French people need to cheer the fuck up: a critique of French cinema

Formula for French cinema: chain smoke ciggies, gaze longingly out the window and look constantly narked. Rinse. Repeat. Simple this film lark.

By Lucy Sweet, in The Sabotage Times

Je suis moody

Last weekend, I watched a lot of French movies. As I usually only watch Dannii Minogue: Style Queen while eating Dairylea Lunchables, I can’t think what came over me.

Maybe I was just being a ponce. Because unless you’re actually French, giving your pseudo intellectualism an airing is one of the main reasons why anyone watches French films. Are you a tedious goatee-bearded tosspot out on a Guardian Soulmates date? Watch a French movie. Are you a sexually predatory university lecturer wishing to impress a nubile foreign exchange student? Watch a French movie. Are you a Belle and Sebastian fan who is crushingly, crushingly alone? French movie.

My conclusion after watching these films was that French people need to cheer the fuck up. Also, I realised that although French films enjoy an elevated reputation as ‘arthouse’, they’re usually about as ‘arty’ as a Thomas Kinkade painting of cottage by moonlight. Also, they are full of clichés. Regardez.

1. Je Suis Smoking un fag

To star in a French film, you must be smoking a cigarette at all times, even when you’re in the bath, in hospital, or wandering through a warehouse full of dynamite. In I’ve Loved You So Long, the quite patently British Kristen Scott-Thomas smokes more fags in 2 hours than Bill Hicks did in his entire life. And she has a right bloody gob on as well.

2. Je Suis staring out of the fenetre

Run out of ideas? In French films it is entirely acceptable to substitute dialogue and action for long periods of gazing out of the window. Nathalie Baye in Jean Luc Godard’s Slow Motion looks out of the window for what seems like days. Who knows what she’s thinking? Actually, she’s probably thinking: ‘I’d better nip down to the Monoprix for 200 fags and a Yoplait’.

3. Je Suis Une kooky pain dans le derriere

The French love a bit of far fetched magical realism and they spread it on thicker than Bonne Maman. Cue an endless parade of girlish free spirits with no grip on reality, fateful chance meetings on Le Metro, dropped passport photographs, and all manner of twinkling and winking that makes you want to be sick in the Seine. If I saw that Amelie down the pub I’d totally slap her quirky face in.

4. J’ai une face comme un arse

Although there are a fair few French actors I wouldn’t chuck out of my bed for farting the theme tune to Jeux Sans Frontiers, for male French stars, being good looking is not a requirement. Better that you look like an aged, post coital rhino who has been rutting in a swamp all night, or if you have a nose like a deformed butternut squash. In L’Homme Du Train, Johnny Halliday is meant to be sexy, despite looking like a crocodile handbag with a wig on. Add Serge Gainsbourg, Gerard Depardieu and Jean Reno into the mix and you’ve got yourself a great big buffet of ugly quiche.

5. Je Suis dans le buff

Nudity and rambunctious shagging in French films is compulsory by law. If there isn’t a nipple by the 12th minute, the entire cast and crew are arrested by les gendarmes and thrown into the Bastille where they’re forced to listen to Carla Bruni albums. Of course, the French always say that nudity is integral to the plot. (Even if that plot is usually all about Emmanuelle Beart’s muff.)

6. Pardonnez ma ‘eavy ‘anded metaphor

While American films like to whack audiences over the head with explosions and car chases, French movies prefer to tie some unwieldy metaphors around your ankles and drop you into a consomme of half-baked poetic symbolism. Your lead character is a fisherman? It’s a metaphor for dissatisfaction. He meets an ageing prostitute? She is a metaphor for death. They have a baguette? A metaphor for sex. What-EVA. In a French movie, you can’t go for a shite without it being a comment on the great existential void.

Et voila. I’m sure there are loads more, but I couldn’t be arsed to read the subtitles properly. If you’re going to see a French movie this weekend, I suggest you bring a bottle of Burgundy into the cinema and take a swig every time someone shags, smokes or nothing happens. Me? I’m off to watch Sandra Bullock in Armed and Fabulous on ITV7.

Wikileaks en viñeta

Una viñeta de Humon Comics (en Satwcomic.com) que me ha pasado el artista de The Flying Monkey Squad

WikiLeaks may make the powerful howl, but we are learning the truth

WikiLeaks has offered us glimpses of how the world works. And in most cases nothing but good can come of it

Henry Porter, en The Guardian

I have lost count of the politicians and opinion formers of an authoritarian bent warning of the dreadful damage done by the WikiLeaks dump of diplomatic cables, and in the very next breath dismissing the content as frivolous tittle-tattle. To seek simultaneous advantage from opposing arguments is not a new gambit, but to be wrong in both is quite an achievement.

Publication of the cables has caused no loss of life; troops are not being mobilised; and the only real diplomatic crisis is merely one of discomfort. The idea that the past two weeks have been a disaster is self-evidently preposterous. Yet the leaks are of unprecedented importance because, at a stroke, they have enlightened the masses about what is being done in their name and have shown the corruption, incompetence – and sometimes wisdom – of our politicians, corporations and diplomats. More significantly, we have been given a snapshot of the world as it is, rather than the edited account agreed upon by diverse elites, whose only common interest is the maintenance of their power and our ignorance.

The world has changed, not simply because governments find they are just as vulnerable to the acquisition, copying and distribution of huge amounts of data as the music, publishing and film businesses were, but because we are unlikely to return to the happy ignorance of the past. Knowing Saudi Arabia has urged the bombing of Iran, that Shell maintains an iron grip on the government of Nigeria, that Pfizer hired investigators to disrupt investigations into drugs trials on children, also in Nigeria, that the Pakistan intelligence service, the ISI, is swinging both ways on the Taliban, that China launched a cyber attack on Google, that North Korean has provided nuclear scientists to Burma, that Russia is a virtual mafia state in which security services and gangsters are joined at the hip – and knowing all this in some detail – means we are far more likely to treat the accounts of events we are given in the future with much greater scepticism.

Never mind the self-serving politicians who waffle on about the need for diplomatic confidentiality when they themselves order the bugging of diplomats and hacking of diplomatic communications. What is astonishing is the number of journalists out there who argue that it is better not to know these things, that the world is safer if the public is kept in ignorance. In their swooning infatuation with practically any power elite that comes to hand, some writers for the Murdoch press and Telegraph titles argue in essence for the Chinese or Russian models of deceit and obscurantism. They advocate the continued infantilising of the public.

Nothing is new. In 1771, that great lover of liberty, John Wilkes, and a number of printers challenged the law that prohibited the reporting of Parliamentary debates and speeches, kept secret because those in power argued that the information was too sensitive and would disrupt the life of the country if made public. Using the arcane laws of the City of London, Alderman Wilkes arranged for the interception of the Parliamentary messengers sent to arrest the printers who had published debates, and in doing so successfully blocked Parliament. By 1774, a contemporary was able to write: «The debates in both houses have been constantly printed in the London papers.» From that moment, the freedom of the press was born.

It took a libertine to prove that information enriched the functioning of British society, a brave maverick who was constantly moving house – and sometimes country – to avoid arrest; whose epic sexual adventures had been used by the authorities as a means of entrapping and imprisoning him. The London mob came out in his favour and, supplemented by shopkeepers and members of the gentry on horseback, finally persuaded the establishment of the time to accept that publication was inevitable. And the kingdom did not fall.

Over the past few weeks, there have been similarly dire predictions from sanctimonious men and women of affairs about the likely impacts of publication, and of course Julian Assange finds himself banged up in Wandsworth nick, having neither been formally charged with, nor found guilty of, the sex crimes he is alleged to have committed in Sweden. Making no comment about his guilt or innocence, or the possibility of his entrapment, I limit myself to saying that we have been here before with John Wilkes; and the reason for this is that authorities the world over and through history react the same way when there is a challenge to a monopoly of information.

It is all about power and who has access to information. Nothing more. When those who want society to operate on the basis of the parent-child relationship because it is obviously easier to manage, shut the door and say «not in front of the children», they are usually looking after their interests, not ours.

I don’t argue for a free-for-all, regardless of the consequences. In the WikiLeaks cables, knowledge and the editing and reporting skills found in the old media, combined with the new ability to locate and seize enormous amounts of information on the web, has actually resulted in responsible publication, with names, sources, locations and dates redacted to protect people’s identities and their lives.

America is sore and naturally feels exposed, but the state department would have had much less cause for regret if it had listened to Ross Anderson, the Cambridge professor often quoted here in relation to Labour’s obsession with huge databases of personal information. His rule states that it is a mathematical impossibility to maintain a large and functional database that is also secure. Hillary Clinton must rue the day that the Bush administration built a great silo of cables that could be accessed by three million staff. The Chinese and Russians would never have been so trusting.

There has been more than a hint that China and Russia have empathised with the Americans. The unseen affinities of the powerful may also be responsible for the unforgivable behaviour by Amazon, which pulled the plug on hosting WikiLeaks, and PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, which unilaterally stopped customers making donations to WikiLeaks. There was not the slightest consideration of principles about free information or the freedom of their customers to make up their own minds. What next? Will these corporate giants be blocking payment to the New York Times and the Guardian? It is hard to feel much regret over the cyber attacks on their websites because, in the end, they did not seem much better than Shell and Pfizer, the companies that appear to be running so much of Nigeria like the worst type of imperial powers.

Nothing but good can come from revelations about these companies, and in this brief moment when we have a glimpse of how things really are, we should relish the fact that publication of the cables, as well as the shameful reactions to it, have brought light, not fire.

El Clásico (de nuevo)

Ya hice otra entrada sobre El Partido Del Siglo allá por el mes de abril, con cancioncitas, libros y demás cosillas. Y esta vez, viendo que El Partido Del Siglo Realoaded ‘esta-vez-sí-que-sí’ es el lunes, copio-pego una del grandísimo Sid Lowe, periodista de The Guardian, Sports Illustrated y algún medio escrito más, y comentarista de La Sexta en ocasiones.  Así que os dejo con su última entrada en Sports Illustrated, que merece la pena leer (por lo menos para los futboleros).

Clásico hype goes into overdrive

Contrary to what you might have heard, the world will not end on Monday night. The sun will rise on Tuesday morning. And there is life beyond the clásico.* It’s just that right now, it doesn’t feel like it — it feels like nothing else matters, like no other games exist, like no other teams do. Every year Barcelona versus Madrid, already the biggest club game in world soccer, seems to get bigger. Even the old title seems worthless now. Derby? No thanks, this is the clásico. It’s even moved on from that. Now it’s the Super Clásico. Carry on like this and soon we’ll run out of superlatives.

And it’s certainly superlative. It’s almost ridiculous. These are the kind of teams you build playing Championship Manager. The kind of teams you could only build if you cheated playing Championship Manager — setting up two or three clubs at once and selling yourself all their best players while selling them all your rubbish ones for absurdly inflated prices. Whichever way you look at it, this is probably the most extraordinary club match there has ever been. Until the next time, at least.

In terms of talent per square meter, you could argue that there has never been a game like it. It is possible that no two teams have ever dominated the planet’s talent like Barcelona and Madrid do now. If the starting XIs are as anticipated, there will be 13 world champions on the pitch. David Villa, top scorer at the World Cup and the European Championships will be there. So will the last four — yes, four (Messi, Messi, Ronaldo, Kaká) — top scorers in the Champions League.

Speaking of them, the last two winners of the Balón d’Or will be there — and the extraordinary statistics presented by Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, statistics that got even better last weekend when both men scored hat-tricks, have already been covered. More than that, Messi and Ronaldo might not just be great players now; they are on course to smash historic records. Against Almería, Messi scored his 100th goal for Barcelona aged just 23. Ronaldo has just scored his 50th goal for Madrid. It took him only 53 games.

That’s just the start, just two men. The reason the last three Balon d’Or winners aren’t on the pitch is that Kaká is injured. The man who won it before that — Fabio Cannavaro — left Madrid, no longer considered good enough. And the man who won it before that — Ronaldinho — was also forced out, this time from FC Barcelona. This year’s winner is likely to be playing on Monday too: Andres Iniesta, Xavi Hernández, Iker Casillas, Leo Messi and Ronaldo are among the favorites. The only other man who could win it is Wesley Sneijder or possibly, at a push, Arjen Robben — and Madrid didn’t want either of them any more.

It’s not just that they are the very best players in the world but that all over the pitch, you find players who can lay claim to being the world’s best in their position. OK, almost all over the pitch: the world’s best left back probably won’t be playing on Monday (although if Marcelo continues to improve at this rate, who knows?). But the world’s best right back might. The world’s best center backs, too. And the world’s best central midfielders, the world’s best wide-men, the world’s best playmakers, and the world’s best strikers.

Real Madrid are the most expensive side ever assembled; Barcelona are the only team to have won six trophies in a row. Some believe that this is the greatest side they have ever had, the fruit of an extraordinary generation of talent built on over 20 years of footballing puritanism. Plus almost €150 million ($199 million) worth of players.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, they are managed by Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola. Two years ago, Guardiola won a unique treble of League, Cup and European Cup. At least it was unique until last May, when Mourinho matched the feat.

No wonder they seem almost unstoppable. In fact, in Spain it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they really are unstoppable. Sure they wobbled at the start of the season but they have both won their last six games. At the weekend, their aggregate score against their opponents was 13-1. Yes, 13. Madrid scored five; Barcelona eight. Between them, they have 20 wins, 3 draws and a solitary defeat in 24 league games. They have scored 33 goals each. Ronaldo alone has more goals than nine teams.

Their dominance goes back further, too. Last season, Barcelona won 31 drew 6 and lost just one. Madrid won 31, drew 3 and lost 4. But two of those were against Barcelona. They might even have won 32 and drawn one game fewer but on the final day they already knew the title had escaped them and went through the motions against relegation-threatened Málaga, caring little about the result. They broke a historic record for the number of La Liga points, a record that went back over 70 years. The only catch was that Barcelona broke it too. Madrid finished on 96 points, Barcelona on 99.

Meanwhile, the season before, Madrid’s defeat to Barcelona — which left them with no chance of winning the league — saw them slip into depression and slump to five consecutive defeats. But before that they had gone into the clásico with just two defeats between them in 18 games each. That’s two defeats in 36 matches combined. In other words, not including the games in which they faced each other in total Real Madrid and Barcelona have won 111 of their last 132 games, losing just six between them. And look at last year’s stats again: but for the two clásicos, Madrid might have owned the league.

With each passing day, it does feel more and more like no other games exist, like no other teams exist. In a way, they don’t. Mourinho insisted that Monday night’s match would not be definitive but few really believed him. On the face of it, just 13 matches into the season, it is absurd but this is already being treated like a title decider. Scratch the surface a bit and it’s not even that absurd. You could certainly make a case for it being the first half of the title decider, with the second leg to come at the Santiago Bernabéu in April (and, incidentally, don’t be surprised if Mourinho treats it like that).

It feels like you can forget the other 36 matches. Of course the clásico is only decisive if both sides keep on winning the vast majority of their other matches, but the evidence suggests they will. No one can stop these two sides except each other: Ronaldo has never scored against Barcelona; Messi has never scored against Mourinho.

Cristiano Ronaldo called it a six-pointer. A 96-pointer, more like. No wonder everyone is acting like Monday is the end of the world, like there are no other teams, like there are no other matches. Like there is nothing after it. There is, but it won’t be the same. Maybe it’s the relentless hype, maybe it’s the excitement, maybe it’s the power of personality, the stardust sprinkled all over this game, maybe it’s the fact that we have been waiting for this since the season started, but right now it’s hard to avoid the feeling that something will shift on Monday night. Something big. The sun will rise on Tuesday but nothing will be the same again. On Tuesday morning we’ll already be counting down to the next one.

* Disclaimer: This column will not be held responsible in the event of the sun failing to rise on Tuesday morning or the world ending on Monday. There might not be life beyond the clásico.

Ministry of Stories

La ‘monster supply shop’ (ved el vídeo), está chula, y encima está vinculada con la Pirate Shop en 826 Valencia de San Francisco, que es un lugar mágico.

 

Nick Hornby opens Ministry of Stories to get Britain’s kids writing again

Children will be lured in by ‘monster supply shop’ – and volunteer teachers including Zadie Smith and Roddy Doyle.

Allegra Stratton, en The Guardian

Since 2002, Dave Eggers, the American author best known for his novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, has been reinventing himself as something of a literacy guru for children. As part of his 826 Valencia children’s writing project, he has opened after-school clubs across America where kids can turn up to develop their creative writing.

The only property Eggers could find to house the first club was a San Francisco shop that reminded him of a pirate ship, so he decided to set up a pirate supply store. Parrots and peg legs helped entice the local kids in to develop their writing skills in informal workshops, and the San Francisco store was followed by a Superhero Supply Store in Brooklyn, New York, selling capes and tins of «anti-matter». Next, Seattle opened the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company. There are now eight of these initiatives, for children aged six and up, all of them linked through the Once Upon a School website. Roddy Doyle has done something similar in Ireland, and he’s had more than 11,000 children through his doors in just 17 months.

VIDEO THAT I’M TOTALLY UNABLE TO EMBEDD

Now the bestselling novelist Nick Hornby wants to do the same thing for Britain. Tomorrow, Hornby, along with art entrepreneurs Ben Payne and Lucy Macnab, is going open his new Ministry of Stories – plus the world’s first supply store for monsters.

The author hopes that a fantastical shopfront will lure children into something rather less fantastical, if no less fun: literacy lessons. In the shop, Hornby will sell «fang floss» and «human snot», while round the back novelists including Zadie Smith, Roddy Doyle and Michael Morpurgo might, on the right day, be found teaching children aged from eight to 18 to learn to write a little like they do.

If all of this volunteering sounds a bit like that «big society» thing, then you are not alone. In fact, Downing Street is so impressed with the venture that next week it is throwing Hornby and co a party in No 10.

Hornby’s Ministry of Stories will open tomorrow in a patch of real estate in Hoxton, east London, and is funded by the Arts Council.

The author used his blog last month to issue an appeal for help to make the project a reality. «We need everything, including money, of course,» he wrote, pointing readers towards a request sent out in the name of the Ministry of Stories.

It called for help to transform the «bland carcass» of a premises in north London into a supply shop for monsters «with a Ministry of Stories secreted behind its humble facade».

«We are working with a great team of designers, but we need people power to make it happen in time,» it said.

«We are going to be holding working parties and need volunteers to come along and help paint, build, arrange, clean and hold things steady whilst someone drills – you get the picture. If you can make any of the following times, please just turn up and lend a hand.»

Readers were given times when they could turn up to help as volunteers, while the blog also made it clear that the ministry was launching a drive for donations.

A list of requested items included cleaning, office and stereo equipment, children’s books as well as a «large car/van and driver for IKEA trip». A separate Ministry of Stories Facebook page said that the project was designed «to inspire a nation of storytellers» in Britain.

It added that its «new home» in London would be offering free workshops and one-to-one mentoring to «both inspire and be inspired by» young people.

«We think writing should be unrestricted by rules and regulations. In fact, we think you get the best results by keeping it seriously playful,» it said.

«It’s not just about stories either: we get excited by all forms of writing, from song lyrics to play scripts, screenplays to journalism, blogging to games, and poems to graphic novels. You’ll be able to find the Ministry of Stories through a secret door inside the first shop in the world to supply the daily needs of monsters of all shapes and sizes.»