All posts by Indy

movies

>Stockholm International Film Festival

7 Comments

>The Stockholm International Film Festival has always been a pleasure. Last year I couldn’t go due to various reasons, but this time I’ll do my best not to miss out on some of the experience.

My best year was in 2003, when I had the pleasure of interviewing director Royston Tan (featured in the paper edition of Ny Moral #1). We hung out quite a bit, and watching his film, 15 – The Movie, was amazing after having spoken with him about it. I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed it as much if I hadn’t known the background, the struggle and all the madness surrounding the creation of the film.
The movie’s plot synopsis reads like this:
Fast, frenetic, and furious, 15 is the story of five Singaporian teenagers who, abandoned by the system and estranged from their parents and life in general, build their own world in which gangs, drugs, fighting, piercing, self-harm and suicide are common and brotherhood is important above all else.

Royston is a huge fan of Roy Andersson, and somehow somebody managed to get us invited to Roy Andersson’s studio, Studio 24, and that was really interesting, since I’m a huge fan of Roy as well. We got to see some of his sets and his private cinema, and I also became friends with the producer of Sånger från andra våningen [Songs from the Second Floor], Lisa Alwert. I was supposed to interview her later on, but somehow that went down the drain. She’s got some wild stories about the production which I haven’t read anything about elsewhere. Maybe that’ll show up in Ny Moral #2…
We hung out a bit with Roy as well, but he really didn’t say much. Good guy, though.

I also exchanged a few words with David Lynch at Lydmar Hotel (check it out if you ever come to Stockholm, they have the coolest elevator!). I don’t remember what we said. He is one of my idols, so I guess I got starstruck.
All I could think of was what his big hair would look like after a shower… Weird.

I also got to see Ong Bak, Goodbye Lenin, Aillen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer, The Grudge 1 & 2, Prozac Nation, The Station Agent, Internal Affairs and Memories of Murder – all very watchable films (well, maybe not the Grudge films…). The worthless “graffiti” movie Bomb The System and the pretty dull and disappointing The Cooler are now erased from my memory.

In 2002 I had my most memorable cinematic experience ever. Gaspar Noé‘s sickening film Irréversible really fucked with my mind. The opening sequence with the spinning camera, the evil sounds (Gaspar uses infrasounds that cause awe and fear to make people extra anxious), the disturbing images, the intensity… A lot of people left the theater after ten minutes. Even more left during the infamous rape scene. The ones who stayed until the end were rewarded with a very good film. But remember, it’s a whole different thing watching that stuff in a good theater with superhigh volume, sick surround sounds and these huge images attacking your eyes, compared to watching it at home. I’m really glad I got to see it then and there.
It won the Best Film award that year, which is pretty brave, because it really is an unpleasant movie. Even though I think the quality of the films has been lower over the recent years, they knew the game back then. They realized that it was a very good movie, even though it was highly controversial. I like that, and I hope they will bring that vibe back someday.

This year is the 20th edition of the Sthlm International Film Festival, and so far I only get to see four or five films. Hopefully they will blow my mind as well.

The Road
I read the book in 2006 when it came out and it was easily the best book I had read in a long, long time. It’s still one of my all time favourites. I wrote about it here.
I hope the movie has the same darkness, the same emptiness, the same uncontrollable combination of uncertainty and hope, and of course the same love.

The Limits of Control
Jim Jarmusch has never disappointed me, and I love how this movie is described in the press: Lights! Camera! Inaction!
As a fan of minimalism, film art and Jim Jarmusch this one should hit the spot for me.

Dogtooth
I have a feeling this one will be both scary and funny. The Fritzl theme brings the darkness. The absurdity brings the joy.

Waiting Room
A short film.
And I’m a sucker for gas masks.
And the plot synopsis rules:
The predicament of man forced to live in an immense void surrounded by nothing but waste, emptiness and degradation. A young man wearing a gas mask wanders through the deserted streets of a crumbling city. Only a few people – all male – still roam the streets and frequent the coffee shops. The anonymous young man is an existentialist hero in a world where man has been robbed of all purpose.

The Road

The Limits of Control

Dogtooth

Waiting Room

politics

>Why we fight

Leave a comment

>Why do people think that just because you give voice to one opinion of one political party, you’re down 100% with that specific party? Just a disclaimer, because I’m not down with any party. So therefore, here’s some old school communism for ya, the way I like it: classy! Because if there’s gonna be a class war, I’d like it classy…

Johannes Jäger made me aware of this one. Check his blogg (in Swedish) here.

art, movies

>Modern film posters

5 Comments

>Yes, modern film posters are ugly as hell. I guess that’s representative for shallow and soulless lives lead by bastards who want everything served on a silver platter. This is beyond doubt the age of stupid in every possible way. People are lazy fucks. People are stupid fucks. I could continue on…
However, there are of course some people who defy the laws of tradition (Primus pun intended – check the jam here, its’ awesome!) and create what in my mind is good looking shit.
Here are some posters and designs created by allcity. They would be even better looking without the ugly review quotes, but this is about as clean as it gets, and that’s the way I like it. The unused ones are in my opinion way better than the ones that were chosen in the end.
It’s all a matter of taste…

Unused.

Unused.

Unused.

Unused.

Unused.

Unused.
art, movies, politics

>Czech film posters

4 Comments

>

Thanks to my man Hynek Pallas I discovered the Czech Film Posters website.
I’m hooked.

Related posts about poster art
Malleus

Stolen text from the Czech Film Posters website:
“Following a communist take-over in 1948, Czechoslovakia was ruled by a totalitarian regime for over forty years. The level of oppression varied throughout the period – the stifling Stalinist practices of the 1950s gradually gave way to a more liberal rule in the 1960s. But the 1968 Prague Spring movement to break free from the leash held by the Kremlin was brutally supressed by the Red Army in August. The following period of darkness – referred to by the regime as “the process of normalisation” – gradually lightened with the onset of Gorbachev’s Perestrojka in the mid 1980s. Like most other Central European communist regimes the Czech one fell in 1989 during the wave of changes set off by the powerfully symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall.

[…]
The decision on which foreign films could be approved for cinema distribution and which local artists could be allowed to make Czech and Slovak films was totally up to the authorities.
The attitudes of the censors rode the same waves as the regime in general.
[…]
Following the Russian invasion in 1968 and the subsequent occupation, the 1970s saw a new tightening of the censorship screw, but it largely concentrated on the local scene and foreign films continued to slip through the iron curtain. Czechoslovak film-goers could see a number of European club movies (Bergman, Fellini, Visconti), more than a few US blockbusters (The Sting, Jaws, Marathon Man, Saturday Night Fever, Kramer v. Kramer, Alien and others) and a good crop of conspiracy theory thrillers (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men). The communist authorities liked the latter for their exposure of the rot in the Western world.
[…]
But it took until the early 1990s for the Czechoslovak screens to finally see the light shining through such seminal rolls of celluloid such as Dr. Strangelove, The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Wings of Desire not to mention any of the James Bond movies or any other film with Russian baddies.
[…]
Due to the high cost, film posters were rarely imported with the film – a smaller number of French film posters being the exception – and so from the early days it was the local artists who were given the task of creating images to get bums on cinema seats. The Czech film poster of the 1920s and 1930s almost exclusively used realistically painted characters and scenes from the film and screamed the names of its stars often in letters larger than those of the film’s title. Notable exceptions to the rule were Atelier Rotter’s Art Deco works and Frantisek Zelenka’s Modernist designs for the Werich & Voskovec films.
Towards the end of the 1930s, photos of the main character started appearing in the film poster design – usually on a painted background, complemented by lettering created by the poster’s designer. The film poster art lost most of its bite and glamour during the Nazi occupation when the film industry was under the complete control of the German authorities and films in the cinemas were either German or heavily censored Czech productions.
[…]
The decade between 1948 and 1958 was dominated by communist propaganda in all aspects of life and film was one of its main tools.
[…]
The 1960s became the golden age of the Czech film poster. It was a period in which the relative artistic freedom enjoyed by the artists gelled with a range of other factors such as a unique concentration of talent, a wave of new and inspirational films coming from both home and abroad and closer links with the international art world. This cocktail of ability, inspiration and attractive topics to work on gave birth to a collection of hundreds of highly original and inovative film posters that stand apart from the main stream of the genre. While the American and Western European film poster primarily served the film, in Czech and Polish film poster art it was – with a bit of exaggeration – the film that served the poster in the sense that the poster developed into an art form in its own right. It was still used to promote the film but the art of the poster went far beyond the mere capture of the public’s attention. Another factor that enhanced the perception of the Czech film poster as a work of art rather than a purely promotional vehicle was the fact that the text on the poster was usually limited to the film title, name of director and the leading actors – no logos of film distributors and sponsors, quotes lifted from reviews, studio information etc.
[…]
The decade of hope ended with the Russian invasion in August 1968. The newly appointed pro-Kremlin government turned one of its searchlights on the arts and entertainment. Paranoid aparatchiks searched for anti-communist propaganda where there was none – film poster designs submitted by artists were often rejected or had to be reworked for bizarre reasons. In her article “Czech Film Poster from 1945 until today” published in the book Czech Film Poster of the 20th century, Marta Sylvestrova writes about a commissioning editor getting fired because of a claim by a communist official that the space between the legs of elephants pictured on a poster for the film “Surrounded by Elephants” looked like a swastika. According to Sylvestrova Zdenek Ziegler was interviewed by the secret police about where he got the 100 USD banknote he used in his design for the 100 Rifles poster and Josef Vyletal had to obscure the US flag on the back of Henry Fonda’s jacket with smoke from one of the passing motorbikes on his poster for Easy Rider.”
politics

>The Israel Lobby – A letter from John Mearsheimer

Leave a comment

> I got a letter from John Mearsheimer the other day. I opened and read it, it said they were suckers.

Well, he didn’t say that, really, but he enclosed a speech he gave in Norway recently, and the finishing words read as follows:

“The bottom line is straightforward: President Obama is not going to be able to push Israel to accept a two-state solution. Instead, Israel will continue to colonize the West Bank and eventually turn itself into an apartheid state. Given that grim future, the Israelis are likely to think more and more about expelling the Palestinians from their midst, as they have done in the past. All of this is to say that Netanyahu’s recent victory over Obama was no victory at all. On the contrary, it means that there will be big trouble ahead for Israel, the United States, and especially the Palestinians.“
John Mearsheimer, October 5 2009, Oslo, Norway

I’ll return to John’s speech and letter as soon as possible.
To be able to communicate with the author of the book I’m reading and obviously using as source for these articles is amazing. Hail the internet, freedom of speech and a true and honest debate above all.
Read more about John Mearsheimer.

politics

>The Israel Lobby – The cash

1 Comment

>

 No words can express our gratitude for your generous support, understanding, and cooperation, which are beyond compare in modern history.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, 1994

 We’re both born of struggle and sacrifice. We’re both founded by immigrants escaping religious persecution in other lands. We have both built vibrant democracies, built on the rule of law and market economies. And we’re both countries founded on certain basic beliefs: that God watches over the affairs of men, and values every life. These ties have made us natural allies, and these ties will never be broken.
George W. Bush, American Israel Public Affairs Committee speech, 2004

 And I know that when I visit AIPAC I’m among friends, good friends… friends who share my strong commitment to make sure that the bond between the United States and Israel is unbreakable today, unbreakable tomorrow, unbreakable forever.
Barack Obama, AIPAC speech, 2008. Hardly watchable here.

Yitzhak, you’re completely right. U.S. support to Israel pale in comparison.
George, do you think God is proud of what you’re doing? And what’s this bullshit about He who values every life? Whitey, please… Say that to the millions of people you have killed, and the billions of people whose lives your country has ruined over the years.
Barack, your ass kissing is disgusting, and in return you’ll be the most ass-kissed president in U.S. history. What an anal orgasm, huh? Peace, bro!

But seriously, even if Israel had been a poor country, the level of material, economic, military and diplomatic support that the United States provides would have been remarkable. By 2004, Israel, a comparatively small country, had become the world’s eighth largest arm supplier. It is a without a doubt a powerful modern industrial state.

As of 2005, direct U.S. economic and military assistance to Israel amounted to 154 billion dollars. Nowadays Israel receives about three billion dollars per year in direct foreign assistance. These are not loans. They’re grants. Also, Israel is the only country that doesn’t have to account for how the foreign aid is spent. Aid to other countries are given for specific purposes, like children’s health, improving education, etc., but Israel receives a direct cash transfer and there is no way to tell how Israel uses U.S. aid.
In addition to all this craziness, Israel, again as the only country, receives its total cash transfer in the first days of the year, while other countries get their cash in quarterly installments. To make such a huge cash transfer possible, U.S. government needs to borrow the money up front, and it’s estimated that it costs U.S. taxpayers between 50 and 60 million dollars per year to borrow funds for this early year payment.
When given money from the United States as military assistance, countries are normally required to spend the money in the U.S. to help keep American defense workers employed (i.e. to buy U.S. weaponry). This is not the case when it comes to Israel. According to a special exception in some crazy ass bill, Israel is allowed to use about one out of every four dollars on its own defense industry.

However, during the 1950’s, economic aid to Israel was quite modest, and the U.S. did not provide much military assistance at all. It was the Kennedy administration that made the first commitment by selling U.S. Hawk antiaircraft missiles to Israel in 1963. This sale opened up for more weapon deals, most notably the sale of more than two hundred M48A battle tanks in 1964. To disguise American involvement and avoid anger from the Arab world, the tanks were shipped to Israel by West Germany…
Between 1966 and 1970 economic aid was at 102 million dollars per year. In 1971 that support sum was raised to 634.5 million dollars, and after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, economic aid more than quintupled (five times the size!). In 1976 Israel became the largest annual recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, a position it has retained ever since.

Three billion dollars per year is  hardly the whole story, though. The actual total is much higher, since Israel is given money under unusually favorable terms, and the U.S. also provides Israel with lots of other material assistance that is not included in the foreign assistance budget.
America allows Israel, and only Israel, to borrow money from commercial banks at very low interest rates. For example, in the early 1990’s Israel received ten billion dollars to finance the costs of settling Soviet Jews immigrating to Israel.
As for private donations, every year Israel recieves about two billion dollars from American citizens. According to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, one recent (2006) dinner in New York raised 18 millions dollars in private contributions, money which is tax deductible under U.S. law.
Also, the aid that the U.S. provides to Israel’s neighbours – particularly Egypt and Jordan – is at least partly intended to benefit Israel as well. The cash is rewards for good behavior, like when these countries sign peace treaties with Israel. In 1979, when the Egypt-Israeli peace treaty was signed, U.S. aid to Egypt reached 5.9 billion dollars. When King Hussein of Jordan signed a peace treaty in 1994, Jordan’s 700 million dollar debt to America was erased. These are just a couple of examples of Washington’s generosity toward the Jewish state.

Mearsheimer and Walt are constantly being accused of anti-Semitism because of their book. They’ve discussed pretty much each and every accusation in a 73 page long PDF document entitled Setting the Record Straight – A Response to Critics of “The Israel Lobby”.
Read it in case you’re in doubt.

Part One in this series.
An introductory video to the Israel lobby.
The photos they don’t want you to see.