Skritek and Look Both Ways

Saw two films in the Vancouver International Film Festival today. "Skritek" is directed by Tomas Vorel of the Czech Republic. The difficulties and disappointments of working-class life are told in the form of an energetic non-verbal fable. A little girl saw and struck up a friendship with a Skritek, a kind of hobgoblin, while her family was falling apart—her teenage brother turned punk, her father turned to a younger curvaceous co-worker, her mother turned to pills and she could not concentrate in class. In a North American film, it would have been full of pain and tear and soul searching. Over this side of the pond, people want psychology and empathy. We want to relation to the character and see that the shittiness of life is an aberration rather then the norm. What is refreshing about Skritek is that it does not try to connect with us emotionally, at least not in a realist way. Formally, it does so by turning all dialogues into gibberish, in effect turning it into a silent movie. We only have the visual and the playful music to go on emotionally. As the result, when the family unit veered towards collapse, we feel more hilarity than disturbance. Life as presented is not pretty but seeing the humour in it can help everybody live through it. In the end, the terrible brother is kicked out, the parents get back together and the little girl rides off with the Skritek. It is a fairy tale and it makes no pretension to be otherwise. Life itself is shitty, so why not have some fun with it? Jokes are the only weapon to combat the inescapable life.

While the jokes and happy ending of Skritek is optimism born from a deep seeded pessimism, “Look Both Ways,” a film from Australia, is no different. What made “Look Both Ways” different is that it does not acknowledge the shitty nature of life and choose to believe that shittiness is but an aberration. A guy got run over by a train while walking his dog and the lives of five people—the engineer who was driving the train, the morbid young woman, just coming home from her father’s funeral, who witnessed the accident, the divorced reporter assigned to the case whose girlfriend is unexpectedly pregnant, the handsome news photographer who just found out about his cancer, the news editor who did not know how to deal with the news of his friend’s cancer, and the grieving wife of the deceased--intersected. The film follows the individual lives of these characters immediately after the accident as they each tried to deal with their own pain. By and large it is beautifully done without falling into the trap of emotional indulgence. It does however offer little insight. Each of them take the conventional road to recovery—the engineer was able to forgive himself with the help of his son by apologizing to the widow, the morbid woman broke out of her shell and found her man in the photographer, the photography was able to beat his cancer with the help of the no longer morbid woman, the reporter overcame his selfishness to be with his girlfriend, and the editor rediscovered his family. It is just all so convenient. In the end of the film, a series of photos documented the therapy, the recovery and the world travelling of the happy couple. On the surface, it is comforting to see things all worked out. But if we think just a little more, we would realize that chances of that is slim to none. It is no less a fairy tale then Skritek. The optimism it so insisted on rings forced and false. Would it not be more honest to oneself and others to deal with it as Vorel did? It would be more productive too.

Bread gouging

Business people like to say that we are living in a consumer world. It is not hard to understand why this is so desirable for them—consumers are just such idiots. Once upon a time no one want to buy overgrown brown mushrooms. Then, they start calling these huge caps portabellas, charge an absurd sum for them, and we worship them as a near truffle. Perhaps the most ridiculous is bread. A loaf of “Tuscan” bread can cost four, five dollars. What is cheaper to make than “Tuscan” bread? It is just flour, salt, yeast and water. When gasoline went over one dollar a litre, people called for parliamentary inquiries. No one wants to look into bread and mushrooms. At least gasoline is made through an expansive process from a depleting resource. Gasoline should be expansive; but flour and yeast? Now that is a scam!

Creator Contest!

In the U.S., “Creationism” is being use by Christian fundamentalists to combat “evolutionist,” the term they have for science. This move is confusing in many levels. On the one hand, through legal manoeuvres they may get schools to teach “creationism.” On the other, they equal religion and science. From the perspective of religion that is an immeasurably large step down. It goes from divine truth to competing human ideas. The move also opens religion, in most cases Christianity, to analysis rather than faith. What is more discomforting to Christian fundamentalist is that there will be no good reason no to include other religions’ “creationism.” The result is not so much the institutional aids to evangelize but a further dilution of the message. God created the world in six days by willing it is cool, but to a 12-year-old boy, Odin creating earth from the decaying corpse of Ymir is just so much cooler!

Paradise of Codes

What is happening to our world? Microsoft is paying attention to the quality of their codes? What is next, U.S. giving up nuclear arms? China embraces open political discussion? Hell freezes over? It is going to be difficult for us all, actually being the end user rather than quality control testers. But then, if they do come up with a bug free and secure Longhorn/Vista, who is going to buy their next version? The only reason most people bought XP was because they believe that it is less buggy and more secure than what they had. And now, as XP proved to be not that much of an improvement, millions of people are panting for a new release. Bill Gate does not seem to be so stupid that he would offer something that would damage his future earnings. So, in the end, I am betting that the world is not going to change and Vista is going to need patches almost daily. After all no one knows better than Billy that money does not grow on perfect codes.

Don't Download But Buy Our Players to Play it!

I know, talking about corporate hypocrisy is like talking about Uwe Boll’s bad directing—it is just plain repetitive and tiresome. Sometimes though, they would do thing so obviously contradicting that it is shocking that no one is paying notice. Case in point is the actions of the electronic consumer product divisions and the entertainment divisions of major conglomerates. Sony for example owns both entertainment companies and consumer product companies. Sony entertainment is making nose and fighting hard on all legal fronts to “combat” Internet piracy. Sony electronics however is producing DVD players that play DIVX, XVID and MP3 formats. The only people I know who use these formats are downloaders, the practitioners of the same Internet piracy that Sony’s entertainment divisions are so vehemently trying to stop. Now the new Sony, and other major brands’, DVD players freed the downloaded movies to be played on any TV in high quality. It is cynicism at full bloom—while they fight to protect their financial interest on one side, they try to make money by exploiting the illegal activities on the other. They just want to make as much money as the can regardless any law or principle.

It Is Not About Soy Sauce

It is not easy to quantify a cuisine like Chinese or Indian. These are two countries each has landmass larger than that of Europe, population greater than Europe and history far longer than that of Europe. A lot of different people have been living in greatly different climates cooking a wide range of food for millennia. It would be foolish to say a certain way of cooking or a certain set of ingredients defines these cuisines. Case in point is in last Wednesday’s NY Times. In the article “Craving Hyphenated Chinese” by Julia Moskin, she quoted Eugene Anderson, an anthropologist who wrote the book “The Food of China” saying, ““Chinese food is defined by a flavor principle of soy sauce, ginger, garlic and green onions.” and methods including stir-frying and steaming… “Once you get too far away from those rules, it is no longer Chinese.”” This may be true for the Chinese food you encounter in North America but certainly not in many parts of China. Many Buddhists do not eat garlic and green onions at all. Many non-Han Muslims do not much use soy sauce. Manchurians grill far more than stir-fry. In the north, they eat far more wheat than rice. To a Shanghainese, Sichuan food can be more exotic and difficult to take than French food. Different cuisines are ways to think about food. They express their own sense of aesthetics. It is not about the medium or techniques but the cultural logics behind them. This is why Chinese can make curries and the results are still unmistakably Chinese; and when Alain Senderens roasted his duck pékinois, he made a new French, instead of Chinese, dish.

The Divine Points

It is abnormal to have two hundred-year storms hitting the gulf in the same year. Normally the interpreters of god would be out in full force telling us whom god is punishing and for what reasons. Curiously, there is not a sign this time. Since there is this vacuum of divined meaning, I will try my hands on it purely as an exercise. So here it goes.

The two Hurricanes make land on the coast from Mississippi to mid-Texas. The major industry most damaged there is oil. Nearly forty percents of the U.S. refining capacity are situated in this area. One can therefore deduce that god’s punishment is on oil related matters in the U.S. It so happens that the most important oil related matters at the moment are the two wars in which the U.S. is presently engaged. The commander-in-chief and his deputy of these two wars happen to be oilmen from Texas. God’s intention cannot be clearer. Since I am not god-fearing, all these are just crazy talks and mean nothing to me. But to the self-professed god-fearers, they should really take this to heart. I am just trying to help here.

Where is Con Air when you need it?

Televisions all over North America were turned to the big plane with little bad wheels trying to land in LAX. They really do not have much choice; “up-to-the-minute” “breaking story” just took over their electron guns and shot out nail-biting all-consuming empathy. It finally ended in a collective exhale at the anti-climax: nobody was hurt; they did not even bother to use the escape chute. You could hear the desperation in the reporters’ voices after the landing, saying that within the minute the stewardesses would open the doors and deploy the chute. Minutes and then minutes, still the doors were not opened. The disembodied voices finally resigned to a complete waste of time, the endless-ness of the non-event. We too were disappointed but dare not admit it. We had been waiting all this time for a giant fireball and heroic rescue. Sure, we had fire but little more than the fire from a home kitchen crème brulé torch. We did not want to see people hurt, not really, but we did want a nice crash, like the one in Toronto last month. We want suspense and we want a good Jerry Bruckheimer ending. We wish we could combine the beginning of this landing and the ending of the one in Toronto. Then, we have a complete narrative. We are all such idiotic Richard Roeper critics on everything!

Hoping for Well Cushioned Seats

Film festivals are tests of one’s endurance and love for watching films. I have been going to or organizing film festivals since my mid-teens, so I know. They tempt you with great discounts on passes that let you watch all the films that you want. All that you to have go on is a large program with hundreds of films, each has but a brief description. The choosing of films to see is made with a combination of chance and faith. Sometimes you want to see one film but the theatre is on the other side of town so you cannot make it; or, more frequently, one film starts before the other ends. And most of the time you know nothing about the film and the filmmakers beyond the hundred words in the book. You just hope that whoever wrote it had at least seen the film. You just have to trust the program like the bible. Most important of all, though, is mental and physical endurance. You plan to see three films a day for two weeks or so. Soon, they starts to blend together and you are not sure which ending goes with which beginning. By the tenth day, you just hope you are not snoring too loudly in the theatre. I do not even know how smokers get through it these days.

In about a week the Vancouver International Film Festival will begin. I hope I am going to be ready.

Coming and Going

Finally British Columbia teachers are heading towards a strike. This has been unavoidable since the last election when the teacher’s union (BCTF) was the most vocal organization against the Liberal Party, the present government. There is no suspense to the failure of negotiation. And there is no surprise in public reactions. The most common one is: “the teacher should get pay more, but this [job actions] will only hurt the kids.” This usually comes from the parents. It is quite understandable but that does not make it any less self-serving and unjust. If the parents truly believe that the teachers should get pay more, they should pressure the government to do so. But of course, the parents are the one that elected the party that says that they would not pay the teachers more. Now they want the teachers to not take job action so as not to hurt their children. That is convenient, isn’t it? They want to get it both ways. They want to sympathize with the underpaid teachers, but do not want to pay them more. They want the teachers to ask for more pay, so long as they do not inconvenient them. It is a beautiful circle--elect a government that would not pay the teachers more and use the children to blackmail the teacher back to work. Brilliant!

What, the Kettle is Black?!

Governments all over the world complain about the news media reporting nothing but bad new. This is not even a “pot calling a kettle black” situation; it is a faked surprise at the kettle being black. The new media of course report bad news, like the fire alarm reports fire. We all hope that when there is a fire, we hear the annoying noise of the alarm. Sometimes, though, when we step away from the stove and burn the pancake on the grill, we take it out on the crying alarm. We may even take a bat and smash it to bits. A wonderful way to reward something that just saved our lives. It is understandable, viewed from our own experience with the fire alarm, that governments would want to take it out on their alarm—the news media. It would be ridiculous for us to agree with them, however. It would be like saying to the foolish cook, “yeah, it is all the alarm’s fault that the pancake is burnt.”

A Sucker's Deal

Even though the US is the largest nuclear power, both military and peaceful, it still wants North Korea to scrape it entire nuclear program. I can support the military part, not because I do not see the hypocrisy in it, but less nuclear bomb is a good thing regardless. Still, it is difficult to find the US argument convincing when they are keep the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world. The more troubling part is their demand to scrape the light-water reactor for power plants. North Korea has no native energy source. They need power to move forward economically. If they give up on nuclear power, they would have no way to move out of the Stone Age. The US wants the North Koreas to give up the possibilities to stand on their own and become dependents on US aids. Even if North Korea had no megalomaniac at the leadership position, they would not, in their right minds, and rightly so, do such a thing. One wonders why the Bush government wants it this way and if they really want a peaceful deal at all.

I Like Grandpa Cheeta Better Than Dirt

A friend recently reminded me that one of the most common things creationists say to convince others of creationism is: “you really think your ancestor is a monkey?” Scientists have time and again pointed out that human does not come from monkey but a common ancestor. This explanation, though true to science, is not very convincing or even interesting. I would take the question at face value, since they tends to take things literally. It really is not so bad to have monkey as an ancestor, considering the alternative. Living in North American, creationists are usually Christian, so let us use they myth as an example. The Bible says that man was created out of clay. One can turn the question back at the Christians and asks, “you really think you are dirt?” That is not so nice, is it? At least a monkey is an animate object; and when a evolutionist baby eats dirt, he is not a cannibal. Let us not even think about the moral and sexual implication for potters. All things considered, monkeys are not so bad at all.

Blog that Burning Bog

Burns Bog is burning again and all I can think of is someone should bring over some malted barley and make some whisky. That is pretty sad, on my part; but I cannot help it. Come to think of it, the city should really rename that bog. How can it not burn every few years if it is called Burns? It is like naming a gas station Kaboom! The Burns family no longer owns the land, so we should rename it, for luck’s sake. The McLaughlin family now owns it, but McLaughlin Bog is a little hard to pronounce. Plus, they have been trying to destroy the Bog for decades by developing it. Maybe we should sell the name like the name of a sports arena and use that money to buy it from the McLaughlin’s.

Watching the Scenery

I like reading mysteries but I am the kind that reads the ending first. A lot of people think it is strange, and I admit it is rather contrary to the rule of the game, but the rule of the game is not as import to me as the pleasure of the text. It is like going out on a car trip. I like to be able to look around, see the scenery. But if I do not know the destination, I would be spending my time in figuring out where that is and let the beauty slips by the windows without taking note. The trip is therefore wasted; it would have been so much easier to fly. Reading is the same, tying to figure out the mystery focuses all the attention on the plot, and the words just slip by. All the pleasures of reading giveb way to anxiety and self-gratifying guessing. Maybe that is why so many people can read poorly written “novels”: they are not reading, just testing their limited intellect.

Who's Gouging Whom?

Free marketers are an odd bunch. They want a free market so long as it benefits them. Take “oil price crisis” for example. As they leave their suburban homes to fill up the tanks of their SUV, they are outraged by the one-dollar-plus a litre price. It is criminal, they say, to have to pay this much to go to work. Some of them even crying “price gouging.” They forget that “price gouging” is precisely what a free market economy does. Take their mantra “let the market regulate itself” for example. When the supply of oil is low and the demand is high, the price of oil goes up. It will be as high as the market can bear. Soon, so the theory goes, oil will be priced out of reach and demand will wane and price will come down. The market will then have adjusted itself. This is the core belief of free marketers. “Price gouging” is simply a part of market mechanism. The free market response to price gouging is not to ask for government intervention but to simply not buy gas. Stay home, bike, walk, swim and roller-blade should all be free market responses to the situation. Changing in taxations and government involvements in changing the supply of oil are all government interference in the market’s freedom. Oh, I forgot, free marketer want a free market so long as it benefit them; as soon as they are slightly inconvenienced, they are the first to cry for daddy. I forgot about this nature of free marketers. Am I red-faced! Never mind.

Holy ... umm... Conception

This Pope has been fun. Two minor news items related to old Benedict in the last few days have given me a couple of good chuckles. First a teacher in Italy was fired because she is “too sexy for the Pope.” The other is the Pope calling for Catholics to have more babies. Is it not stepping over boundaries when a celibate priest tells sexually active people what to do? If Catholics are to have more babies, shouldn’t the Pope, as the leader of all Roman Catholics, be the first to make some. Where is his leadership and example? It becomes truly humorous when paired with the sexy teacher’s story. What can be better then to have a sexy religion teacher to teach religious baby making? When after all these years of teaching with nuns resulted in low birthrates, maybe it is time to have some sexy mamas to change the tide. Celibacy has gone to the old man’s head, unless they support artificial means of reproduction, human still need to have sex to make babies. Come to think of it, I wish I were catholic. Divinely sanctioned, no urged, sex doesn’t sound bad, good excuse anyway.

Refugee/Evacuee

Of all the craziness of the Katrina disaster, none is more absurd than the big deal over the word “refugee.” It is particularly disappointing to hear it coming from Jesse Jackson. The rationale behind the outrage of using “refugee” to descript displaced people is that “they are American.” The clearly implicit is that refugees are those lesser people from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and South America; Americans, as the superior human, cannot be call such demeaning word that would equal them with the lesser human. A distressed refugee saying so is understandable, but for the leader of the Rainbow Collision to say so is ridiculous. What is good for others should be good for Americans. And they say they do not know why the world finds American annoying.
Are these “evacuees” not looking for refuge in places other than their home town/state? They are and they are therefore refugees. And think about the word “evacuees.” They are people who are evacuated, a passive subject in the speech. They do not look for refuge but are hopelessly controlled by whoever evacuated them. Is that really superior to “refugee”? A refugee is lost but still is an active participant in his/her live and future, but an evacuee is the ward of a system. I would rather be a refugee than an evacuee any day.

New N'awlins

New Orleans will be rebuilt, regardless of what people are saying in the “debate.” Whoever decides to let the city sink into the sea will most likely lose the South. No political party is that stupid. The question is not so much whether it will be rebuilt but what will be rebuilt. The most attractive thing about New Orleans was its historical hodgepodge-ness. Its lack of organization made it a free-for-all party town that it was. It was the hometown of Jazz, not R&B. Unfortunately the devastation is so severe that hodgepodge-ness is not going to be able to have the resources to rebuild the city. The only groups that have the resources are the giant corporations. To give the city over to the Pepsis, the Disneys, and the Gaps means to make New Orleans into a mall, a theme park. A clean, organized and homogenized simulacrum will be erect over the ruin of the great city. It will become a “family oriented vacation destination.” It will become a theme hotel airlifted from Las Vegas. When that is done, New Orleans will truly die and become history, pop history. There will be carnivals everyday at 4 and 6, no alcohol served. When that happens, one of the culture hearts of the world will stop beating. I hope I am wrong, I pray to the gods that I don’t believe that I am wrong.

System Default

The panel tonight on PBS talked about whether race and/or class had to do with the lack of support in the wake of Katrina. The discussion soon got to if the problem was decisions made or by system default. The panel seemed to settle on what they considered to be the leaser of the two evils: default. They were mistaken; they had correctly picked the greater evil instead. A few people in position making wrong and racist decisions is easily fixable. Change the people, remove them from office, and the problem is fixed. It may not help this time, but it may help next time. If it is a result of system default, it is deeply serious. You cannot change people and issue directives to get rid of it. You will have to change the system, every part of it, to change the default. That is more difficult and all encompassing. And its implication is much more difficult to face: the system did not fail, the people did not make wrong decision, and this is precisely what is supposed to happen. It implicates everyone in the system.

Save the TV Sets!

Things seem to be all backwards these days. Case in point is the coverage of Katrina. For about two days when people were dying and no help was in sight, there was no outrage over the lack of help; and then the “looting” started. The outrage radiates out from CNN—“we have to send troops into the city to stop looter!” Shoot to kill order was reported given. Bodies can float on streets but god forbid someone breaks windows and steals TVs, which, incidentally, is completely useless without power. There were thousands of people desperate for rescue, and they were asking that police be sent to guard department stores? Talking about ass-backward!

Nobody Expected...

The problem of tropical storms is that they occur every summer like clockwork and people usually survive them. They are scary and damaging, but to a well-built city, they are not normally very deadly. Over the years we get complacent. And then, once in a few years one exceptionally bad storm would hit square on and people would die. Katrina is but an example of it. Every year, millions are displaced by storms worldwide, thousands die. Governments know that and have plans ready for it. Third world countries cannot do very much themselves, so they ask for help when danger approaches. Storms are nice that way--we know they are coming days ahead of time. This is what made watching the news on Katrina’s aftermath so shocking. While it is human nature to be complacent, it is the government’s job to be vigilante and ready for the worst. The incompetence of every level of the US government has been outrageous for the last week or so. If China can evacuate nearly a million people before a far less powerful storm hit, why can’t Louisiana and Mississippi? I am used to watching soldiers from Taiwan, China to India chest-deep in water saving people and repair dams. But the so-called “greatest army in history” is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps most damning is George Bush’s answer to why the government was so unprepared: “nobody expected the breach of the levees.” He said it as if it were an excuse. I don’t know what is worse: that the President did not expect what all experts had expected for decades or that he knew but chose to do nothing. I hope all levels of my government is watching and learning. One day there will be a major earthquake here in Vancouver and monster storms in the Maritimes. I don’t want my government to say, “nobody expected…”