

Paul Haggis’ film of the same name – released in 2007, but which I’ve only just seen on dvd – takes us into a valley of the sort best evoked in another bible verse: the valley of the shadow of death. And leaves us there.

Though most of the film is played out in a grey, tumble-weed ridden Albuquerque in North America, every scene takes place under the shadow of the Iraq war. The radios are playing a war-mongering George Bush; the local police joke when an Iraq veteran’s wife comes in complaining he has drowned their dog. With an army base just outside town, post-traumatic stress disorder is no news at all.

On that level the film is a classic interrogation of war and its consequences; a natural descendant of The Deer Hunter, with its narrative of young recruits brutally shorn of innocence and coerced into acts of inhumanity. Though Elah is, if anything, even more despairing. The film suggests that the impact of legitimised violence, especially against civilians, is rarely less than catastrophic for the individual psyche.

Like The Deer Hunter, Elah is deeply concerned with the lives of the people left behind, and their inability to imagine the unimaginable scenes their loved ones must inhabit. Hank Deerfield, played by Tommy Lee Jones – who has surely never looked so worn nor so broken – fails to foresee the trials his son Mike will endure in Iraq, even though he is himself a Vietnam veteran.

So when Mike goes AWOL while on leave from the Middle East, Hank, an ex-military policeman, sets out to discover where he might be and what might have prompted his disappearance.

Both Jones and Charlize Theron – as a local police officer – give outstanding, self-effacing performances as two very different versions of the law. Both live their work; both are driven by a selfless sense of duty, an allegiance to something remote and intangible.

The other main players, the soldiers who clearly know more than they’re willing to say about Mike’s disappearance, offer a more extreme version of such discipline. Their loyalty is two-fold: to the American flag, but less consciously, to their own mental survival in impossible conditions, at any cost.

The film is based on true events: the disappearance of an American soldier named Richard T. Davis. And though on the surface, Elah is most obviously a police procedural – a genre film – replete with missed clues, a crotchety “detective” and a few red herring leads, it is also a very original piece of cinema which dares to tell a deeply unpalatable truth about soldiering and our reliance on it. When I wrote that the Dark Knight was so far the only film I’d seen to have dealt in some way with Iraq, Paul recommended In The Valley of Elah, saying it was one of the best films he’d seen tackling the effects of war. I would second that. Of course it’s not at all optimistic or fun to watch; rather, it inspires a kind of dread. But it’s worth remembering that the valley of Elah, where David fought Goliath, was only briefly a place of extraordinary courage. More commonly it played host to paralyzing, deeply human fear.

Posted in Watching | Tagged david and goliath, in the valley of elah, iraq war films, paul haggis, tommy lee jones | Leave a Comment »

The future of capitalism

March 10, 2009 by estherbintliff

graffiti in York, photo by Paul Kelly on creative commons

Back when I studied economics at A-level, my teacher instilled a healthy scepticism of absolutes. He had no time for teenage leanings towards purist doctrines; neither communism nor an uninhibited market economy, said Mr Walker, would ever succeed alone.

The only answer then, was a mixed economy – one that encouraged the best aspects of the market while tempering animal spirits with a certain degree of state intervention, in order to protect the weak and provide public goods such as healthcare and education.

But what ratio of ingredients would create the best mix?

Although my teacher was fairly left-wing, with a hatred of Maggie Thatcher and her legacy, he believed a hearty helping of capitalism was the foundation of an ideal economy.

reagan and thatcher

Why? Because the overrarching desire for profits means private companies allocate resources in the most efficient way possible, and certainly far better than an overworked civil servant – or so we were taught. And not just by Mr Walker, but by our textbooks, our politicians and particularly the architects of New Labour. As Peter Mandelson once said: “We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes”.

The idea that individual greed might help boost wider economic conditions and thus wider society too, was suggested in 1776 by the great Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations:

“By directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, (the individual) intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it.

By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.”

Alas, this recipe has recently gone a bit wrong. Given free rein, the invisible hand of the market didn’t allocate resources quite as accurately as expected, as Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon suggests (if the writing’s too small, go here for the original).

So a cartoon is questioning capitalism, so what? Well it’s not just cartoons. The paradigm shift that is taking place in the way we think about economic theory is demonstrated by the fact that my own paper, the Financial Times, is now running a series entitled The Future of Capitalism, with the sub-headline: “The credit crunch has destroyed faith in the free market ideology that has dominated Western economic thinking for a generation. But what can – and should – replace it?”

Martin Wolf has penned a deeply insightful opening overview on the idealogical vacuum we now face:

On June 19 2007, I concluded an article on the “new capitalism” with the observation that it remained “untested”. The test has come: it failed. The era of financial liberalisation has ended. Yet, unlike in the 1930s, no credible alternative to the market economy exists and the habits of international co-operation are deep.

And Gillian Tett has written a brilliant analysis of the banks’ descent into creative mayhem. Now I’m not recommending these just because they’re from the FT, though I suppose I am a little biased – but because they’re among the finest journalists currently writing on the crisis, and if you want to understand some of what’s going on, you won’t find more reliable and knowledgeable guides. There’s no doubt Mr Walker’s mixed economy is still the only answer, but the question of ratio – the role of the state in relation to the free market – is up for grabs.

Posted in Reading | Tagged gillian tett, martin wolf, the financial times, the future of capitalism | 1 Comment »

Coal and the Coens

February 26, 2009 by estherbintliff

Joel and Ethan Coen have made a fun little film about clean coal. Enjoyable. Watch it here:

Posted in Watching, acclimatizing | Tagged clean coal, coen brothers, this is reality | Leave a Comment »

The Filtnib is reading: Dreams from My Father

November 3, 2008 by estherbintliff

One day left, and we’re on the cusp of great change. Fingers crossed. A while back I read ‘Dreams from My Father‘, the memoir published 13 years ago, when Barack Obama was just 33; post his social justice work, post-Harvard; the book he wrote while working as a civil rights lawyer in Chicago.

As such, it’s an incredible historical document. What’s really fascinating is the window it gives into Obama’s motivations, offering anyone who can afford the price of a paperback the chance to see beyond the weighty rhetoric of his speeches; to get into his head.

Of course if we’re talking about historical documents, this one is hardly an objective source, and the cynics would say, why trust it? Couldn’t he just be telling us what we want to hear? Isn’t an autobiographical memoir the perfect way to reconstruct oneself and manipulate your readers’ reactions?

Language is surely powerful. But the cliche is correct: actions speak louder than words, and Obama’s actions are on his side. Indeed, one of the strongest endorsements of Obama’s integrity has to be the actual timeline of his life thus far. Not to mention that the man would have had to be ridiculously machiavellian to have thought of writing a manipulative memoir over a decade before he even ran for Senate.

Dreams from my Father, above all else, witnesses to something truly inspiring in a politician: someone who isn’t interested in power for its own sake. Near the end of the book, having worked in the deprived Chicago housing projects of Roseland and Altgeld, Obama describes his decision to study at Harvard:

I had things to learn in law school, things that would help me bring about real change… I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail, knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed, back to Roseland, back to Altgeld; bring it back like Promethean fire.”

Leave aside the lyricism of these sentences, their measured cadences; it is the actions that follow that best bespeak his integrity. Returning to Chicago, Obama worked as a lawyer and civil activist for a further three years before deciding to run for Senate. He revered the law but also recognized it’s limitations.

How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love? The answers I find in law books don’t always satisfy me – for every Brown v. Board of Education I find a score of cases where conscience is sacrificed to expedience or greed.”

I love the barefaced idealism of these words. When Obama’s half-sister Auma visits him for the first time in Chicago, she asks him why he’s chosen a low-paid, undervalued job as an “organizer” (an American word for community advocate – a bit like a youth worker, except that it’s for all ages).

Are you doing this for them, Barack?” she asked, turning back to me. “This organizing business, I mean?”

I shrugged. “For them. For me.”

That same expression of puzzlement, and fear, returned to Auma’s face. “I don’t like politics much,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. People always end up disappointed.”

That Obama includes this line in the book tells us something: he’s faced cynicism and doubt for a long time, even in the people closest to him. He understands why good people hardly ever bother to go into politics anymore, which makes his own career choice all the more admirable.

On top of all this, the writing is crafted, elegant and often witty. A great writer has to have imagination; the compassionate vision to relate to anyone and everyone, to “climb into [their] skin and walk around in it“. It’s a quality that we should desire in our politicians, and yet it’s all too rare. In the course of telling his story, Obama demonstrates it constantly. Like when he describes trying to reason with four teenage boys who’ve pulled up in a car outside his flat:

One of them could be me. Standing there, I try to remember the days when I would have been sitting in a car like that, full of inarticulate resentments and desperate to prove my place in the world. The feelings of righteous anger as I shout at Gramps…

The blood rush of a high school brawl. The swagger that carries me into a classroom drunk or high, knowing that my teachers will smell beer or reefer on my breath…

That knotted, howling assertion of self… while these boys may be weaker or stronger than I was at their age, the only difference that matters is this:

The world in which I spent those difficult times was far more forgiving. These boys have no margin for error; if they carry guns, those guns will offer them no protection from that truth.”

Can you imagine a man with this level of compassion and intelligence, such understanding of human weakness and woe, in the White House? And did you get that bit, where he describes being “drunk or high” in class? The book isn’t a carefully censored, clean and tidy version of a life. It’s honest to the point where you know the writer didn’t intend to run for president when he wrote it – he just wanted to tell a truth.

Obama also talks about race with astonishing candour. It’s all very well to admire his Perfect Union speech (see below), but it’s almost more illuminating to read about the first time he visited Kenya:

“You could experience the freedom that comes from not feeling watched, the freedom of believing that your hair grows as it’s supposed to grow and that your rump sways the way a rump is supposed to sway. You could see a man talking to himself as just plain crazy, or read about the criminal on the front page of the daily paper and ponder the corruption of the human heart, without having to think about whether the criminal or lunatic said something about your own fate. Here the world was black, and so you were just you; you could discover all those things that were unique to your life without living a lie or committing betrayal.”

I’m still not certain what the title “Dreams from my Father” means, even after having read the book. It’s not ‘Dreams of my Father’ though it easily could have been, since the narrative is haunted by the absence of Obama’s dad, who left his wife and two-year-old son and returned only once.

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned… The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image”

So is it that Obama’s dreams were inherited from his father? Or are they the dreams his father would have wanted him to have? At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter: what counts is the nature of the dream. Here’s an excerpt from his speech, A More Perfect Union:

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand — that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.”

Of course we can’t predict how well Obama will actually perform in office, if he does win tomorrow. In today’s Financial Times, Clive Crook argues: “The plain fact is, Mr Obama cannot deliver what he has promised. The problems he will confront are too difficult.” He’s right, in that to idolize anyone, to put unconditional faith in any human being given power, would be absurd. But I would argue that if Obama brings to office even just a little of what this book promises, we have good reason to be hopeful.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
A few other key excerpts from A More Perfect Union:

23.23: “…to wish away the resentments of white americans, to label them as misguided… this too, widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding. This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy — particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.”

26.11: “The profound mistake of Rev. Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

“But what we know — what we have seen — is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope — the audacity to hope — for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.”

Posted in Reading, Thinking | Tagged a more perfect union, barack obama, dreams from my father | 1 Comment »

In cinemas from tomorrow: Burn After Reading

October 16, 2008 by estherbintliff

Trailer of the Week back in June; hitting your local this week. Good news.

Posted in Going Out | Tagged burn after reading | Leave a Comment »

When I grow up I wanna be

September 30, 2008 by estherbintliff

It recently came to my attention that the Pussycat Dolls have a new song out.

Ok I might as well say it. I watched T4. Confession over.

Now, interested as I am in the issues behind gender inequality and female empowerment in the workplace, I was pretty intrigued by the lyrics of the ridiculously catchy When I Grow Up.

In contrast with their charming debut single, Don’cha, (“Don’cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me”), the Dolls’ new record is altogether more introspective.

Boys call you sexy (What’s up, sexy)
And you don’t care what they say
See, every time you turn around
They screamin’ your name
When I grow up
Fresh and clean
Number one chick when I step out on the scene

[Verse 1]
Now I’ve got a confession
When I was young I wanted attention
And I promised myself that I’d do anything
Anything at all for the boys to notice me

[Bridge]
But I ain’t complaining
We all wanna be famous
So go ahead and say what you wanna say
You know what it’s like to be nameless
Want them to know what your name is
‘Cause see when I was younger I would say

[Chorus]
When I grow up
I wanna be famous
I wanna be a star
I wanna be in movies
When I grow up
I wanna see the world
Drive nice cars
I wanna have Groupies*

When I grow up
Be on TV
People know me
Be on magazines
When I grow up
Fresh and clean
Number one chick when I step out on the scene

[Hook x2]
But be careful what you wish for
‘Cause you just might get it
But you just might get it
But You just might get it

[Verse 2]
They used to tell me I was silly
Until I popped up on the TV
I always wanted to be a superstar
And knew that singing songs would get me this far

[Bridge]
[Chorus]
[Verse]
I see them staring at me
Oh I’m a trendsetter
Yes this is true ’cause what I do, no one can do it better
You can talk about me
‘Cause I’m a hot topic
I see you watching me, watching me, and I know you want it
[Chorus]

* Groupies is pronounced ‘Boobies’

Aside from the ‘fresh and clean’ bit, which I suppose is quite good for promoting personal hygiene, I’ve got to say the overall message here is kind of depressing. The whole whether-it’s-meant-to-sound-like-boobies-when-they-sing-groupies is a separate debate that I’m not getting into – besides, lead boobie-pronouncer Nicole surely cleared it all up when she told Ellen DeGeneres “it’s open to interpretation and some of us want boobies”.

What bothers me more about the song is that it’s such a proud example of the pervasive raunch culture that encourages girls to disempower themselves, bump by sordid grind. Even Steve Jones was shocked at the girls’ risque moves on the T4 soundstage. “It’s amazing we’re allowed to show that at this time of the morning,” he laughed. The revelation for me (which I’m sure most of you already know) was that the Pussycat Dolls are not just any other super-branded girl band with a tidal wave of adolescent girls aping their every wriggle, but in fact a real x-rated burlesque troupe.

If the girls performed this song every night on a Sunset Strip stage, where they were originally resident in 1995, I couldn’t care less.The problem is, the PCD’s management want the Doll Domination to be total. And that means tapping one of the most lucrative market groups around: kids and teenagers. In fact in 2006, the toymaker Hasbro created a set of plastic dolls based on the band, to be marketed at 6 to 9 year old girls. Luckily the wave of protest that erupted persuaded Hasbro to cancel the Pussycat line before it reached stores.

That didn’t stop the PCD from expanding their merchandise. On stardoll.com, (a “virtual paperdoll community” with 21,200,240 members, most of whom are aged 7 – 17) you can dress up Melody, Nicole and co. in knee high leather boots, hot pants and a bra, though actually the PCD are the least fun paperdolls on the site since their wardrobes are limited by the fact that they’re the real thing – branded clothing – rather than fun fantasy outfits.

(NB. The admittedly very entertaining stardoll site does make a gesture at some kind of female empowerment, in the form of a page entitled ‘Role Models‘. Apparently, girls, our leading role models are Coco Chanel, Rosa Parks, Beatrix Potter, Forest Fairy (??), and Venus. That would be Venus, as in the mythical goddess of beauty. Great.)

It’s not that I think the Pussycats intend any harm with their fixed-smile fetishization of fame and mindless attention-seeking. Like Nicole says: “The Pussycat Dolls have no boundaries. We continue to stretch and find ourselves in every performance. We do what is truthful for each of us.” Bless. I’d be suprised if the Dolls even had the brains to think past their own shiny latex wardrobe. They’re dolls, right? Here the group claims the ‘When I Grow Up’ song is meant to be a warning, though of what exactly?

I think people see us and think: ‘Wow, I want to do that. I want to be famous, I want to see the world, I want nice cars, I want groupies.’ But it’s not going to be an easy road getting there and it’s not as glamorous as it always seems.”

OK. So the warning is not that maybe there’s more to life than fame, but that getting there might be tricky?

The fact is that girls could really do with better role models than a group of strippers who glorify the single-minded pursuit of fame and boobies (or groupies, for that matter).

One recent study found that 63 per cent of teenage girls aspired to be topless models rather than doctors or teachers, while 25 per cent considered lap dancing a “good career choice”. Unfortunately, as this former dancer testifies, it’s not. The Pussycat Dolls insist we’re all pussycat dolls-in-waiting, that – like they said in their TV show, The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll – “inside every woman is a pussycat doll”. Presumably with limitless potential to strip and grind and be watched, and thus have value, if only we believe in ourselves enough, right?

The weird thing is that if Pink were to sing ‘When I Grow Up’ it would be hilarious; a piercing satire of the objectification of women. As it is, it’s just really very sad.

Posted in Listening, Thinking | Tagged female chauvinist pigs, pussycat dolls, raunch culture, when i grow up | Leave a Comment »

Trailer of the Week: Rachel Getting Married

October 5, 2008 by estherbintliff

I’ve had a soft spot for Anne Hathaway ever since her good-natured, witty performance in the cheeky fairytale Ella Enchanted. She also provided strong support in Brokeback Mountain. But apart from that, her career thus far has been a bit, well, lite – characterised by the sort of low-calorie fluff that gives momentary sweetness but lacks any lasting nutritional value (The Princess Diaries 2, The Devil Wears Prada, Hoodwinked!, Get Smart).

So it’s good to see her stretching her talent a bit and going for a less saccharine role in Rachel Getting Married. Script-writer Jenny Lumet (daughter of the fabulous Sidney) ploughs the rich seam of drama inherent in family get-togethers, charting the progress of a daughter fresh out of rehab who returns to the family home for her sister Rachel’s wedding.

Director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) seems to have favoured a roaming camera that swoops in and out of familiar household set-pieces, somewhat reminiscent of Thomas Vinterberg’s masterful Festen (also an acerbic exposé of deep familial fissures). The rugged camerawork lends a scratchy authenticity and promises to deflate any potentially sentimental moments with a sense of their realism, while at the same time mirroring the characters’ emotional turbulence.

Posted in Watching | Tagged anne hathaway, jenny lumet, jonathan demme, rachel getting married, trailer of the week | Leave a Comment »

Eighty per cent

October 16, 2008 by estherbintliff

Coal Power Plant by Bruno D Rodrigues, courtesy Creative Commons

photo by Bruno D Rodrigues, courtesy Creative Commons

Wow. So last week the committee responsible for advising Parliament on climate change told the government in no uncertain terms that Britain needed to slash its carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050. In 2000, policymakers came up with a target of 60 per cent, and have resisted calls to increase it for some time.

In their letter to the new Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband (which is, incidentally, charmingly friendly – “Dear Ed… Yours ever“) – the committee explain it pretty clearly.

Reductions of this scale are required to limit the expected global temperature increases to around 2 degrees centigrade… and to reduce the chances of exceeding 4 degrees centigrade… Temperature rises above 2 degrees are likely to have a major and increasing impact on human welfare and the natural environment. Temperature rises above 4 degrees centigrade could be catastrophic.”

So what would an 80 per cent reduction mean?

At most, we could only expel 118 million tones of CO2 each year.

That might sound like a lot, especially as it’s got the word million in it, but last year British CO2 emissions totalled 544 million tonnes. And by 2050 there’ll be a lot more people around.

An 80 per cent target will put the UK at the vanguard of climate change mitigation. It will also have immediate implications for existing energy policy, as Greenpeace’s exec director John Sauven explains:

The new target should sound the death knell for new coal-fired power stations and Heathrow’s proposed third runway.

A simple back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that a new fleet of coal plants would hole the new target below the water line, while Labour’s current ambitions for aviation expansion would finish it off.”

In fact, aviation would account for Britain’s entire carbon budget in 2050 unless the industry shrinks dramatically.

Of course with the financial meltdown currently dripping its doom all over the globe, lots of people think we can’t afford to worry about other worrying meltdowns, say, in the Arctic. Thank goodness Ed Miliband disagrees. Yesterday he told the Guardian: “I don’t think there is an option not to act.”

Then today, he passed that message on to Parliament, telling MPs he accepted all the recommendations from last week’s report, and committing Britain to the 80 per cent target.

Good work indeed, dear Ed.

Posted in Thinking | Tagged 80 per cent CO2, ed miliband 80 per cent, greenpeace, UK CO2 emissions | 1 Comment »

Trailer of the Week: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

October 20, 2008 by estherbintliff

There’s a worrisome dearth of fun trailers around. So, in honour of the late, great Paul Newman, I thought we could all sip on a shot of good strong melodrama. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is showing in London from November 8 – 29 as part of the British Film Institute’s Tennessee Williams season.

Though there is comedy, and whimsy, and beautiful, intricate staging in Williams’ plays, they are not really for the fainthearted. The emotional violence visited on his characters is rarely less than brutal, though in amongst the verbal assaults he pries open the darkness and the light. Williams won his second Pulitzer prize when Cat on a Hot Tin Roof premiered in 1955 (his first was for A Streetcar Named Desire). Three years later, MGM’s film adaptation was released, powerfully evoking the bitter, fierce sexual tension that Williams had laid bare in the play. But the film was also a sad betrayal of the boundary-breaking tenor of the original work, for the scriptwriters had assiduously removed all references to the central character’s homosexuality, in order to soothe the American film censor.

Interestingly, although the film was originally to be shot in black and white, once the most famous pair of blue eyes in the world signed on to star, the movie execs decided to splash out and film it in colour.

No doubt partly thanks to those baby blues, aswell as the similarly stunning violets of Elizabeth Taylor, the film became one of the top ten box office hits of the year and was subsequently nominated for six Oscars.

Posted in Watching | Tagged bfi tennessee williams, elizabeth taylor, paul newman cat on a hot tin roof, trailer of the week | Leave a Comment »

Human traces

October 30, 2008 by estherbintliff

The last time I visited my granny in Scotland, I was sitting at the piano, leafing through a battered old hymn book and trying out the odd tune, when the book flapped open at the very back. The two sides were covered in small, neat handwriting; hymn titles, with their page numbers for ease of reference.

Sellotape criss-crossed the binding, which had come unstuck through long use, and there was a small rip at the bottom of one page.

Most astonishing, there was a picture. In between the lines, in a sudden block of white space, was a boat with a chimney that puffed smoke into the hymn title above it. It could have started out as a house, or perhaps it was always meant to be Noah’s Ark.

My grandpa died when I was still a teenager. He was much loved and respected, remembered for his careful compassion as a doctor, his love of jazz and his idiosyncratic sense of humour. He wore a bow tie nearly every day. My memories of him are drawn mainly from disjointed episodes – car journeys when he’d tap the steering wheel in time to Benny Goodman on the tape player, hand out chunks of dairy milk before pretending we were hopelessly lost; times he’d pick up his trumpet and play along to a record or pluck at the double bass while I struggled to find chords on the piano.

There are also the more abstract sensory memories – the smell of his cigar smoke, the scratch of his shaven chin as I kissed him hello; the pretend fierceness in his voice when he barked “Quiet!” at his rabble of beloved grandchildren. I often wondered what it would have been like to know him as an adult, rather than in my childish, half-grown form. I wished I could have played the piano better, for music was one of his greatest pleasures, and in particular I wished I had the aptitude to improvise the jazz he loved so well, but it always sounded false when I tried.

It was strange and wonderful to come across this trace of him, in the back of his old hymn book. It made me wonder what traces we all leave behind, intentionally or otherwise.

When had he drawn it? While bored one day in the cold, echoey church that nestles in the hills above the village? Did he imagine that one day someone else would find it and smile? Was that why the giraffe’s neck was so long as it peered out of the window?

Posted in Thinking | Tagged grandpa, human traces, memories | 2 Comments »

Behind the collapse

October 23, 2008 by estherbintliff

Stories about the smashed-up financial sector are everywhere. Hovering above the news of banks toppling, governments handing out wads of cash and unemployment rising, hangs a cloud of guilt, but everyone disagrees as to who it belongs.

Was it greedy, bonus-chasing bankers? Laissez-faire governments, for failing to regulate? Consumers, for borrowing money they could never pay back? The answer is riddled with political risk. The nature of the crash has implications for whole economic ideologies.

Those on the left are quietly smug, for their worst predictions about the destructive force of market fundamentalism have come true, again and again. Those on the right, or even just the centre, are scuttling for cover, as their idol – free, unfettered capitalism – is knocked from its pedestal along with the high priests Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns and Merrill Lynch.

But some capitalists are sticking to their besieged posts. While Will Hutton argues in The Observer:

This is a crisis that has been 30 years in the making – a Gordian knot of libertarian free-market fundamentalism, unregulated globalisation, the collapse of social and political forces committed to fairness, and the explosive impact of financial innovations such as ’securitisation’, and sheer greed”,

the Economist’s cover story, Capitalism at Bay, stubbornly attempts to decry government intervention and champion the free market.

Funnily enough, it feels as though the Economist writer doesn’t quite believe in what he’s writing. It’s like he’s become an agnostic, but someone is still dragging him to church.

Why? Because the Economist’s central, defining tenet is “economic liberty”. And not even the worst crash since the 30’s will let them betray that.

All the signs are pointing in the same direction: a larger role for the state, and a smaller and more constrained private sector,”

the leader-writer says, anxiously.

This newspaper hopes profoundly that this will not happen.”

Poor Economist. Not only has it signally failed to come to terms with the fact that it’s no longer a newspaper but a magazine, it also, bizarrely, feels personally threatened by the incursion of the state. The writer goes on to admit that, “In the short term defending capitalism means, paradoxically, state intervention”. Paradoxical indeed. Don’t worry though, that paradox doesn’t skew his wholly contradictory conclusion: “Capitalism, eventually, corrects itself.”

Hmm. Surely you can’t have it both ways. If capitalism requires state intervention in the short-term, then it won’t have corrected itself; the state will have.

All of which underscores that the ubiquity of political bias puts an ever higher premium on objective reporting. I’d like to recommend a reporter who’s left all prejudice at home and instead relied merely on facts, to shine an investigative light on something most of us know nothing about. Credit rating agencies. Here, a new suspect joins the line-up in the crime of the century, and there’s some solid evidence involved. Here’s what a U.S. Congressman said about them yesterday:

The credit rating agencies occupy a special place in our financial markets. Millions of investors rely on them for independent, objective assessments. The rating agencies broke this bond of trust, and federal regulators ignored the warning signs and did nothing to protect the public. The result is that our entire financial system is now at risk.”

Want to know more? Read Sam Jones’ excellent feature When Junk Was Gold, illustrated quite beautifully by Balint Zsako. And then read Jones’ equally incisive blog post from today’s Alphaville. Now that’s good journalism.

Posted in Reading | Tagged alphaville, capitalism at bay, credit rating agencies, hand of the market, sam jones, the economist | Leave a Comment »

Marling it up

October 26, 2008 by estherbintliff

Steer: there’s a nice Guardian interview here with one of my favourite songstresses, the Mercury-nominated Laura Marling.

* Listen on myspace to her current, beatific single Night Terror.

* More on Alas I Cannot Swim

* and an old review of Laura Marling in concert at the Union Chapel

Posted in Listening | Tagged Laura Marling | Leave a Comment »

Trailer of the Week: Wendy and Lucy

November 2, 2008 by estherbintliff

The first glimpses of Michelle Williams’ stricken, timid beauty in this trailer make it look like a film that is sure to beget tears.

It also seems to be a truly independent movie; shot in twenty days, highly textured with an unfamiliar, meditative rhythm. The kind of film that evokes such an authentic landscape you come out of the cinema taking big gulps of the cold air, just to check you’re still real.

Williams plays a hard-up young woman trying to make her way to Alaska to find work, accompanied only by a beloved dog.

Manohla Dargis called Wendy and Lucy a “pitch-perfect triumph”, explaining:

With uninflected realism, an attentive camera and no weeping strings, [director] Ms. Reichardt makes palpably, tragically real what it means to be struggling at the very edge of the economic abyss.”

Perfect for the credit crunch then. You can watch director Kelly Reichardt talking with Michelle Williams at the New York Film Festival here.

Posted in Watching | Tagged kelly reichardt, michelle williams, trailer of the week, wendy and lucy | Leave a Comment »

Trailer of the Week: Twilight

October 26, 2008 by estherbintliff

Could there be a Dracula Global PR company somewhere, and if so, are its staff working overtime? Because there’s a slew of vampire-driven entertainment coming out, and the common theme is that vampires aren’t all bad. Evidently some of them are still nasty old blood-suckers, but then there are the ones who are apparently just like us; people trying to better themselves and conquer their darker instincts.

In HBO’s new series True Blood (reviewed by Slate’s Troy Patterson here) vampires have found a way of getting along with humans by sipping on synthetic blood, though predictably not everyone plays nicely and therein lies the rub. Then there’s the very dark but apparently sublime Let The Right One In, a critically acclaimed arthouse Swedish film about two unhappy children who become each other’s only friends, even though one of them is a vampire.

And finally there’s Twilight, this week’s trailer of the week. I didn’t choose Let the Right One In, because no matter how good it is, I really don’t like gore so there’s no way I will be going to see it. But Twilight should be a little bit more tame, being as it is an adaptation of a cult teen fiction series by Stephanie Meyer, which became a New York Times bestseller and one of the American Library Association’s ‘Top Ten Books for Young Adults’.

Also it’s a damn good trailer. And Robert Pattinson looks rather fine in his first major role since playing another tragic teen heartthrob, Cedric Diggory.

Twilight is due in UK cinemas December 19th.

Posted in Watching | Tagged robert pattinson, stephanie meyer, trailer of the week, twilight | Leave a Comment »

As Aladdin would say, a whole new world

November 5, 2008 by estherbintliff

Waking up this morning felt like Christmas Day, when you open your eyes to find Santa has left the exact present you wanted under the tree. I don’t really have anything else to say, except that pictures seem to tell the story best today.

Obama rally, courtesy Alexandre Matzke

I love this one by Alex Matzke. It’s from a very cool album that perfectly captures the mix of anticipation and exaltation.

This is Zilly Rosen of Zillycakes in Buffalo, NY, building an Obama portrait using 1240 cupcakes. Thanks to Shastio on creative commons. Yummy.

And one last.

Posted in Watching | Tagged alexandra matzke, obama election night pictures, obama michelle, zillycakes | 1 Comment »

Philip Stephens on Obama’s win

November 7, 2008 by estherbintliff

Great comment in today’s FT by my absolute favourite British columnist, Philip Stephens.

“One of Mr Obama’s most dangerous enemies will be the impatience of our age: the ever present demands that tomorrow’s problems be fixed yesterday… but this is a moment for optimism. Once in a while, politicians do change the course of history.”

Posted in Reading | Tagged ft, philip stephens, philip stephens obama | 2 Comments »

Coalfinger

November 8, 2008 by estherbintliff

Last night I saw Quantum of Solace. I’d been warned that the latest Bond movie consisted of sheer action devoid of narrative substance, but as light entertainment it turned out to be suprisingly enjoyable. I’m learning that with action movies it’s all about low expectations.

Anyway, David Mitchell – the dark-haired one from Peep Show – had never struck me as a likely successor to the chiselled Daniel Craig, but in a new Bond-inspired cartoon from Greenpeace, he sends up the role pretty well.

Also starring Brian Blessed, the film tries to tell the story of our dangerous dependence on coal and the miscreants who are trying to feed our fossil fuel addiction. Specifically, the energy provider E.ON, by building the first new coal-fired power station in 30 years. There are plans for seven more.

As I’ve said before, coal is the most polluting way we know of producing electricity and it makes absolutely no sense to expand its use. The new power station at Kingsnorth would produce more CO₂each year than Ghana.

It’s worth watching Greenpeace’s short animation (which I’ve posted below) just to imagine E.ON’s response – I can’t see them being too pleased to be cast as arch-villains in the style of Dr.No, Blofeld and Auric Goldfinger, especially as they’ve just installed the first turbine at a new offshore wind farm and are also trying to flog their ‘Go Green’ dual fuel offer.

But the fact is they’ve asked for it: by stubbornly sticking to their plans to revamp Kingsnorth, and thus ignoring passionate opposition from a horde of scientists, politicians and ordinary people.

Al Gore has encouraged civil disobedience to halt the construction of new coal plants; charities including Christian Aid, Tearfund, WWF, Oxfam, RSPB and the World Development Movement have all spoken out against Kingsnorth.

Professor Jim Hansen, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, told a British court: “Somebody needs to step forward and say there has to be a moratorium, draw a line in the sand and say no more coal-fired power stations”, while Zac Goldsmith pointed out: “By building a coal-power plant in this country, it makes it very much harder [to exert] pressure on countries like China and India”.

The excuse E.ON give is that carbon capture technology will eventually limit the damage caused by coal, but unfortunately this is just a huge smokescreen, because clean coal technology is still only at a trial stage, and as the Economist says: “even the most optimistic proponents of carbon capture and storage doubt it will be a serious alternative much before 2020. And by then both the physical and the political climate may look rather different.”

Of course Britain isn’t the only country mulling new coal plans – the US has 28 under construction, India plans 73 in the next 10 years, and Germany has 27 in the pipeline, though six have already been stopped by successful environmental campaigns.

As Greenpeace says, the good news is: “We know exactly what needs to be done to stop climate change – and the technologies we need already exist. The use of renewable energy sources such as wind, wave, tidal and solar power combined with increased energy efficiency would dramatically reduce our carbon emissions and our chances for stopping climate change.”

If you want to make your voice heard against Kingsnorth, add your name to a letter to Gordon Brown here.

Posted in Watching | Tagged coalfinger, david mitchell, e.on, greenpeace, kingsnorth, quantum of solace | 2 Comments »

Picturing Iraq

November 12, 2008 by estherbintliff

The Frontline Club, a hub for independent journalists in London, today announced the winner of its 2008 award: the Russian photographer Yuri Kozyrev, “for his exceptional coverage of the Iraq war.”

Even as the conflict has faded from the headlines amid global financial meltdown and hopes that the “surge” of 2007 had established the foundations for peace, Iraqis have continued to battle terror, not just economic recession.

Today, 21 people died in a series of bomb attacks in Baghdad, and more than 85 were injured.

Kozyrev’s eloquent photo essay for Time magazine, from the early days of war in 2003, is well worth a look.

Posted in Watching | Tagged iraq photo essay, the frontline club, time magazine, yuri koyzrev | Leave a Comment »

A changing climate, at last

November 14, 2008 by estherbintliff

“Enjoy the holiday season…and rest up, because it’s going to be a very, very busy 2009,” Obama’s lead environment and energy adviser Jason Grumet told a carbon conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, according to Ian Talley at the WSJ.

It sends a shiver of excitement down the spine.

Obama promised that if he won the Presidency, he would act on climate change immediately – in his own words, “from the moment I take office”. He added: “The question is not if a renewable energy economy will thrive in the future, it’s where.” He challenged the sceptics who doubt we can halt our carbon-heavy lifestyles in the short term:

When the scientists and engineers told John F. Kennedy that they had no idea how to put a man on the moon, he told them they would find a way. And we found one. I believe we will again.”

In his Op-Ed for the New York Times this week, Al Gore borrows the same image, to powerful effect:

President John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon within 10 years. Eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface.

The average age of the systems engineers cheering on Apollo 11 from the Houston control room that day was 26, which means that their average age when President Kennedy announced the challenge was 18.

This year similarly saw the rise of young Americans, whose enthusiasm electrified Barack Obama’s campaign. There is little doubt that this same group of energized youth will play an essential role in this project to secure our national future, once again turning seemingly impossible goals into inspiring success.”

Posted in Thinking | Tagged al gore obama, jason grumet, obama climate change | Leave a Comment »

Our last chance, by Ian McEwan

November 20, 2008 by estherbintliff

The novelist Ian McEwan penned a timely and elegant feature which fronted yesterday’s G2, and which coincidentally explores the themes of the post below in far more depth.

McEwan’s piece is entitled The World’s Last Chance and basically argues that the fate of the world now rests on Obama’s shoulders.

McEwan, who wrote Saturday, Enduring Love, Atonement and most recently On Chesil Beach, believes climate change is “our most pressing problem, underpinning all others, requiring degrees of cooperation and rationality we might not even be capable of”.

He goes on to explain why with his signature elegance and charm, winding the science and politics up in simple evocative phrases that slide across the page and into your brain.

As Barack Obama steps forward, the smoke machines and mirrors are packed away – or perhaps we can never, or should never, let them go.

The burning forests, the dissolving coral reefs, the extinction of species – we have numbed ourselves with these familiar litanies.

We are still dreaming, still murmuring in our sleep as we grope for the levers that connect thoughts to actions.”

Earth egg, courtesy azrainman on creative commons

Not everyone will approve; it’s more of an essay than a newspaper article, and his word-play (“on the all-too-kickable stone we call the Earth”) and references to Samuel Johnson might seem too academic for the harried reader scouring for news.

But I found the novelistic style deeply refreshing. And he makes some very good points:

Within the climate science community there is a faction darkly murmuring that it is already too late. The more widely held view is hardly more reassuring: we have less than eight years to start making a significant impact on CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions…

Thereafter, as tipping points are reached, as feedback loops strengthen, the emissions curve will rise too quickly for us to restrain it.

In the words of John Schellnhuber, one of Europe’s leading climate scientists: “what is required is an industrial revolution for sustainability, starting now“.

Posted in Reading | Tagged G2, ian mcewan climate change, ian mcewan obama, the guardian, the world's last chance | Leave a Comment »

The colour of tragedy in Waltz with Bashir

December 4, 2008 by estherbintliff

When was the last time you noticed colour in a film?

Perhaps it’s been a while, because rather like perfect dialogue or sound design, the best use of colour is often characterized by it’s very unobtrusiveness.

In such cases, the cinematographer wants to nurture the illusion that you’re watching reality in all its winter grays and mud browns, not some gaudy approximation of real life. Even when colour is being used to parallel the emotional tone of a story, it will usually do so subtly, moving in undercurrents your brain hardly has time to register. We’ve come a long way from the hyper-real technicolor of The Wizard of Oz.

But rules allow their exceptions to work even more powerfully. The red coat of a little girl in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List plays a different role to the red coat of the girl in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now; the subdued grays of the Belgian steel town in L’Enfant make its heartbreaking plot all the more plausible. Steven Soderbergh, in his best film, Traffic, employs colour like an expressionist, shading his locations with starkly contrasting palettes – whether a Mexican border town, a middle-class Ohio suburb or a sordid drug den.

Certainly the award for most stunning use of colour in recent years should go to Waltz with Bashir, a documentary animation that was trailer of the week back in September. Having seen it last week I briefly felt tempted to ask the government to get a copy for every school and force children to watch it, like David Miliband did with An Inconvenient Truth. Though the truths told in Ari Folman’s film are not so much inconvenient as simply horrifying.

The opening sequence, in which a pack of snarling, slathering dogs chases through a city, is dominated by a burnt ochre yellow, a colour that sears itself into the film’s complexion and returns to haunt the film and its hero throughout. The same colour is later resurrected in the form of a set of flares erupting in the sky above Beirut. That sequence, in which the protagonist and his comrades rise slowly from an unnaturally placid sea and walk towards a burning city, is, like the opening, a nightmare; an example of the post-traumatic stress that provides the catalyst for the film itself. The extreme colour in some way signals to the audience that we are in a dream state, an effect heightened by the leaden, sluggish movements of the men, as if they are walking in treacle.

The filmmaker’s quest in Waltz with Bashir is to retrieve the memories of his time as an Israeli soldier during the Lebanon war of 1982. His journey proves utterly compelling, not only because it provides its own narrative momentum, as Folman pieces together facts and memories from comrades and eyewitnesses, but also because this quest is really a pretext for a far more universal urge: to understand man’s inhumanity to man, to unearth the place where darkness hides in the human heart.

While the quest itself is satisfying, its conclusion is perhaps inevitably less so. Much tragic art functions cathartically, leaving its audience feeling ultimately cleansed, allowing us to re-enact personal and collective trauma in a safe and controlled way. Folman’s canvas resembles the safe space of the psychoanalyst’s room, an environment in which he can explore and enact the original trauma in order to exorcise its power over his unconscious. Indeed at one point he actually interviews a psychiatrist, an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder.

But for the audience, Waltz With Bashir does not seem to offer such balm; perhaps it cannot. For although it wears the garb of a choreographed work of art, it is most importantly a documentary, and thus relies on real life, that most chaotic and unyielding of narratives.

The audience must live with an absence of closure because the lessons of the film – that violence is repeated; that massacres beget more massacres; that we cannot erase history – point so evidently to the horrors going unchecked in the world today – in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; in Darfur.

Aristotle said that tragedy was a process of imitating an action which “is complete”. He added, “A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles”. Essentially, the tragedy explored in Waltz with Bashir can never be complete while genocide occurs anywhere in the world. The fact that the trauma is therefore ongoing will always prevent catharsis.

But despite this, the film is a triumph. It is right that we should leave the cinema shaken and dumbfounded. It is the least we can do to acknowledge the suffering of the refugee victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and the terrible cyclical nature of violence which has rendered the phrase “never again” so futile.

Posted in Thinking, Watching | Tagged ari folman, tragedy, waltz with bashir | Leave a Comment »

So many films, so little time

January 20, 2009 by estherbintliff

On Friday a cluster of films come out that have each been trailers of the week: Milk, Frost/Nixon and Rachel Getting Married.

A cause for celebration but simultaneously, a teeny bit frustrating; why did they have to schedule them all at once? Couldn’t the distributors have sprinkled the good stuff more evenly through those arid weeks when the only movies in sight were slushy stacks of generic romcoms and kids adventure movies aimed at milking parental holiday fatigue?

frost_nixon_poster

I just hope that all three are so successful that the cinemas agree to keep screening them for at least a fortnight. I think I’ll start with Milk though, on the basis that A.O. Scott, writing in the New York Times, called it “the best live-action mainstream American movie that I have seen this year”.

Posted in Watching | Tagged frost/nixon, milk, rachel getting married, trailer of the week | 1 Comment »

Trailer of the Week: Revolutionary Road

January 12, 2009 by estherbintliff

revolutionary_road_poster_by BLT & Associates

One of the best trailers I’ve seen in ages. No dialogue for 53 seconds, and then only a sparse two lines. Cat Power’s jangly, mournful Sea of Love getting stuck like an old-fashioned record; signalling breakdown and fracture better than any scripted voiceover. Everything else left to our imagination, unlike almost every other trailer you see these days. Not to mention an ingenious revival of the split screen and tantalising glimpses of Roger Deakins‘ sublime cinematography.

But even if the trailer wasn’t this good, Revolutionary Road has a lot to recommend it. Sam Mendes makes striking films, and though sometimes they bear fairly visible flaws – see Jarhead and Road to Perdition – it seems to me those flaws are mostly just a testament to his profound cinematic ambition.

The film is adapted from an acclaimed American novel by Richard Yates. First published in 1961, it became recognized as a pivotal twentieth-century tragedy of suburban disquiet and disappointment. According to the author, the ‘revolutionary road’ of the title did not lead anywhere but was in fact disappearing, as Yates explained in an interview in 1972:

there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs – a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the Joe McCarthy witch-hunts.

Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that – felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit…”

Frank and April Wheeler, the young protagonists of Yates’ novel, are the everyman figures doomed to play out this betrayal in the shape of their marriage. Some critics have complained that the film adaptation of Revolutionary Road too closely suggests American Beauty transplanted to the fifties, but I imagine the dream team of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio – in their first on-screen reunion since Titanic – will ensure a very different kind of movie. Both have matured into outstanding actors, with the stature and depth to carry a grown-up, subtle tragedy.

still from Revolutionary Road Fortunately they also boast the charisma to make even domestic purgatory watchable, and in fact, many say Winslet could garner another Oscar nomination for her role as April (she won Best Actress at the Golden Globes last night). Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers says: “the glorious Winslet defines what makes an actress great”, while in New York Magazine, David Edelstein swoons: “There isn’t a banal moment in Winslet’s performance—not a gesture, not a word. Is Winslet now the best English-speaking film actress of her generation? I think so.”

Let’s see. Revolutionary Road is in UK cinemas from January 30.

Posted in Watching | Tagged kate winslet and leonardo dicaprio, revolutionary road, richard yates, sam mendes, trailer of the week | 2 Comments »

Airplot: Greenpeace strikes back

January 13, 2009 by estherbintliff

airplot150w Got to say, I’m exceptionally pleased with Greenpeace today. Those brainiac-tivists have come up with an ingenius way to obstruct the proposed expansion of Heathrow Airport. Even Gordon Brown conceded the plan showed “breathtaking cunning.”*

The climate campaigners have clubbed together and quietly bought the deeds to a football pitch-sized plot of land within the site of the proposed third runway.

airplot-alistair As if that wasn’t enough, the main title deed holders happen to be some very eloquent celebrities. Here’s comedian Alistair McGowan, with the kind of quote any journalist would kill for:

By giving this runway the go-ahead Gordon Brown is effectively holding a giant blow torch to the polar ice caps and saying ‘Melt! Melt!’

Aviation expansion will have a serious effect on sea levels and will decimate the very countries people feel it is their right to fly to. This isn’t just about the destruction of Sipson but the destruction of the world as we know it.”

contrails over london skies, courtesy inel on creative commons McGowan, Emma Thompson and Zac Goldsmith are among the official title deed holders, but Greenpeace are also inviting members of the public – i.e. us – to sign up as ‘beneficial owners‘, which means you don’t have to hand any money over but will be included in a legal deed of trust. By 3.15pm today, an astonishing 4,640 people had already agreed to become co-owners of the plot, and numbers were rising by around a thousand every hour.

Jim Pickard explains why this will make a difference:

I just called up a planning expert at one of the big property agencies to ask whether this would work. It turns out that a government agency wanting to carry out a CPO has to physically serve it in person to the landowner. That could make things very, very complicated.”

Want to make a stand? Join in here. At full capacity, an expanded Heathrow would become the biggest single source of C02 emissions in Britain. Greenpeace protested at Heathrow back in April, organizing a peaceful demo which was unfortunately overshadowed by BAA’s own incompetence in failing to open Terminal 5. Luckily their latest act of rebellion has already attracted a whole lot more press coverage: it was discussed on radio 4 this morning, and on the FT’s Alphaville blog. It’s even being covered in the Spanish press.

The government, who were expected to greenlight a third runway this week, will now only say they will announce their decision by the end of the month. More than 40 backbench MPs have voiced their concerns over the plan. If you’re still feeling undecided, read this Economist article on why it’s time “for the British government to realise that it is not its job to be the champion of the aviation industry“.

* he didn’t really. except probably he did, in his head.

Posted in acclimatizing | Tagged airplot, greenpeace, heathrow third runway | 2 Comments »

George Bush is leaving the building

January 15, 2009 by estherbintliff

…on January 20, and Slate has done us all a favour and collected the top 25 Bushisms of all time.

bushlastpress My personal favourites:

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”—Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000

And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I’m sorry it’s the case, and I’ll work hard to try to elevate it.”—speaking on National Public Radio, Jan. 29, 2007

Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

Posted in Reading | Tagged george bush, jacob weisberg, slate, top 25 bushisms | Leave a Comment »

A dark day

January 15, 2009 by estherbintliff

'The fly on my windscreen' by Wiros, on creative commons Again, again, my faith in democracy has been squashed like a fly on the windshield of a jumbo jet.

Two days ago I was (alright, probably naively) excited about the Greenpeace airplot to obstruct the proposed new runway at Heathrow.

Today, the government said it was ploughing ahead with the runway despite the massive outcry of public concern; despite 50 backbench MPs opposing the move; despite the fact that the Tyndall Centre has forecast that if the aviation industry grows as predicted, aviation alone will destroy any hope of hitting the government’s own 80 % target for cutting carbon emissions by 2050.

that special mace My only consolation is that one MP staged an immediate and rather courageous mini-protest in the House of Commons, which you can watch here. Labour MP John McDonnell, bless him, is now suspended for five days, after he picked up the mace (a silver gilt ornamental club of about five feet in length, dating from the reign of Charles II) while shouting: “It’s a disgrace to the democracy of this country.” Agreed.

The government have assiduously ‘greenwashed’ their plan, claiming that only the cleanest planes will be allowed to use the new runway. What does that even mean? Well, the aviation industry thinks it can cut CO2 emissions by 50 % by 2020, a pledge the government is counting on. Unfortunately, even industry insiders doubt whether that target can be achieved – Keith Mans, chief executive of the Royal Aeronautical Society, told the BBC today:

I honestly don’t know. There is a good prospect that they are achievable by 2020 but the science and the engineering solutions to the science are not totally reliable.”

Breaking promises won’t be a problem for Labour or BAA. As my friend Jeremy documents over at Make Wealth History, both parties have a history of telling lies, and so:

The only option now is to fight the runway in the courts, in the planning process, and on the ground.”

Fischli and Weiss, Airport Luckily climate campaigners won’t be on their own, as the Lib Dems and the Tories vehemently oppose the plan and have clearly seized on it as a way to assert their green credentials. Lib Dem MP Norman Baker has said the government is “in the pocket of the aviation industry”, while the tories have actually promised that if they win the next election, they’ll cancel the new runway altogether.

Posted in acclimatizing | Tagged greenpeace, heathrow, heathrow third runway, john mcdonnell | 3 Comments »

Trailer of the week: Gran Torino

January 21, 2009 by estherbintliff

gran_torino, poster design by the cimarron group For seven years at the start of his career, Clint Eastwood played a cattle drover in the CBS television series Rawhide. Between 1959 and 1965, he completed a total of 217 episodes, more than any other actor in the entire series. Maybe that record stint is a lesson in patience.

Almost half a century later, he’s not only a legendary actor but also one of the foremost filmmakers in Hollywood, nominated for 8 Best Director Oscars, and twice a winner – for Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby.

Did he foresee such epic success while shooting his 216th episode as Rowdy Yates (a character he called “the idiot of the plains“)? He didn’t even secure his first serious film role until he was in his mid-thirties. According to film critic Roger Ebert, he went all the way to Spain to star in Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars for the simple reason that “Hollywood wouldn’t hire him“.

The truth of that unlikely statement is born out by this vintage review from Time magazine, 1968:

Clinton Eastwood Jr., son of a California business executive, went into television after an unsuccessful try at breaking into movies… his acting—so far—has been consistently awful”

Luckily Clinton Jr. didn’t take such criticisms to heart. He went on to star in over 40 films, perhaps most famously Dirty Harry in 1971 and Unforgiven in 1992. Now in his late 70s, his latest – and, apparently, final – acting role is in Gran Torino, a film about racial intolerance, violence and redemption. It’s only the ninth feature he’s directed since 2000. My own favourite has to be 2003’s haunting, sombre Mystic River, a film that unravels its dark secrets with exceptional power and restraint. I don’t expect Gran Torino will replace it, if only because it doesn’t star Sean Penn and Tim Robbins, but then again, the reviewers are pretty keen, so I’m keeping an open mind.

Gran Torino is in UK cinemas from Friday February 20.

Posted in Watching | Tagged clint eastwood, clint eastwood and sergio leone, gran torino | 1 Comment »

Why the earth would have voted Obama too

January 22, 2009 by estherbintliff

Wind farm and San Jacinto Peak, by Wayfinder 73 on creative commons

Nice piece in the Huffington Post on why Obama’s explicit reference to climate change in his inauguration speech is so important.

In case you missed it (surely not), or alternatively got diverted thinking about how Obama fluffed his lines just a teeny bit and whether it meant he might not actually be President (I know, pretty unlikely, unless you work for Fox News) then here’s what he said:

Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet…

We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories…”

Go renewables!

Posted in acclimatizing | Tagged huffington post, jerry cope, obama climate change | 1 Comment »

Trailer of the week: Watchmen

January 25, 2009 by estherbintliff

watchmen_ver8 I saw the first trailer for this last year and wasn’t particularly excited. But at that point I knew nothing about Watchmen (I know, apologies to all comic-enthusiasts). I think I then filed it away in my brain alongside Night Watch and subsequently came to think of them as one and the same. Oops.

Thank goodness, then, that a friend of mine put me to rights yesterday, explaining that Watchmen was one of the best graphic novels of all time, and noting how annoying it was that the long awaited film adaptation had been held up in a post-production scrap between Fox and Warner Bros (full story here).

Turns out, that dispute has very recently been settled, and the film is now due out on March 6. The new trailer gives a far greater sense of narrative and character than the first, although I still wonder whether it really does justice to the film’s potential.

Partly that’s because trailers often focus on high-octane action in the hope of winning viewers through sheer visual violence; partly it’s because there’s been such a slew of superhero films in the last decade that it’s easy to feel jaded at the sight of yet another rubberized torso.

watchmen But it’s exactly this apparent superfluity of superheroes that the the novel and the film are interested in. Creator Alan Moore told one interviewer he wanted to explore “the idea of the superman manifest within society“, while in a brilliant literary analysis of the book, philosophy professor Iain Thomson called Watchmen a “masterful deconstruction of the hero”. All of which sounds pretty exciting.

Clearly this is not only a completely different film from Night Watch or Day Watch or whatever that other film with watch in the title was called, it could also be a pivotal film for the whole superhero genre.

Watchmen is in UK cinemas from March 6.

* Time magazine agrees: it was the only graphic novel in their list of the 100 greatest novels, and here’s why: “Told with ruthless psychological realism, in fugal, overlapping plotlines and gorgeous, cinematic panels rich with repeating motifs, Watchmen is a heart-pounding, heartbreaking read and a watershed in the evolution of a young medium”

Posted in Watching | Tagged alan moore, heroes and superheroes, trailer of the week, watchmen | 1 Comment »

Trailer of the week: State of Play

February 23, 2009 by estherbintliff

state_of_play Much as I like this poster, I need you not to see the film without first watching the original tv series. It’s for your own good, trust me.

David Yates directed the six part thriller for the BBC back in 2003, from a script by the legendary Paul Abbott, the writer of Cracker, Shameless and Clocking Off. Abbott’s dark, acerbic style, informed by his own troubled upbringing, makes him one of our best writers. The dialogue in the original State of Play crackles and spits, whether taking place at a bus stop or inside the Houses of Parliament. The story – which involves a politician, his dead lover, a journalist and some very dodgy blackmailing in the corridors of power – is enacted by an ensemble of the classiest British actors, including John Simm, David Morrissey, Bill Nighy, Philip Glenister, a young James McAvoy and Kelly Macdonald.

stateofplay Fast-forward six years and the inevitable Hollywood adaptation is soon to be released, starring Russell Crowe.

Sadly it looks about 34 per cent as good as the series, judging from the trailer. My concerns were initially raised after Brad Pitt dropped out of the production due to script concerns. My other immediate worry is the dire state of Russell Crowe’s hair. All in all, it just seems very unlikely that the film will come close to the dramatic integrity of the original. For one thing, the movie can only be around 120 minutes, whereas the series consisted of six glorious hanging-off-the-edge-of-your-seat hour-long episodes.

still from State of Play Take a look at the trailer, and then do yourself a favour and get the series out on DVD.

State of Play is released in UK cinemas on April 24.

Posted in Watching | Tagged paul abbott, russell crowe, state of play, state of play bbc, trailer of the week | 2 Comments »

Kubrick tickets, a little treat just for you

January 29, 2009 by estherbintliff

courtesy pierofix on creative commons The British Film Institute is running a season of Stanley Kubrick films to mark the fact that it’s ten years since he died.

To my great excitement, I’ve got 2 free tickets to see any film featured in the season, just for YOU.

That’s right. You get to go to the lovely BFI building which sits on London’s South Bank, to see whichever film you like, when you like, and you can take a date.

The full programme is here and includes the classic Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Lolita (1962), Spartacus (1960), and Barry Lyndon (1975), the film I most want to see, which Wendy Ide gave 5 stars to stanleykubrick in this week’s Times.

All you have to do is email me at filtnib@gmail.com, with a (brief – just a few lines) answer to the following question:

What was the best film you saw last year (2008) and why?

The best answer will win the tickets! Yay. Simple as pie. Deadline is February 12th.

Posted in Watching | Tagged BFI, BFI Kubrick season, british film institute, free cinema tickets, stanley kubrick | 1 Comment »

Kubrick competition winner!

February 20, 2009 by estherbintliff

southbank_bfi Thankyou to everyone who entered the competition for tickets to the BFI’s Kubrick season!

I’ve got to say it was an absolute pleasure to read every single entry and I thought I’d post excerpts from the best below, since they highlight some pretty interesting films and even if you didn’t enter, you might get an idea for your next dvd rental. They’re in no particular order, except that the winning entry is at the top. Also, some of you asked not to be named, so they’re all anonymous.

Gommora

“The best film I saw in 2008, and by best I mean the one that made the biggest impression on me, is Gommora. Not only because it’s a very well made film about the south Italian Mafia with great actors but because of the director’s bravery, both in making the film (he’s now under constant police protection) and in resisting the temptation to add any silver lining at all. It’s a depressing film that hits you like a ton of bricks but that’s because the reality it portrays doesn’t have any redeeming features for the people that inhabit it.”

Gone Baby Gone

gone_baby_gone “For being the only film I have ever seen which manages to take the subtleties and complexities of many strands of analytic ethical philosophy, apply them to an ethical dilemma, reduce none of them to caricatures, resist force-feeding the viewer an answer, and do it all on top of an intelligent, well-paced thriller who’s end nobody could predict. A film which showed that sometimes there is no single right answer.”

lust_caution Lust, caution

“It shows how spy paranoia and factional hatred are exactly the same as a
fevered, physical love affair.”

Atonement

“Best film I saw last year was Atonement – I spent most of the film very irritated by its picture postcard qualities and felt it was very unreal – only to discover in the last scene (I hadn’t read the book) that the way they were shot and scripted made perfect sense.”

“I reckon the best film I saw in 08 was Atonement, because it picked up the audience and put it right in the middle of war – not just the evacuation fron Dunkirk right at the human level of the horror, but the life-long battle with the guilt caused by childhood dishonesty and its frightening consequences.”

The Emperor’s New Clothes

“This was released in 2002, but I only got around to watching it on
FilmFour, which produced it, last year. It’s a beautiful “what if” story about Napoleon’s supposed escape from St Helena. Ian Holm’s central performance is touching as he is transformed – through his friendship with a Parisienne fruit seller – from haughty Emperor into ordinary citizen.”

Waltz With Bashir

“I think by far the finest film I saw last year was Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentary with touched me to the core. Never has an animated work – and very few films for that matter – dissected such a terrible subject in such an accessible way.”

“The best film I saw in 2008 was Waltz With Bashir, because: it gripped me from start to finish; to moved me to tears; it dazzled my brains out with its gorgeous design and colour; it had such clarity of vision and purpose; it looked like nothing I’ve seen before. It was inspirational.”

“The best film I’ve seen this past year would have to be Waltz with Bashir. It dealt with a dangerously caustic subject matter with soul-searing honesty, and did so in a mindblowingly unconventional way. It teft me utterly emotionally and spiritually disrupted.”

Posted in Watching | Tagged best film of 2008, BFI, gomorrah, kubrick competition | Leave a Comment »

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