Is it? Well, here’s what Russell Goldman had to say about it in an article on ABC News (quoted here from www.abcnews.go.com):
For a while there it was touch-and-go. We as a country would walk past a newsstand in the airport or flip thorough a tabloid in line at the supermarket and collectively breathe a sigh of relief that our crazy country cousin Britney Spears was still alive.
You still hear sighs at the newsstand, but they’re no longer sighs of relief. Now they are sighs of resignation.
Spears isn’t the only one keeping us bored by staying out of trouble these days. Nearly all of the so-called bad girls who just several months ago graced magazine covers as they sauntered out of rehab, sashayed out of prison and stepped out of cars sans underwear have been bumped off the pages by dime-a-dozen reality show stars and politicians.
….
“Certainly, sales of photos and videos of Britney have gone down since last year and the beginning of this year,” said Brandy Navarre, vice president of the paparazzi photo agency X-17 Online. “She’s just not out doing wild and unexpected things anymore.”
“There is still a market for the weird and wacky, it’s just other people doing it,” Navarre said. “We’ve got shocking photos of Colin Farrell on the beach looking really skinny.”
Colin Farrell? Really? That’s it? Sigh.
Read Russell Goldman’s entire article here.
[Citation: Is Tabloid Trash a Thing of the Past? by Russell Goldman, ABC News, 26 June 2008.]
30 June 2008
27 June 2008
In Bruges – unpredictable and extraordinary
In Bruges (‘Bruges’ is pronounced ‘broojz’), Irish director Martin McDonagh’s début film, is a dark comedy about two Irish hit men – one young, one middle-aged – cooling their heels in a sleepy medieval Belgian town (Bruges), under orders from their boss in England. They wait, indefinitely, for their boss’ call.
There are mixed feelings about this. The younger man, Ray (played by Colin Farrell), scruffy and tense, is disturbed, wondering why he has been sent to this ‘shithole’. The older man, Ken (played by Brendan Gleeson), mature with experience, takes in the beauty of the town and its various sights, and finds peace.
Ray has reason to be disturbed. His previous job had gone wrong and now he has to live under its shadow. He sulks through his holiday in Bruges; at times, going philosophical and talking about suffering in Hell. Ken, caring and compassionate, tries to soothe Ray’s feelings… and writer-director McDonagh defines an understated kinship between the two hit men. But, things don’t go as expected.
Through a series of chance encounters – the making of a medieval film in the town, meeting with a beautiful girl and a midget connected with the film, a row at a restaurant over smoking, and a botched robbery by the beautiful girl’s skinhead boyfriend – Ray’s mood rises and he feels the trip to Bruges isn’t wasted after all. That’s when the boss, Harry (played by Ralph Fiennes), calls and leaves specific instructions with Ken.
And, that changes everything.
There are further twists to this tale, but I won’t give anything away. I’ll let you hang on to its unpredictability – because that’s what, I feel, Martin McDonagh wants to do.
You’ll love McDonagh’s direction and his cinematographer Eigil Bryld’s fantastic presentation of Bruges, in daylight and at night, while keeping the pace of the film tense until its very end. The script is both taut and funny, leading to some hilarious situations in the film. And, even though the dialogues are filled with expletives, they add to the character of the film and its three leading characters.
In In Bruges, Martin McDonagh presents something of a slow-burn thriller in the setting of a quiet town in Europe. The film is heavy on dialogue but slow in action; its comedy overriding its tragic end. The acting by Farrell, Gleeson and Fiennes is superb (Colin Farrell’s best performance so far), bringing to the front an honest but fanciful message: that even killers have a conscience and principles to live by.
Probably, that’s what makes In Bruges an extraordinary film.
There are mixed feelings about this. The younger man, Ray (played by Colin Farrell), scruffy and tense, is disturbed, wondering why he has been sent to this ‘shithole’. The older man, Ken (played by Brendan Gleeson), mature with experience, takes in the beauty of the town and its various sights, and finds peace.
Ray has reason to be disturbed. His previous job had gone wrong and now he has to live under its shadow. He sulks through his holiday in Bruges; at times, going philosophical and talking about suffering in Hell. Ken, caring and compassionate, tries to soothe Ray’s feelings… and writer-director McDonagh defines an understated kinship between the two hit men. But, things don’t go as expected.
Through a series of chance encounters – the making of a medieval film in the town, meeting with a beautiful girl and a midget connected with the film, a row at a restaurant over smoking, and a botched robbery by the beautiful girl’s skinhead boyfriend – Ray’s mood rises and he feels the trip to Bruges isn’t wasted after all. That’s when the boss, Harry (played by Ralph Fiennes), calls and leaves specific instructions with Ken.
And, that changes everything.
There are further twists to this tale, but I won’t give anything away. I’ll let you hang on to its unpredictability – because that’s what, I feel, Martin McDonagh wants to do.
You’ll love McDonagh’s direction and his cinematographer Eigil Bryld’s fantastic presentation of Bruges, in daylight and at night, while keeping the pace of the film tense until its very end. The script is both taut and funny, leading to some hilarious situations in the film. And, even though the dialogues are filled with expletives, they add to the character of the film and its three leading characters.
In In Bruges, Martin McDonagh presents something of a slow-burn thriller in the setting of a quiet town in Europe. The film is heavy on dialogue but slow in action; its comedy overriding its tragic end. The acting by Farrell, Gleeson and Fiennes is superb (Colin Farrell’s best performance so far), bringing to the front an honest but fanciful message: that even killers have a conscience and principles to live by.
Probably, that’s what makes In Bruges an extraordinary film.
17 June 2008
A horrible business
“Approximately 800,000 people are trafficked across national borders each year and millions more are traded domestically. The International Labour Organisation estimates that there are at least 2.5m people in forced labour at any one time, including sexual exploitation, as a result of trafficking.
Efforts to wipe out this modern slave trade are hampered because human trafficking is a big business. It is impossible to know the exact sums involved but recent estimates of the value of the global trafficking trade have put it as high as $32 billion. The United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking describes it as a high-reward and low-risk crime. People come cheap and many countries lack the necessary laws to target traffickers, or they are not properly enforced. Worse still, it is often the victims of the traffickers that are treated as criminals.
Women suffer most in this respect: the report estimates that 80% of victims of international trafficking are women forced into some form of prostitution. Women are involved in trafficking too, though this is less common. In Europe and Central and south Asia women are often recruited by other women who were themselves the victims of trafficking. In part to avoid detection by the authorities, traffickers grant victims limited freedom while simultaneously coercing them to return home to recruit other women to replace them.
The report also casts a light on the increasingly important role that technology is playing in the trade, both in combating it and its perpetration. The internet helps to identify and track down the perpetrators but increasingly it is becoming part of the problem. Chatrooms are used to exchange information about sex-tourism sites; people are targeted through social-networking sites where pornographic records of sex trafficking are also bought and sold; victims are ensnared through instant messaging.”
[Citation: Quote from A horrible business, The Economist print edition, 14 June 2008.]
Efforts to wipe out this modern slave trade are hampered because human trafficking is a big business. It is impossible to know the exact sums involved but recent estimates of the value of the global trafficking trade have put it as high as $32 billion. The United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking describes it as a high-reward and low-risk crime. People come cheap and many countries lack the necessary laws to target traffickers, or they are not properly enforced. Worse still, it is often the victims of the traffickers that are treated as criminals.
Women suffer most in this respect: the report estimates that 80% of victims of international trafficking are women forced into some form of prostitution. Women are involved in trafficking too, though this is less common. In Europe and Central and south Asia women are often recruited by other women who were themselves the victims of trafficking. In part to avoid detection by the authorities, traffickers grant victims limited freedom while simultaneously coercing them to return home to recruit other women to replace them.
The report also casts a light on the increasingly important role that technology is playing in the trade, both in combating it and its perpetration. The internet helps to identify and track down the perpetrators but increasingly it is becoming part of the problem. Chatrooms are used to exchange information about sex-tourism sites; people are targeted through social-networking sites where pornographic records of sex trafficking are also bought and sold; victims are ensnared through instant messaging.”
[Citation: Quote from A horrible business, The Economist print edition, 14 June 2008.]
14 June 2008
Josie McCoy – portraits suspended in paint
Raimunda
(character, played by Penélope Cruz, in Pedro Almadóvar’s film Volver)
Oil on canvas
2007
“Painting offers a version of reality in the same way as films do. I paint portraits of these unreal moments. The poses I choose are evocative – the moment that stays with me days after I have watched the film.
Using oil paint like watercolour, I build up the painting in thin layers to make the surface glow – an imitation of a television screen. The unearthly colours accentuate this. The green hue references traditional techniques of painting, where green was used as under-painting to give luminosity to the surface colour.
Working from photographs of the television allows me to paint an isolated, spontaneous moment, which the character hasn’t specifically performed for. I pare down the image to include only the information required for the character to be recognisable and for their expression to be conveyed to the audience. The viewer is presented with a split second of time, suspended in paint.”
Please visit Josie McCoy’s gallery on her website to see more of her art.
[Citation: Quote from Josie McCoy’s statement from her website. Image from Josie McCoy’s gallery on her website.]
13 June 2008
News is a story about what happened
“I would argue that news has always been an artifact and that it never corresponded exactly to what actually happened.
We take today’s front page as a mirror of yesterday’s events, but it was made up yesterday evening — literally, by ‘make-up’ editors, who designed page one according to arbitrary conventions: lead story on the far right column, off-lead on the left, soft news inside or below the fold, features set off by special kinds of headlines.
Typographical design orients the reader and shapes the meaning of the news. News itself takes the form of narratives composed by professionals according to conventions that they picked up in the course of their training — the ‘inverted pyramid’ mode of exposition, the ‘color’ lead, the code for ‘high’ and ‘the highest’ sources, and so on.
News is not what happened but a story about what happened.”
[Robert Darnton, Harvard University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard; quoted from The Library in the New Age, The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 10, 12 June 2008.]
We take today’s front page as a mirror of yesterday’s events, but it was made up yesterday evening — literally, by ‘make-up’ editors, who designed page one according to arbitrary conventions: lead story on the far right column, off-lead on the left, soft news inside or below the fold, features set off by special kinds of headlines.
Typographical design orients the reader and shapes the meaning of the news. News itself takes the form of narratives composed by professionals according to conventions that they picked up in the course of their training — the ‘inverted pyramid’ mode of exposition, the ‘color’ lead, the code for ‘high’ and ‘the highest’ sources, and so on.
News is not what happened but a story about what happened.”
[Robert Darnton, Harvard University Professor and Director of the University Library at Harvard; quoted from The Library in the New Age, The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 10, 12 June 2008.]
09 June 2008
Shanghai Nights
“So it was that, over time and without my realising it, the setting of my childhood adventures gradually became a moral landscape, and that is how it has always remained in my mind.”
So says 14-year-old Daniel, hero of Juan Marsé’s novel Shanghai Nights (translated by Nick Caistor), towards the end of the book. But, from what I’ve read about the author, it could well have been Marsé’s own confession.
Shanghai Nights is a story about a 14-year-old boy’s childhood in 1950s rundown Barcelona. The boy, Daniel, who has lost his father to the Civil War and now lives with his mother, is entrusted by an eccentric old sea captain called Captain Blay with drawing pictures of an ailing (from tuberculosis) but attractive 15-year-old girl, Susana.
In between school and taking up a job as a jeweller’s apprentice, Daniel spends half his time with Susana, staying just out of reach so as not to catch an infection while drawing her picture, and the other half with Captain Blay, collecting signatures for a petition to stop a gas leak and to close down a factory spewing polluting smoke which may have caused Susana’s illness.
Like Daniel, Susana also lives with her mother, Senora Anita, having lost her father, Kim, mysteriously, as he seems to have disappeared during the Civil War. Sitting by her bedside, as Daniel attempts to draw a fitting picture of the ailing Susana against the backdrop of a factory chimney billowing hazardous smoke, the two teenagers become attracted to each other.
In this scene enters Forcat, a mysterious friend of Susana’s father Kim, bringing news of Kim from Shanghai. Over weeks and months, as a lodger at Senora Anita’s place, Forcat narrates tales of Kim’s daring adventures of escape to Shanghai in pursuit of a Nazi war criminal who had once tortured one of Kim’s friends during WW2, and of Kim’s self-assured dealings with the Shanghai underworld.
Juan Marsé paints a vivid contrast between the rundown world of post-War Barcelona and the colourful gangster world of Shanghai. In each setting, he manages to adorn the storyline with strange but strangely-appealing characters who keep us hooked onto every page of the novel. Yet, Marsé falters towards the end, bringing the story to a quick and a confusing finish. Thereby, destroying the fantasy he had created so well.
I didn’t quite understand the need for this hurry to end the novel, but I must admit that, until that time, Marsé had me mesmerised with his tale. Even now, I wonder about the element of fantasy we all add to our tales of our childhood when we remember them or narrate them to others. And, that is probably the point Juan Marsé wants to make in Shanghai Nights.
So says 14-year-old Daniel, hero of Juan Marsé’s novel Shanghai Nights (translated by Nick Caistor), towards the end of the book. But, from what I’ve read about the author, it could well have been Marsé’s own confession.
Shanghai Nights is a story about a 14-year-old boy’s childhood in 1950s rundown Barcelona. The boy, Daniel, who has lost his father to the Civil War and now lives with his mother, is entrusted by an eccentric old sea captain called Captain Blay with drawing pictures of an ailing (from tuberculosis) but attractive 15-year-old girl, Susana.
In between school and taking up a job as a jeweller’s apprentice, Daniel spends half his time with Susana, staying just out of reach so as not to catch an infection while drawing her picture, and the other half with Captain Blay, collecting signatures for a petition to stop a gas leak and to close down a factory spewing polluting smoke which may have caused Susana’s illness.
Like Daniel, Susana also lives with her mother, Senora Anita, having lost her father, Kim, mysteriously, as he seems to have disappeared during the Civil War. Sitting by her bedside, as Daniel attempts to draw a fitting picture of the ailing Susana against the backdrop of a factory chimney billowing hazardous smoke, the two teenagers become attracted to each other.
In this scene enters Forcat, a mysterious friend of Susana’s father Kim, bringing news of Kim from Shanghai. Over weeks and months, as a lodger at Senora Anita’s place, Forcat narrates tales of Kim’s daring adventures of escape to Shanghai in pursuit of a Nazi war criminal who had once tortured one of Kim’s friends during WW2, and of Kim’s self-assured dealings with the Shanghai underworld.
Juan Marsé paints a vivid contrast between the rundown world of post-War Barcelona and the colourful gangster world of Shanghai. In each setting, he manages to adorn the storyline with strange but strangely-appealing characters who keep us hooked onto every page of the novel. Yet, Marsé falters towards the end, bringing the story to a quick and a confusing finish. Thereby, destroying the fantasy he had created so well.
I didn’t quite understand the need for this hurry to end the novel, but I must admit that, until that time, Marsé had me mesmerised with his tale. Even now, I wonder about the element of fantasy we all add to our tales of our childhood when we remember them or narrate them to others. And, that is probably the point Juan Marsé wants to make in Shanghai Nights.
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