Vicky Cristina Barcelona got to me.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a film made of gorgeous looking people, shot at charming Spanish country. Scarlett Johansson playing Cristina was convincing as the experimenting artist that helps to sooths the volatile relationship between Juan Antonio Gonzalo (Javier Bardem) and Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz). Speaking of Penelope, she truly shined. She jumps you and grab your attention whenever she was on screen. She played that artistic, passionate but emotionally volatile character flawlessly. I specially liked the way she reacted when Scarlett told them that she is leaving them. I didnt want to see it but now i am going to have to watch her raved movie – Volver.

so did i like this movie, no!! fuck this movie. one charming Penélope is not going to make up for the stereotypical   character and narrative surrounding the two main characters that are Vicky (Rebecca Hall who play her poorly) and Cristina. The opening scene when the narrator introduce Vicky as the uptight girl and Cristina as the soul searching girl  really made me want to walk out of the theater (metaphorically speaking of course, i saw the film on a laptop sitting on a bullet train). I restrained my self and continue watching because the movie’s high Rotten Tomato rating (82%) gave me hope. the movie never got better.

What annoys me to no end is that although this movie is slightly better than usual soup drama, it still doesn’t stray from the mainstream pop culture’s track record of glorifying the “bohemian” lifestyle while trashing the “conventional” lifestyle. The glamorous Juan-Maria-Scarlett trio and their cliche romanticism, pseudo sophistication and pretentious aestheticism is of course the commonly defined “Bohemian” life style”. The dull Vicky and Doug has to represent the boring “conventional” lifestyle. The bohemian guy is of course play by the stud Javier Bardem who has treesomes with Scarlett and Penélope and looks like this:

While the conventional guy has a fiancée who cheated on him with the bohemian guy and looks like a suit with ascending hair line that looks like this:

can it be more obvious?

Now after watching this movie and thousands of pop culture material like it, all the coming-of-age girls is going to go romance a bohemian guy only to later find out it really just is an act to get laid. and all the coming-of-age boys are going to act like a pseudo painter-poet-musician-artist to laid as many time as possible before their cover is blown.

come’on!!

to the boys, fact: You can be a major nerd like Malcolm Gladwell or Larry Page and get laid.
to the girls, dont let other define romance for you, thats bull shit. you should define romanticism for your self.
and to the entertainment industry, stop trying to define what is romantic or what is a good lifestyle to us and make films with more originality and less cliche. please.

Movie weekend: To Africa

You told me that you like The English Patient, which to be frank I fell a sleep watching. I think I was too young to appreciate the slower pace. Although I didn’t love it, its beautiful landscape shots did left a impression in my blurry memory.

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I am going to start you off by taking you to another continent.
I am going to recommend The Constant Gardener.
It’s a revenge (?) love movie shot in the beautiful African landscape with an extra tad of social conscious. Also starting Ralph Fiennes. you should stop reading at this point. go watch the movie then come back to see my next recommendation. onwards, you should adhere to this suggestion, ie dont read it all at once.

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After falling in love with Africa, watch what happen when shit happens in Africa, and you will be glad that you are not there. Watch Hotel Rwanda, a true story.

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Now you should be wondering what is wrong with the place.
I am going to offer three perspectives, there are:
1. Blood Diamond, pick this one to see how Africa’s rich resources is also root of its troubles. And or
2. Lord of War. See it if you want to see how foreign arm dealers like Nicolas Cage getting rich by selling weapons to third world countries to fuel their never ending conflict. And or.
3. Black Hawk Down, to find out how and why when outsider try to intervene, things can go horribly wrong.
And if you are really enjoying the movies that I am recommending see all three in those sequences, if not just pick Blood diamond.

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Next movie that I really want to recommend is not a movie, but a documentary on globalization and its affect on Africa. I am of course talking about the Oscar nominated Darwin’s Nightmare. By this time you should be ready to move beyond the African theme. I would like you to finish your weekend with Morgan Freeman’s soothing voice and cute penguins from a documentary that actually won a Oscar – The March of the Penguins. Or, alternatively, if you cant get your hands on these two great documentaries, I think the serendipitous get-out-of-slam movie Slumdog Millionaire will get you more hopeful about people living in third world slums. Its a heartfelt Danny Boyle movie that will give you a smile before you go to bed and wake up to another week of labor in positive perspective.

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See you on Tuesday, i hope you liked all these movies. if you do i will set you up for another batch of movies next weekend.

What fundamentally divides Liberal and Conservative?

Stephen Clarke talk to Philosopher’s Zone’s Alan Saunders about What fundamentally divides Liberal and Conservative? as a pretty consistent liberal i found the divide very agreeable.

here are some money quote

[C]onservatives think that there’s nothing wrong with being unable to articulate their concerns. They think that morality is typically a matter of an implicit knowledge that’s encapsulated in intuitions, and we might not be able to unpack that. But just because we can’t state what it is, doesn’t mean that there isn’t something there…Whereas a liberal is going to say, if you can’t explicate what the problem is, then it’s not a problem that ought to be taken seriously.

which lead to the conclusion

[Prominent moral psychologist, John Haidt] suggests that American conservatives have much more in common at least when it comes to moral reasoning, with the Islamic fundamentalist, than they would with an American liberal.

so in essence, liberals are willing to use reason to examine their moral intuition, whereas conservatives champion their inability to articulate the bases of their moral intuition. Understands that our moral intuition comes from two sources:(1) genetics that are selected to fit past environment. and (2) information digested since birth. We know that (1) is outdated, and unfit. and (2) is often propagated by those who benefit from the dissemination of those information. which means that conservatives are either living in the imaginary past or are pawns to somebody else (conservertive hacks)’s scheme.

Kaufman and his universe

Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” was an instant classic for me. Not unlike the lead character Caden Cotard, after series of successful films – Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Kaufman earn a chance to direct a movie to define his legacy. Kaufman dint disappoint. Kaufman took on a plot so grand and ambitious it felt overwhelming and exhausting even to a ardent fan like me. To audience who is unfamiliar with his previous work will probably felt confuse by his characteristically blend of interchanging real and imaginary reality. My company to the cinema who is watching Kaufman for the first time was confused by it and frankly so was i. I however was able to accept the obscurities as just Kaufman being Kaufman, she could not.

while in one layer the film displayed an artist’s life at the peak of his career – longly, sick, domestically dysfunctional and obssese with his death and legacy. Properly a reflection of Kaufman’s own life (Kaugman did that also in Adaptation). The story is also about the existential conflict between the projected reality in our mind and the reality (hat tip Roger Ebert). we live by interacting most immediately with an projection of the real world in our own mind. Our project of the world is generally flawed and fill with what we want to see. So when the real world clashes with the projected world unexpected consequences is expected (like Sammy is suppose to love Tammy not Hazel, and Tammy is not suppose to jump and die).

Although i love this movie, i will only recommended if you have seen either one of his Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and liked it.

The good evil doers

The often used reasoning religious people use justify the existence of evil in a world overseen by an omnipotent and all good god is that without evil there can be no good.

if thats the argument then the logical extension would be evil doers are enabler of good and therefor good.

to use a real world example. Hitler was good because without his evil doing, there can never be the good of Alliances fighting back and saving Europe.

weird argument it is.

update 090802: poppies below in the comments section refer to a passage (Romans 3:8) in the bible that says

Or can we say-as some people slander us by claiming that we say-”Let’s do evil that good may result”? They deserve to be condemned!

– bible International Standard Version 2008.

so then why does evil exist in a universe created by an omnipotent and all good god?