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A Short Clarification
Slavoj Zizek
A new text by Ian Parker is circulating around the net - available, among other sites, at www.discourseunit.com - which begins with the claim that, towards the end of the 1980s, when the Communist regime in Yugoslavia was in its death throes, I acted as a "commissar" monitoring and controlling dissident activity – here is the full paragraph:

"Let us start with a true story. In the middle of a crisis and crackdown in Slovenia toward the end of the 1980s Slavoj Žižek telephones an academic colleague in Britain late at night. This is before Slovenia seceded from Yugoslavia and when the League of Slovene Communists was making some last desperate attempts to maintain power. The crackdown was directed at the opposition movement, in which Žižek and the artistic political grouping Neue Slowenische Kunst, were active. So, Žižek is on the phone during this political crisis in an agitated state. He tells his colleague how bad things are, that there is a total clampdown on the opposition. His colleague is sympathetic. Žižek goes on to tell him that things are even worse than that, for in every workplace a 'commissar' has been appointed to monitor and control dissident activity. His colleague is very sympathetic, even slightly alarmed by the picture Žižek is painting. And it is even worse than that, Žižek says, for even in the universities, in every department a commissar has been appointed to keep order. His colleague in Britain exclaims that this is indeed dreadful. And, Žižek then informs him that there is only one good thing in the midst of all this. What is that, his colleague asks. In my department, Žižek says, 'I am the commissar'."

One should note the serious implications of these lines: I am accused of nothing less than being an infortmant of the Communist power against dissidents. Let me be as clear and unequivocal as possible: this "true story" is entirely false, everything in it is a lie. Not only was I never any kind of a "commissar," I also never boasted – ironically or truthfully – via a phone – or any other – conversation that I am anything like that. The only thing to add is that anyone who knows a little bit about Slovenia in the late 1980s will immediately see that the "true story" doersn't make sense, for two obvious reasons. First, which "department" should be "mine"? In Yugoslavia, I was never employed at any university department - how could I then be active there as a "commissar"? Second, from (at least) the middle of 1980s, the Communist party effectively lost control over the employment politics at the university. At the Institute of Sociology where I was then formally employed (formally, since I already spent most of the time abroad), if a candidate for a job was suspected to be too closely linked to the Communist party circles, he had no chance of getting the job – at the end of the 1980s, to be "against" the regime was already a way to make a career!

Bio sam danas sa mrkoyem na press projekciji TERMINATOR SALVATIONa. Šta da kažem sem da sam potpuno raspamećen, a da je čak i stari h8r mrkoye oduševljen filmom. SALVATION je nesumnjivo film za više gledanja, i na nivou čisto tehničke egzekucije donosi niz stvari koje su zaista sada po prvi put viđene.

Iako sam se plašio kako će izgledati film u kome se priča prethodnih filmova uvodi u domen onoga što zapravo nije osnovna tema, to jest kada se ulazi u samu tehnologiju katastrofe koja je tek pokretač priče u prethodnim nastavcima, a ako imamo u vidu negativno iskustvo sa MATRIX REVOLUTIONS, mogu reći da sam izašao prezadovoljan sa filma pre svega na nivou priče. Naime, na vrlo širokoj ravni detalja i krupnih tačaka, u rasponu od sklonosti mladog Kyle Reecea da nosi retro Nikes do ožiljka na licu Johna Connora ili celokupnog hronomocijskog zapleta, ovaj film zadovoljava. Da, on može poslužii kao samo jedna epizoda u nekoj višedelnoj sagi, ali isto tako može da stoji i kao samostalan film a ja sam poznat po tome da ipak najviše štujem samostalne i zaokružene filmove.

Borba ostataka poklanog američkog naroda, isteranog sa svojih dvoipovekovnih ognjišta, u ovom filmu pre svega liči na odličan ratni film u kome se ljudi bore protiv mašina. Mašine nemaju onaj horor momenat koji su imale u prva dva Terminatora. Sada je nekako jasnije kako ih ubiti, a uostalom, i ti koji su preživeli su uopšte živi jer su hardassovi, ali mašine su opake, podmukle, zle i vrlo vrlo žilave.

McG nas uvodi u drugu fazu totalnog rata sa mašinama. S jedne strane, dakle, ovde nema horor-nevinosti prvog susreta sa mašinama iz prva dva filma, ali zato mašine su mnogo raznovrsnije i imaju razne oblike, bore se i u vodi, i na nebu, a o zemlji da i ne govorimo.  

Priče o tome kako su mašine simpatičnije od ljudi su potpuno neosnovane. Christian Bale glumi u CAPS LOCKu ali ga nema puno dok je Sam Worthington do jaja i nameće se kao novi akcioni heroj. Ne samo da je predsednik Warnera Alan Horn bio u pravu kada je McGu savertovao da ako hoće nekog čvrstog momka ode u Australiju, nego ga ni Tatko nije slučajno uzeo za AVATAR. Sam je emotivni centar filma i supeva da iznese tu rolu sasvim uverljivo ako imamo u vidu o koliko neuverljivoj premisi se radi. Bale u CAPS LOCKu takođe ima smisla sada kada je rekontekstualizovan u vođu koji ima utisak da je prorok, a zašto ne reći jer nije spoiler, kada je tretiran kao vođa u koga ne veruju baš svi. Baleov John Connor je kao neka vrsta Kapetana Dragana u borbi protiv mašina.

Mašine kao negativci uspevaju da probude emociju. Mislim, naravno, teško je reći "Ubi ga mašina, majku joj ustašku" ali dizajn je takav da kao i u prvim delovima, spaja funkcionalnost mašine i čisto gigerovsko zlo. U tom smislu, ja zaista nisam imao odsustvo emocija gledajući film.

S druge strane, žalili su da nema zabave. Hm, pa mislim ovo je dosta zabavan film, i u tom smislu, on ima jednu ozbiljnost ali ona nije tako napadfna kao u DARK KNIGHTu. Iako sad nema previše viceva kao u ranijim filmovima, pošto je i situacija kudikamo kritičnija, meni su reference na ranije filmove bile savršeno zabavne. Neke replike se ponavljaju, Kyle nosi patike iz osamdesetih, a ne želim da spojlujem koliko značaj za priču filma ima pesma Gunsa iz T2. Mislim, to je detalj na koji će i Meho reagovati krajnje prostodušno.

Što se akcije tiče, McG ga prži za sve pare. Akcija je pregledna, lepo inscenairana, scenografija je sjajna, efekti su vrhunski, ima svih mogućih vidova akcije, ima kad Worthington nasrne sekirom na mašinu, ima svega što čovek može da poželi. Međutim, ono što je revolucionarno jeste što su neke od tih sekvenci rađene iz jednog kadra to jest napravljene su da izgleda kao da je iz jednog kadra, i to je kao CHILDREN OF MEN dignuto na nivo akcionog spektakla. U tom smislu, film ima tog gejmerskog duha u najboljem smislu, a ubačeno je gejminga i u dramaturgiju jer se pred likove postavljaju zadaci koje rešavaju, cela inscenacija je bazirana na tome da gledalac misli zajedno sa junakom. Ja nisam neki gejmer ali zahvaljujući Mehu igram dosta igara, i meni je iz te vizure ovo prijalo.

Shaneova fotka je takođe sjajna i do sada takav kolorit nije tako intenzivno korišćen. Meni je kao detetu osamdesetih smetalo što u budućnosti postoji obdanica. Međutim, ova obdanica je sick, ima taj neki efekat post-nuklearnog holokausta i u principu ne deluje uopšte okrepljujuće čega sam se najviše plašio već je jako uznemirujuća.

McG se mnogo kurčio pred film i što se mene tiče, imao je razlog za tu samouverenost. TERMINATOR SALVATION je sjajan akcijaš. Ne želim da ga poredim sa ranijim jer svi znamo šta su raniji filmovi bili, naročito prva dva, a i sam treći (koji meni nije previše sporan) je imao Arnolda u glavnoj ulozi.

U bezarnoldskom svetu (izuzev camea koji je do jaja) na koji smo osuđeni, SALVATION je vredan dodatak TERMINATOR univerzumu. Kao što ništa ni ne pokušavam da poredim sa prvim delovima, neću ni ovaj.

U svakom slučaju, 2018. godine, kada krene odsudna borba za odbranu nejači protiv Skyneta, Ratko Mladić će imati 76. godina. Biće već star, ali mislim da će on naučiti robote kako da plaču.

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http://www.wharf.co.uk/2009/05/linda-hamilton-terminator-shou.html

Linda Hamilton: Terminator should be terminated
By John Hill on May 27, 2009 5:43 PM |
Tagged with:

    * Arnold Schwarzenegger,
    * Christian Bale,
    * Dante's Peak,
    * Excel London,
    * Holy Water,
    * James Cameron,
    * Lena Headey,
    * Linda Hamilton,
    * MCM Expo,
    * Sarah Connor Chronicles,
    * Sigourney Weaver,
    * Terminator,
    * Terminator Salvation

aa-may28-linda3.jpg

As Sarah Connor, Linda Hamilton wouldn't dream of giving up, even if a fiery-eyed Terminator was chasing her out of the wreckage of a tanker with her car keys and her left leg in its hand.

But with a fourth movie on the way, Linda the actress thinks it might be time to send the franchise to the scrapyard after 25 years.

Linda sat out the third Terminator movie in 2003, but returned to provide a voice-over for Terminator Salvation, which was released in the US on May 14 and appears in British cinemas next Wednesday (June 3).

However, she revealed to fans at Excel's MCM Expo last weekend that she probably would have let the metal icon die after two outings.

She said: "I thought it was perfect with two films. It was a complete circle, and it was enough in itself. But there will always be those who will try and milk the cow.

"I didn't like the third one particularly. I didn't think it had that spark.

"I haven't seen the fourth one but I did some voice work in it. If they can do it and make it good, I wish them all the best. But James Cameron really drove the films forward. It was his vision that really made it soar and it's hard to repeat that."

Linda revealed she "auditioned and auditioned and auditioned" for the role of Sarah Connor, an everyday woman who discovers her destiny as the mother figure of the resistance when a robot from the future turns up and starts stalking her with a gun shop full of weaponry.

She said: "I didn't really look at the script and say 'This is going to be the next major hit'. And it wasn't. It was a slow burn and collected its fan base over a period of time.

"I was actually worried at first that Arnold was going to be in it. I wasn't sure he was going to serve the film. Then I saw how good he was at being that robot.

"He's one of a kind. He's a monolith. He's a force of nature. If he was late on set, it was because he was talking to George Bush Senior, the president."

After Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger became one of Hollywood's big box office titans, while Linda also found herself enjoying a higher profile - while enduring some suffocating typecasting.

linda.jpg

She said: "After Terminator, they [Hollywood] only saw me as a lesbian or a cop or a military officer.

"I went into the first meeting with the director from Dante's Peak, and he said 'You've never played a part like this before. It's normal'. Normal comes easy to most of us.

"You have to go in and win this kind of work. People think I'll chew up the scenery and kill all the other actors."

So she's no psychotic ham or hired killer. But that doesn't mean she hasn't got a strategy if she spots a Terminator ambling down her drive.

She quipped: "I think that after playing that part, I have a strategy for anything that comes into my house.

"I've got weapons buried and a flashlight and knives. I'm ready."

Beyond the sequels, the Terminator franchise had a brief life as a TV series. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was cancelled this month, and the new Sarah - 300's Brit actress Lena Headey - was frequently criticised for being less ripped than her movie counterpart.

Linda said: "I'd only seen her in 300 but I was very impressed and she's quite a looker, so I was like 'Yeah!'".

"I saw the pilot episode. But I really don't watch that much TV as I'm so busy.

"It's the hardest thing to step into someone else's shoes and trying to fill them. I was doing a play called Laura, which had once starred Gene Tierney. Every damn review said 'She's no Gene Tierney'."

MCM011220.jpg

While Linda is hailed for helping to create a rare female role model in the action world, she was bemused by the interest in Sarah Connor's toned physique.

She said: "Sigourney [Weaver] did it before me [in Alien] and we have [director] James Cameron to thank for that too.

"Never in a million years did I expect the fuss over my body. When everyone started to say 'I want your arms', I was really surprised.

"I was playing a character in a hell of the world's making. She's in so much pain. Why would anyone want to be like that?"

Linda married James Cameron in 1997, but divorced him after two years. She still ranks him as one of the best directors she has worked for.

She said: "It's James Cameron for sure, although not all of him is perfect.

"I remember finishing the first film and I left thinking 'The director is rooting for the machines'. He did not have a way with people at all. But he's such a general and a planner and very inspiring to work with. He's the most invested person on the set. I respect him for that.

"Quite often, though, the best director is someone who leaves you alone to do your best work, and they have a lot to admire about them because they know how to get out of the way."

Another Terminator tantrum made the news in the run up to the release of the fourth film, much to Linda's disgust.

MCM010220.jpg

Star Christian Bale - who plays resistance leader John Connor - was videoed ranting and swearing at a crew member who walked into his shot on set. The clip became a huge talking point around the world.

Linda said: "I'm ashamed to call myself his mother.

"You'll never find me acting like that and I wouldn't tolerate that from other actors.

"As far as Jim [James Cameron] went, he was normally the one having the temper tantrum so there was no room for anyone else to have one.

"How embarrassing was that? It's everything that's wrong with LA. Super stars, super egos and super bad manners."

Linda is now juggling stage work with comedy roles, such as the upcoming film Holy Water which follows a Viagra heist. She doesn't think that the world will need a real Sarah Connor anytime soon, but doesn't seem to be a fan of machines anyway, whether they're planning to wipe out mankind or not.

She said: "I don't really think there's a risk of AI taking over from mankind. It's pretty far-fetched.

"Science wrongly-applied can be really bad. It's not AI so much as cloning, and bringing back a prehistoric elephant just because we have the DNA and can do it.

"I just don't do machines. I have a cellphone I never use. I don't watch TV or use computers. I'd much rather go to bed with a good book."

Terminator Salvation opens on Wednesday June 3
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Quint chats with The Hurt Locker's Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal about explosions, snipers and much more!!!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here to present an interview I did with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, director and writer of THE HURT LOCKER. I saw this film when it played SXSW (also where I did this interview) and loved it. It's the rare war film that balances honesty with a real cinematic experience. The flick isn't preachy, it isn't a strong statement movie, it's a slice of life in the Middle East.

The fact that we follow a bomb squad gives it that WAGES OF FEAR tension that suddenly changes it from the typical (and unsuccessful) modern day war movies, as both Bigelow and Boal are quick to point out below.

The conversation got off to a bit of a rocky start, I think... not bad, but a tad awkward. I'm a big fan of Bigelow's vampire flick NEAR DARK and thought I'd kick things off with that, but as you'll see below she very nice about it, but it didn't get the conversation started like I hoped it would. But I think it smoothes out when we really get started.

Hope you dig the chat!

Quint: Thank you guys for talking with me. I really liked the movie and I'm a huge fan of NEAR DARK.
Kathryn Bigelow: Oh, good.
Quint: I remember seeing it for the first time on cable as a young teen. It was very striking, just different from everything else from the era. I'm sure you probably get a lot of NEAR DARK love from people in my generation...
Kathryn Bigelow: That's nice, though. It's always nice to hear. It's great.
Quint: I didn't really know too much about Hurt Locker before seeing it last night. I just knew that you were involved and that was about it. I knew I was seeing it at the festival, so I didn't want to start digging up trailers and clips and reviews and all of that stuff, so it was a real surprise to me. I love these kinds of movies and it really seemed to have a similarity to stuff like SORCERER or WAGES OF FEAR in that you just wrack up the tension and you kind of combine that with the character building...
Kathryn Bigelow: Characters defined through action.
Quint: Exactly. If you have characters you like around stuff that will blow them up, then suddenly the tension really does work, you know? It's kind of the Hitchcock thing where you learn about characters and then you show the bomb under the table. Was that anything you thought of in those movies?
Kathryn Bigelow: WAGES OF FEAR is just near and dear to probably all of our hearts, probably not a direct reference in this. This was more, I think, conceived and designed as a combat film and also classic war dramas. If there were any touchstones, it would be more along those lines, but really in all honesty, I think that one of our mandates was to keep it as authentic and realistic and in that sense it's as original as... Because it's a really under-reported war and I think a day in the life of a bomb tech in Baghdad, I think most people... certainly I knew little to nothing about as a result to how the media has treated it in this particular conflict, as opposed to Vietnam, where there was a lot of saturation, also a lot of mortality, but here it's simply because a) how the media has treated it and also it's just too dangerous. As a film, I think it shows, it's a 360 degree threat parameter, so that being said, I think it is it's own kind of animal, something as a result of firs-hand observation.
Quint: Mark, I would assume you probably felt a deep responsibility yourself to portray this realistically or at least write it realistically because you got to know a lot of these people as a reporter covering the war.
Mark Boal: That's true, although it's a movie and it's entertainment and I hope people approach it that way and approach it as... to me, the greatest compliment is "I was on the edge of my seat" and then the second greatest compliment is "I didn't know it was really like that," so I was very concerned with being accurate and authentic and faithful to real life within the contexts of a movie, which is not a documentary. If we got the screwdriver wrong or... that's because the other screwdriver didn't look as exciting as the screwdriver we used and so it's kind of like a hybrid in that way.
Quint: You will get that through a lot more by wrapping it in real entertainment. If you made it dry, then people wouldn't have gotten the message and it wouldn't have spread as far at least.
Mark Boal: That's probably true, yeah.

Kathryn Bigelow: Yeah, but it's always combining like facts and accessibility, you know, kind of like truth and access and seeing where that balance and that interface is. That's where I think the script is pretty successful.

Quint: You also go out of your way to show... even some of the more non exciting aspects, like showing the real sniper fight and just how that is where it's not a video game where you are just exchanging shots that go right in the head. I love that aspect of it. I love the waiting and the tension.
Kathryn Bigelow: And also the distances. I think people... I certainly have never seen it in a film before, which is what those 50 calibers are capable of, I mean that kind of distance... Everything is always kind of telescoped in a way that doesn't seem as truly impossible... I mean shooting somebody a mile and a half away...
Quint: And how it's not crystal clear when you are looking through the scope and it's blurry.
Kathryn Bigelow: And they are moving and you are moving, yeah exactly.
Quint: It's not as simple as point and shoot. I don't know why, but I have a very interest in sniping stories and stuff and I've watched stuff on Discovery Channel with war stories where it is such an elite group that can actually do it and be able to calibrate the wind and calibrate...
Kathryn Bigelow: And their breathing. If you have seen footage of these guys doing what they are doing, they have to almost slow their heart down.
Quint: Their very heartbeat will...
Kathryn Bigelow: Will affect it, exactly.
Quint: That's great. That was a part of the movie that I didn't expect. When it came to the bomb stuff, I was like "OK, I can see where this is going," and I thought that that was going to be the main focus, but you vary it up. You have your lead pretty much going undercover when he's searching for the boy's father, street gunfights, the sniper stuff, the mercenaries... You kept me on my toes I guess is what I'm trying to say.
Mark Boal: That's probably hard to do since you probably have big toes since you have seen so many movies.
Quint: I do. My toes are huge! (laughs) But yeah even though you said that you very much wrote it for a film-going audience and took real experiences and made it more entertaining, was there anything specific from your experiences over there that you brought over?
Mark Boal: I didn't mean by that that we kind of juiced it, it's just more of a compression of stuff in terms of timelines and stuff like that.
Quint: So, pretty much everything in the movie you saw?
Mark Boal: It's pretty much authentic in terms of the situations that either I saw or that I heard about. That is really what the bombs look like. That is really how they go about disarming them, for the most part. There are some things that we left out. You obviously want to protect the troops there in harm's way and not show too much, but that's pretty much the deal, especially at that time period.

It's a little different now since the war has changed a little bit, but at that time, that's pretty much what they did and they would pretty much drive around finding bombs in garbage bags and in the middle of the road and tied to trees and buried in things.

Kathryn Bigelow: That's why I think that type of warfare is kind of prototypical. It's not air to ground or ground to ground.

Quint: It's not like John Wayne fighting the Japanese.
Kathryn Bigelow: In the Vietnam era, the journalists were able to stay behind the front line, because you actually knew where the front line was. There is no line in this conflict and that was what I think what was so extraordinary to me when he came back and was telling this story about literally everything is a threat. Everything. To try to convey that...
Quint: You showed that with even the body bombs and stuff... I had heard of that and you see it in some Vietnam films where they rig bodies, but how they actually had the body on the slab, I thought that was a great scene at that arms warehouse or where ever that is.
Kathryn Bigelow: Yeah, the bomb factory.
Quint: Mark, how did you find making the transition? I'm sure it's probably the number one question you are always asked, so I hope it's not too boring.
Kathryn Bigelow: No, it's a good one.

Mark Boal: Which transition?

Kathryn Bigelow: From journalist to screenwriter.

Quint: Yeah, was the writing any different in terms of your process?
Mark Boal: Well, it's a pretty steep learning curve, but fortunately I had good teachers in Kathryn and before that Paul Haggis. I enjoyed it. It's nice and it's a shitload of work, to be honest. But it's thrilling to have as your first screenplay Paul Haggis as the guy you are sitting next to writing with and to have as your second Kathryn Bigelow, it's like you just went to graduate school and elementary school and preschool all at once and either your head is going to explode or you are going to come out of their knowing a little bit more than you do...
Quint: Sink or swim.
Mark Boal: Yeah, sink or swim, but it was cool. I love journalism and I love being able to import some of the things that make journalism great into movies and I love to try to... The whole thing with journalism, obviously as you know, is authenticity and accuracy and all of that so, to me, what I wish for more of in movies that I see is more of that. I wish there was more realism. I wish we were more into that. I like fantasies as much as the next guy, but what I really like is when I can believe in something, so that's kind of cool.

Kathryn Bigelow: As a filmmaker, being given an opportunity to work on something both topical and relevant and that's where the world of film, certainly for me, and taking a topical journalistic approach is... I mean, if the medium could really be relevant I think that's it's present sweet spot.

Quint: You kind of hit the nail on the head with this one, because you always hear that "It's not a traditional war" and in your mind you have an idea of what that is, but seeing what is depicted in your film really puts your preconceived notions of what's going on over there...
Kathryn Bigelow: That's the interesting thing.
Quint: This really makes it tangible.
Kathryn Bigelow: There was this article in THE NEW YORK TIMES were, at that point there were four thousand deaths and only six photographs of people killed in action that had ever been published, so in other words all I am saying is there's this incredible inequity in terms of information. Don't you agree?

Mark Boal: I do, but I don't want it to sound like we are making a public service announcement. Obviously if you see the movie, you know, but if you are trying to flip through the internet and trying to figure out whether you want to watch something or not, I'd like people to understand that this is an "edge of your seat" movie, ideally. If I can be a salesman for a second, you know what I mean?

Quint: You can take the message or not and you can still enjoy the movie.
Mark Boal: You can still eat your popcorn is my point. You don't have to bring your homework book with you.
Quint: Well, then let's talk about the explosions!
Mark Boal: Alright! Now we're talking! (laughs) Blow some shit up!
Quint: Another thing that I dug about the movie is that the explosions are almost the co-stars of the movie, like each one was varied and different and I was just wondering how you determined...
Kathryn Bigelow: Lot of particulate matter. I mean, (Mark) saw these detonations over there and in fact, tell them what the bomb guys would say about Hollywood films.

Mark Boal: Well, I would watch TV at night sometimes and they would go "There's another HME." I'd go, "What's that?" "Hollywood Movie Explosion."

What it means is that big ball of flame is basically vaporized gasoline which is how the special effects guys make those things, they just take a shitload of gasoline and light it on fire and it makes a big fireball. But an actual artillery round or C4 military explosive, when they blow them up in a combat situation, like in Bagdhad, it's not gasoline. They aren't blowing up gasoline, they are blowing up what's called "High order explosives" and it just looks different. It looks like it does in (this) movie.

I was like "Really? Movie explosions aren't realistic?" and then the next day you see a real bomb go off and you're like "Oh yeah, they're not."

The guy that was our special effects guy, Richard Stutsman, who is a pretty high end special effects guy and he's done a lot of really big movies, but one of the other things he does is he consults with the military as a side thing. He builds IED's and stuff for them to train on and he's part of a whole thing at Fort Irwin where they have their IED program out there. So, when Kathryn said to him "Not a movie explosions, a real explosion," he knew what we were talking about.

Kathryn Bigelow: He was so sick and tired of seeing those movie explosions...

Mark Boal: He had worked with the military. He knows all of those guys.

Quint: So, he must have known how to recreate it.
Mark Boal: And he knew how to do it without actually killing anybody, because I was always like "Can't we just use real C4?" and he would be like "No, Mark."
Quint: "We can hire somebody who's sick or something..."
Mark Boal: We were getting some of our supplies from the Jordanian military, basic equipment, they were like "Can we give you the C4?" and he was like "No, I can't. We have to use this black powder..." They were like "Black powder? Like for a musket?" and he's like "Yeah, we use it for movies." It was very confusing to them, like "Why not just use C4?" They were like "We have the best C4!" "Can't use that, sorry..."
Quint: When you are saying this, I imagine a guy in a suit with a briefcase full of plastic explosives.
Mark Boal: It's like a military guy in a warehouse... with stacks of C4.
Quint: Did you have to work the actors closely with the pyrotechnic guys and the stunt guys and all of that stuff? I would imagine safety had to be...
Kathryn Bigelow: Yeah, safety was number one, but they all did a kind of boot camp at various bases, predominantly Fort Irwin. Anthony (Mackie) spent a little bit of time at Fort Brag and so they did their boot camp and spent time with EOD techs, learning from them and then on set with pyrotechnic guys just to try to get a sense of what the explosions are going to be like, what the protocol would be. And then, of course, learning how to shoot the Barrett (sniper rifle), which you shoot with the real guns and then go to blanks when you are on camera.

Mark Boal: That's a real Barrett!

Kathryn Bigelow: It's real, but the shell...

Quint: I'd imagine they have a different kick.
Kathryn Bigelow: That one has a kick no matter what you use. (laughs) That was pretty serious.

Mark Boal: It's loud as all hell, too.

Quint: What's next for both of you guys?
Kathryn Bigelow: I'm working on a few things, but right now selling the movie.

Mark Boal: Promoting this thing!

Quint: You are still a little while out, right? It doesn't come out until June?
Mark Boal: The end of June and then (rolling out) early July.
Quint: So these are the early days. You've got months of this to look forward to!
Mark Boal: We are kind of like the Little Engine That Could. The movie is independently made. I don't know how much you know about it or care about that stuff, but it was kind of financed pretty much on a wing and a prayer and we just got distribution from Summit, the studio, and we sold it in Toronto, but up until then it was like "Hey man, how much money do you have left on your Visa?" It's actually pretty thrilling to be at this place where you are like "It's actually going to come out, you're sitting across from Ain't It Cool News, it's like a real fucking movie!" (laughs)

Kathryn Bigelow: The good news with that is that we had complete creative control and I have final cut. There was not interference whatever.

Mark Boal: That's actually the secret as to if it's any good, she had full control.

Quint: Going through the studio, you couldn't have shot a movie that we have been talking about, that balances the combat with character.
Kathryn Bigelow: Never. I mean, we shot five kilometers from the Iraqi border. Barry Ackroyd, the world's greatest cinematographer, and I kept wanting to just drive across the border. "Let's just shoot in Iraq," but the security guys kept saying "There are too many snipers, I can't guarantee... You can go shoot there, but I can't guarantee that you will come back." You could throw a stone like five kilometers, but my point is the idea of taking a production to the middle east, let alone with no creative interference and final cut, it's a great way to work.
Quint: When Summit picked it up, they didn't ask for any changes or anything? I know that sometimes happens.
Kathryn Bigelow: No, it's absolutely unadulterated.
Quint: "This is the movie, take it or leave it."
Kathryn Bigelow: Kind of, but in a nice way. Patrick Waxberger just loves the movie. I've known him for a while, so I was hopeful that they would like it and they loved it.

Mark Boal: They have been really great about understanding that it can work in an art type context, but also in a commercial type context.

Quint: That it can play in multiplexes.
Kathryn Bigelow: Exactly.

Mark Boal: They did understand that and feel that way and they are feeling that way more and more.

Kathryn Bigelow: It has gotten a really tremendous response...

Mark Boal: It's you guys with the press that have actually, to be honest, been the most influential in terms of getting people to say "Shit, we could make some money on this," which is what you want, because then they support it.

Quint: And then they actually put some money into the ads.
Kathryn Bigelow: It's like a self fulfilling prophecy.

Mark Boal: It's a "Chicken or the egg" type of thing.

Quint: Cool. Thank you guys so much for taking the time to talk with me!





See, once it got going I think it's actually a really good little chat, covering lots of ground. Pretty crazy to hear about how close they were to the real warzone and I loved the Jordanian army guys trying to push real C4 on to the special effects coordinator.

Seriously, this is a damn intense flick. Give HURT LOCKER a view when it comes out. It's the kind of movie that doesn't force you to turn your mind off to enjoy it, but it also doesn't feel like you're in a classroom as the projector is whirring.

-Quint

Pogledao sam MARIN BOI Jong-seok Yoona.

Iako je u par navrata polazio putem koji mi je delovao sumnjivo, kada sumiram utiske, MARIN BOI spada među korejske repertoarske filmove koji su mi se dopali. Gledano, izvan Bonga i Chan Wooka koji su klasa za sebe, Koreja ima sjajnu repertoarsku kinematografiju i sve je više njihovih filmova koji prevazilaze početnu derivativnost koja je opterećivala njihove izvorne blokbastere. S jedne strane, upravo kroz autore kao što je Bong Koreja predstavlja avangardu u domenu repertoarskog filma, dočim s druge strane, Koreja ima i drugu stranu repetoarskog filma a to je pokušaj nadholivuđivanja sa Holivudom, u nekim projektima koji možda nemaju neku veći internmacionalnu ubedljivost ili relevantnost ali stoje kao simbol snage korejske kinematografije da proizvede vlastitu varijaciju na holivudski kanon, kopiju koja je u ravni originala, homegrown film koji ne mora da se oslanja na originalnost i snalažljivost kako bi dobro stzajao pored holivudskog filma.

U tom smislu, MARIN BOI spada među projekte koji svakako nisu nužni za gledanje najširoj publici jer svakako lakše je gledati krimić ovog tipa sa nekim poznatim američkim glumcima, ali gledano iz vizure zanata, MARIN BOI nimalo ne zaostaje za savremenim krimićima iz SAD ili Francuske.

Francusku sam naveo kao zemlju iz koje MARIN BOI uzima deo svog šmeka u rasponu od fetišističkog prikaza sveta kriminala svojstvenog Melvilleu do fascinacije prirodom i morem po kojoj je recimo poznat Besson. Kako IMDB kaže, debitant Jong-seok Yoon, pokazuje zavidnu veštinu u oblikovanju ovog elegantnog trilera. Kao što je kod Korejanaca već tradicionalno, on donosi sveć pristup kadriranju sa otvaranjam scena iz specifičnih uglova, a u finalu, u kome se pojavljuje solidan, mada ne i savršen CGI, ide putem totalne holivudske ekstravagance. Taj korejski pristup kadriranju ispraćen je relativno konvencionalnim, gotovo zapadnim pristupom tempu, doduše sa više francuskog no američkog šmeka u ekonomiji unutar scena. Međutim, nesumnjivo je da ovakav materijal niko na svetu više ne bi tretirao sa ovolikom pažnjom i elegancijom, osim možda ponekog Francuza kao što je Schoendoerffer.

Ipak, ono što mi je bilo najspornije to je u neku ruku prenatrpana priča koja ipak na kraju supeva da profunkcioniše. Iako junak realno ima previše motiva, i to motiva tipičnih za noir dakle sa sve zabranjenom romansom sa šefovom ženom, pritiskom policije, undercover ubacivanjem, kockarskim dugom i sl. - u krajnjoj instanci Jong-seok Yoon uspeva da to sve nekako opravda u svom scenariju. Ono što filmu daje posebnu draž jeste to što se u tačkama kada priča počne da deluje predvidljivo ili generic, obično desi neki preokret koji možda na preformuliše žanr ali promeša karte protivno očekivanju gledalaca a opet upravo u skladu sa njihovom potrebom da se prevaziđe kliše. Još je važnije to što film ne donosi nelogične preokrete. Svi preokreti su logični i dobro koncipirani, utemeljeni u priči, tako da ne tone u neki oportunizam, proizvoljnost ili poništavanje do tada izgrađene priče.

Iako MARIN BOI nema neki suštinski crossover potencija zbog koga bi obična publika morala da ga pogleda, sasvim je sigurno da čak i najtipičniji konzument zapadnog filma u njemu može da uživa. što se onih koji iz Koreje očekuju isključivo inovaciju tiče, ni oni neće naći previše toga novog u ovom filmu. Međutim, realno MARIN BOI je vrlo kvalitetan repertoarski film koji potvrđuje dominantnu poziciju Južne Koreje na internacionalnoj sceni.

* * * / * * * *

Branko Schmidt je lako mogao postati junak knjige KAKO JE REDATELJ BRANIO HRVATSKU, ako imamo u vidu njegov nacionalistički angažman u vreme odvajanja zemlje. Otud je njego politički korektan film METASTAZE poprilično iznenađenje, i to ne samo na isključivo ieološkom nivou.

Naime, što se ideologije tiče, METASTAZE su tipična pseudo-realistička priča o grupi Bad Blue Boysa i njihovom potonuću u svet heroina, alkohola i gubljenja vremena, bez nekog dubljeg istraživanja manipulacije istim tim ljudima, dolaska heroina na tribine i njegove funkcije i sl. U duhu nedavnih Peranovićevih pustolovina, interesantan detalj je svakako lečenje jednog od junaka u katoličkom rehab centru u Španiji gde se skidao sa paje. Na planu scenarija, METASTAZE su recimo dosta bliske filmu SUTRA UJUTRU Olega Novkovića, s tim što je Schmidtov ambijent nešto zanimljiviji, ili je pak Zagreb nama neko inostranstvo, majka mu stara, pa nam deluje kao nešto novo tj. ne znamo koliko Schmidt fejkuje.

Kako god bilo, scenario je koncipiran tako da priču podređuje likovima, ali da istovremeno ima i likove i priču, i mislim da je taj balans dobro napravljen. Što se samih likova i priče tiče, Schmidtov defetistički pristup deluje dosta iskonstruisano, i likovi u suštini spadaju u klišee. Nerazumevanja i sukobi među junacima su generic, i jedino što je novo jeste pristup realizaciji.

A novina u realizaciji je ono sledeće iznenađenje, a to je da Schmidt koji je do sada bio prepoznat kao reditelj sa vrlo akademskim pristupom, u ovom filmu pokušava da bude vrlo trvd, prljav, da snima iz ruke i u tom pristupu je konsekventan. Iako, naravno, tako prljavo snimljen film u Hrvatskoj više liči na Beogradsku Hroniku nego na neku fotku Barry Ackroyda, za svaku je pohvalu što je matori barem pokušao da doslednije primeni jedan od rediteljskih koncepata koji su jako dugo prisutni u svetskom filmu a kod nas se o njime mnogo više priča nego što se rade.

U ideološkom smislu najciničnije je svakako Schmidtovo vrlo uporno akcentovanje ksenofobije, naconalizma i rasizma kao velikog problema hrvatskog društva, koji su dopunjeni problem veterana Domovinskog rata i tim sukobom kao traumom. Kao neko ko je podžravao zakuvavanje te situacije, čudno je da se Schmidt toliko preokrenuo, naročito ako imamo u vidu da je pored hrvatskog nacionalizma njegov output u nezavisnoj Hrvatskoj bio i vrlo antikomunistički.

Gluma je pristojna. U pojedinim fazame je neubeljiva, vidi se da neki glumci ne mogu da se snađu o konceptu kadar-sekvnce, pre svega Ivo Gregurević. rene Bitorajac pak, iako ne donosi najbolju, pružu barem najenergičniju ulogu. Kao i ranije, glavni junak, onaj sa kojim jašemu - u vstren rečniku, dosta je pasivan. najubedljiviji svakako je Robert Ugrina kao Kizo.

U svakom slučaju, METASTAZE uprkos svim ovim kontradikcijama stoje kao pristojan i solidan film za lokalnu upotrebu, i kao znak da nas Hrvati iz godine u godinue u proseku sustižu. Mladen, Jovan i Spaske su ove godine malo digli letvicu, ali hrvatski mejnstrim je trenutno jači od našeg.

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Pogledao sam TRUCK Hyeong-jin Kwona.

Odlučio sam da nastavim za pozitivnim trendom korejskih filmova, i sa TRUCKom sam koliko-toliko nastavio tu seriju. Iako TRUCK ima određenih problema pre svega na nivou prenategnute motivacije likova, koja je prenapadna, kao i zbog nekih neuverljivih reakcija glavnog junaka koje prilično razbijaju iluziju, opet je reč o vrlo solidnom korejskom žanrovskom filmu čije je osnovno svojstvo da se ponovo radi o tipu filma koji niko drugi sem Korejanaca ne bi radio sa tolikom umetničkom i produkcionom ambicijom.

Ovako mala priča o očajničkom pokušaju siromašnog kamiondžije da sakupi novac za kćerkinu operaciju bacajući leševe za mafiju i njegovom susretu sa serijskim ubicom, nigde ne bi bila ovako maštovito i glossy realizovana.

U tom smislu, kao i u slučaju sa MARIN BOIjem i još nekim filmovima, Južna Koreja stoji kao bastion vrlo specifičnog i ambicioznog pristupa žanru.

Izvan rediteljske ambicije, TRUCK je vrlo kompetentno vođen i solidno režiran, tako da izvesne greške na nivou scenarija, preduga ekspozicija sa vrlo očiglednim ishodima određenih scena i sl. mogu da se oproste. Štaviše, TRUCK ima natprosečno interesantne odnose među karakterima ako imamo u vidu da je glavni negativac serijski ubica sa krajnje generic backstoryjem.

* * 1/2 / * * * *

U sklopu industrijske špijunaže povodom ŠIŠANJA, pogledao sam ruskog učesnika berlinskog festivala Россия 88 Pavela Bardina.

Mislim da je ovo film po Son of Manovom ukusu, pošto problemu skinheda prilazi dokumentaristički, odnosno pseudo-dokumentaristički pošto je koncipiran kao lažni dokumentarac sačinjen od snimaka koji beleže doživljaje grupe ruskih skinheda. Ipak, unutar toga postoji neka vrsta labave priče koja sve ovo vodi ka nekoj vrsti zaključenja. Son of Man je u odnosu na ŠIŠANJE imao sasvim legitimnu primedbu da je taj film isuviše movie, i na svu sreću, evo filma na tu temu koji nije nimalo movie.

Skinhedi su neobična grupacija tako da oni ne deluju realistično ni u stvarnosti sa svojom hiperdizajniranošću. Ipak. Bardin uspeva da uhvati njihov autentičan look i da bez mnogo dubinskog objašnjavanja prikaže ovaj fenomen.

Ono što je problem jeste to što njihovi autentični doživljaji nisu dovoljno zanimljivi da bi funkcionisali kao film, a isto tako ima nekih situacija za koje ne deluje da bi iko dopustio da budu snimljene što samim tim devalvira pseudodokumentarni pristup priči.

U tom smislu, Россия 88 liči na neku vrstu lutajućeg metka u ideološkom smislu, pošto uprkos svom realizmu zapravo seže vrlo plitko u fenomen kojim se bavi. Mislim da ga skinsi vrlo lako mogu gledati kao video pismo svojih drugara iz Rusije, a da ga levičari mogu gledati kao dokument o zabludelim marginalcima. Možda Bardin nije ni imao neku jasniju ideju od toga, ili ja pak baš to želeo, ali čini se da koliko god postupci junaka bili "teški" i sirovi, smisao im nekako izostaje.

U svakom slučaju, u odnosu na stilizovanost i filmski jezik ŠIŠANJA,  Россия 88 nudi nešto potpuno drugačije. Po bilbordu za film MAMMA MIA inače rekao bih da je počeo sa snimanjem posle ŠIŠANJA.

U poređenju sa MADE IN ENGLAND, koliko god taj film pretendovao da bude realističan, Россия 88 je još ekscesivnija u tome. Glumci i reditelj su solidno obavili taj zadatak. Ipak, čini mi se da je trajanje od 103 minuta ipak preambiciozno za ovu formu i da ovakvom filmu pre priliči nekih 90 minuta trajanja i manje.

* * / * * * *

Bong Joon-ho's thriller Mother has beaten Park Chan-wook's Thirst to become the biggest opener of the year in South Korea.


According to the Korean Film Council, the film has racked up 1.03 million admissions since it opened on Thursday May 28.

As Bong's previous thrillers, Memories Of Murder and The Host, both broke local box office records – the latter taking a whopping 13 million admissions – Mother was already one of the most anticipated Korean films of the year along with Thirst.

After recent buzz from Cannes, where it screened in Un Certain Regard, local anticipation reached fever pitch and CJ Entertainment opened the film on 756 screens.

Despite the seven-day national mourning period leading up the funeral of late ex-president Roh Moo-hyun on Friday, the film clocked up over 200,000 admissions on its first day (Thursday) and took more than 800,000 admissions on the following days.

Also rated '18 and over' and distributed by CJ Entertainment (on 633 screens), Park Chan-wook's Cannes competition film Thirst took 170,000 admissions on its first day and 820,558 in its first four days. The film made it over the 1 million admissions mark on the fifth day of its run, which included two public holidays and a weekend.

Mother was followed by Terminator Salvation, distributed by Lotte Entertainment, with 627,037 admissions; Angels & Demons (SPRI BVI) with 135,797; My Girlfriend Is An Agent (Lotte) with 111,981, Coraline (UPI) with 44,472, and Castaway On The Moon (Cinema Service) with 41,763.

Preliminary box office rankings are according to admissions numbers, with definitive Top Ten gross figures announced Tuesdays in Screendaily.com's Global Box Office category.

Pogledao sam CRUSH AND BLUSH Kyoung-mi Leeja. To je ekscentrična korejska romantična komedija koju je producirao i pisao Chan Wook Park, a zanimljiv detalj je i to da je među scenaristima filma i Eun-kyo Park, saradnik na scenariju na novom Bongovom filmu MOTHER.

CRUSH AND BLUSH nudi Chan Wookov pogled na tipičan kanon romantične komedije na tragu BRIDGET JONES, obogaćen nekim tipično korejskim dodacima pre svega u formi neobično opsesivnih likova koji čine da junakinja koja bi inače u tipičnom zapadnom romcomu bila ružno pače, u ovom postane neka vrsta monstruma koja ni ne zasluži, niti dobije hepiend.

Zapadna kritika je hvalila prvu polovinu filma a imala je problem sa opadanjem tempa i ispovednim situacijama u drugoj, međutim, meni je upravo ta druga polovina ono po čemu se ovaj naslov izdvaja. Situacija suđenja na kraju tokom koga junaci pričaju šta su radili i njihove postupci se procenjuju počinje kao serija tipičnih Richard Curtis-ispovsti a onda se pšretvara u chanwookovsku situaciju kada se otkriva plot behind the plot. Ono što je osnovna razlika jeste to što bi kod Chan Wooka tu imali revelation nečega što ne znamo a u ovom slučaju se onome što znamo i što nam deluje kao niz tipičnih romcom radnji daje nova dimenzija.

Za razliku od većine azijskih komedija u mom slučaju, CRUSH AND BLUSH mi je bio zanimljiv pre svega zato što se ne oslanja previše na gegove, a one situacije koje su u širem smislu smešne prevazišle su kulturološku barijeru. Tempo je dobar a posebno drag touch su cameo uloge Chan Wook Parka i Bong Joon Hoa u filmu.

Film nema vizuelnu ekspresivnost Bongovih i Chan Wookovih filmova ali sasvim dobro izgleda i mislim da ima crossover potencijal i za Zapad.

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Pogledao sam PUSH Paul McGuigana. od ovog reditelja sam jako mnogo očekivao još od njegovih engleskih dana međutim trebalo mu je dosta dugo da se nađe i pokaže svoj potencijal ne samo na nivou nego i na nivou celine.

Konačno je to uspeo da radi. naime, PUSH je TAKEN za ovu sezonu. Doduše, PUSH se dosta razlikuje od TAKENa po tome što nema tako jednostavnu, rudimentarnu priču, štaviše vrlo je složen na nivou same mehanike zapleta, međutim, može se porediti po toj underdog poziciji iz koje se odjednom pojavljuje izuzetno energičan akcioni film koi nudi odgovor na pitanje kako raditi superherojski film u realističnim okolnostima.

Paul McGuiganov film se u tom smislu porediti po impactu sa BLADEom Stephena Norringtona s tim što je Norringtonov film pored intergracije superheroja u stvarnost bio bitan i zbog nekih drugih stvari.

S druge strane, McGuigan pre svega nudi integraciju superheroju u jednu zanimljivu, ali suštinski vrlo gritty fakturu smeštenog u Hong Kong i to u Hong Kong koji više liči na ono što gledamo lokaciju u HK filmovima nego u američkim, sa jednim pristupom lokaciji koji jemene u pojedinim deonicama podsetio na Assayasa u filmu BOARDING GATE.

Zatim, McGuigan je snimio sjajno osmšljen film u kome se sve vreme koriste supermoći junaka (junaci poseduje razne vrste telekinetičkih moći) a one imaju kako fizičke, tako i mentalne i optičke manifstacije, i onda kroz niz sitnih detalja pokazuje efekat njihove snage. Ti sitni detalji čine da priča u tim okolnostima bude uverljiva.

Ako se izuzme relativno bleg glavni glumac Chris Evans, koji je simpatičan i hunky ali nije prvorazredni materijal još uvek, glumačka podela je sjajna. Dakota fanning je vrlo atipična, neslatka tinejdžerka, Camilla belle je grungy love interest, a negativac je Djimon Hounssou kriminalno slabo korišćen personality actro koji sve češće nalazi svoje mesto u produkcijama koje distribuira Summit.

McGuiganova režija je sjajna, film je snimljen za 38 miliona a deluje znantno skuplje. Da ga kritika nije otpisala u startu jer očigldno nije bio pimpovan film koji je pravljen da bude kvalitetan i da je neko preuzeo odgovornost da ga hypuje, mislim da je mogao imati ubedljiviji rezultat.

McGuigan prevazilazi budžetsko ograničenje upravo kroz lucidno korišćenje manjih detalja, dinamičnu inscenaciju dramskih scena u kojima se osećaju najpozitivnije tradicije britanske škole, i odličnu upotrebu lokacija koje i bez velike destrukcije daju filmu naročit production value.

Neki uticaju deep cut HK akcijaša su očigledni u McGuiganovom hip pristupu, i u ovom konkretnom slučaju činjenica da je McGuigan hip upravo daje klasu projektu. Taj HK tocuh se naročito oseća na planu izbora lokacija, koje u mom sećanju evociraju uspomene na remek-dela poput BEYOND HYPOTHERMIA, BLACK MASK i sl.

PUSH verovatno neće iznedriti franšizu što je šteta, mislim da je mogao. Ipak, ovaj film će sigurno nekada biti otkriven kao akcijaš vredan pažnje.

Iako se po svom zahvatu ovaj film kreće u domenu filmova koji kod mene teško imaju iznad * * *, mcguigan će biti ocenjen ipak nešto jačom ocenom zbog odličnog prevazilaženja ograničenja jednog dosta prisutnog žanra.

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Five Favorite Films with Adult Film Star Sasha Grey
The Girlfriend Experience star opens up on her cinematic tastes.
by Jen Yamato | May 21, 2009
Discuss Article | Blog Article
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Sasha Grey

Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh made waves when he premiered his latest film, The Girlfriend Experience, at this year's Sundance Film Festival -- not so much due to its subject, a high class call girl, but rather thanks to who plays her: adult film actress Sasha Grey, the 21-year-old award-winning star of countless films we can't mention here. An avowed cinephile and French New Wave enthusiast who once considered taking the stage name Anna Karina (and has been known as a Godard devotee ever since), Grey shared her Five Favorite Films with Rotten Tomatoes, revealing a penchant for intense character dramas that dare to be honest and open -- much like Grey herself. Read on for more about Sasha Grey's Five Favorite Films, her improvised central performance in The Girlfriend Experience, what it was like to share the screen with film critic Glenn Kenny (who appears in a cameo role), and more.



Stroszek (1977, 100% Tomatometer)

StroszekStroszek by Werner Herzog. It's such a hard movie not to like. You have this character who has these hopes and dreams, he wants to come to America and he's a struggling, failed musician but he also really cares about everybody else around him, and he doesn't judge the people around him, no matter what their faults may be. I like the characters and just the story itself.



Pierrot le Fou (1965, 76% Tomatometer)
Pierrot Le FouTo me, it's just a very romantic story. It's the ultimate, "let's just drop everything and run away together" movie; the way the story was told was so unique. There's one scene in particular where Anna Karina is on the beach, and she rolls over and she just says, "F--- me." To put that in a film in that time period -- you just didn't expect that to come out of her mouth. It's titillating, I guess you could say.




Fat Girl (2001, 72% Tomatometer)
Fat GirlI don't really know how to go into detail about it; the story is so intense, and you're not made to feel a certain way towards these characters. You see this mom who's kind of a b---- and doesn't really care about her youngest daughter, and you see this older sister who's a b----... especially at the end, you don't really feel sorry for these people.

I had a list of films that my theater teacher gave me, when I was about 14 or 15. One of the things he always told the class was you should be watching one film per week, to study other actors and study the language of film. Fat Girl just happened to be one of the films on the list.



A Woman Under the Influence (1973, 91% Tomatometer)
A Woman Under the InfluenceI think there's something about all of these films that resonate with me -- they're all stories and situations between characters that you couldn't make with an American studio today. A Woman Under the Influence is so raw, it's so wrong... it's like, you knew those neighbors. It's a really emotional film, and I think for John Cassavetes to have his own wife play that character, it was even more challenging and even more of a risk.



Escape From New York (1981, 81% Tomatometer)
Escape From New YorkIt's John Carpenter! I mean, come on. John Carpenter, Kurt Russell as f---in' Snake Plisskin -- it doesn't really get any better than that.

Was that on your theater teacher's list?

It was not. [Laughs]

Žižekov postmoderni diskurs kritike i bjesomučne dekonstrukcije neoliberalnog modela istovremeno ga i podržava, prikazujući čitavu eksploatatorsku strukturu kao nedodirljivu tvorevinu koja sablasno pluta iznad svih antagonizama. Žižek time samo reproducira i utvrđuje već postojeću društvenu pasivnost, hitchcockovski manipulirajući ljudima.

http://www.h-alter.org/vijesti/kultura/hickokovski-kontrarevolucionar

Hmm, biće da sam ja gledao neki drugi Push s istim glumcima, jer mu ne bih ni tri zvezde dao. Al' dobro, ja nisam išao u te kritičarske škole. Možda je problem bio u kopiji.

Economy May 2009 Atlantic
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time.
by Simon Johnson


The Quiet Coup
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Image credit: Jim Bourg/Reuters/Corbis



One thing you learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your "clients" come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You're never at the top of anyone's dance card.

The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in telling its clients what they don't want to hear. I should know; I pressed painful changes on many foreign officials during my time there as chief economist in 2007 and 2008. And I felt the effects of IMF pressure, at least indirectly, when I worked with governments in Eastern Europe as they struggled after 1989, and with the private sector in Asia and Latin America during the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over that time, from every vantage point, I saw firsthand the steady flow of officials—from Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and elsewhere—trudging to the fund when circumstances were dire and all else had failed.

Every crisis is different, of course. Ukraine faced hyperinflation in 1994; Russia desperately needed help when its short-term-debt rollover scheme exploded in the summer of 1998; the Indonesian rupiah plunged in 1997, nearly leveling the corporate economy; that same year, South Korea's 30-year economic miracle ground to a halt when foreign banks suddenly refused to extend new credit.

But I must tell you, to IMF officials, all of these crises looked depressingly similar. Each country, of course, needed a loan, but more than that, each needed to make big changes so that the loan could really work. Almost always, countries in crisis need to learn to live within their means after a period of excess—exports must be increased, and imports cut—and the goal is to do this without the most horrible of recessions. Naturally, the fund's economists spend time figuring out the policies—budget, money supply, and the like—that make sense in this context. Yet the economic solution is seldom very hard to work out.

No, the real concern of the fund's senior staff, and the biggest obstacle to recovery, is almost invariably the politics of countries in crisis.

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

In Russia, for instance, the private sector is now in serious trouble because, over the past five years or so, it borrowed at least $490 billion from global banks and investors on the assumption that the country's energy sector could support a permanent increase in consumption throughout the economy. As Russia's oligarchs spent this capital, acquiring other companies and embarking on ambitious investment plans that generated jobs, their importance to the political elite increased. Growing political support meant better access to lucrative contracts, tax breaks, and subsidies. And foreign investors could not have been more pleased; all other things being equal, they prefer to lend money to people who have the implicit backing of their national governments, even if that backing gives off the faint whiff of corruption.

But inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried away; they waste money and build massive business empires on a mountain of debt. Local banks, sometimes pressured by the government, become too willing to extend credit to the elite and to those who depend on them. Overborrowing always ends badly, whether for an individual, a company, or a country. Sooner or later, credit conditions become tighter and no one will lend you money on anything close to affordable terms.

The downward spiral that follows is remarkably steep. Enormous companies teeter on the brink of default, and the local banks that have lent to them collapse. Yesterday's "public-private partnerships" are relabeled "crony capitalism." With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced to draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports, service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an economic pariah. The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that's gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs.

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here's a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.

Eventually, as the oligarchs in Putin's Russia now realize, some within the elite have to lose out before recovery can begin. It's a game of musical chairs: there just aren't enough currency reserves to take care of everyone, and the government cannot afford to take over private-sector debt completely.

So the IMF staff looks into the eyes of the minister of finance and decides whether the government is serious yet. The fund will give even a country like Russia a loan eventually, but first it wants to make sure Prime Minister Putin is ready, willing, and able to be tough on some of his friends. If he is not ready to throw former pals to the wolves, the fund can wait. And when he is ready, the fund is happy to make helpful suggestions—particularly with regard to wresting control of the banking system from the hands of the most incompetent and avaricious "entrepreneurs."

Of course, Putin's ex-friends will fight back. They'll mobilize allies, work the system, and put pressure on other parts of the government to get additional subsidies. In extreme cases, they'll even try subversion—including calling up their contacts in the American foreign-policy establishment, as the Ukrainians did with some success in the late 1990s.

Many IMF programs "go off track" (a euphemism) precisely because the government can't stay tough on erstwhile cronies, and the consequences are massive inflation or other disasters. A program "goes back on track" once the government prevails or powerful oligarchs sort out among themselves who will govern—and thus win or lose—under the IMF-supported plan. The real fight in Thailand and Indonesia in 1997 was about which powerful families would lose their banks. In Thailand, it was handled relatively smoothly. In Indonesia, it led to the fall of President Suharto and economic chaos.

From long years of experience, the IMF staff knows its program will succeed—stabilizing the economy and enabling growth—only if at least some of the powerful oligarchs who did so much to create the underlying problems take a hit. This is the problem of all emerging markets.




Becoming a Banana Republic

In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn't be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn't roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

But there's a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

Top investment bankers and government officials like to lay the blame for the current crisis on the lowering of U.S. interest rates after the dotcom bust or, even better—in a "buck stops somewhere else" sort of way—on the flow of savings out of China. Some on the right like to complain about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or even about longer-standing efforts to promote broader homeownership. And, of course, it is axiomatic to everyone that the regulators responsible for "safety and soundness" were fast asleep at the wheel.

But these various policies—lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership—had something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector's profits—such as Brooksley Born's now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.

The financial industry has not always enjoyed such favored treatment. But for the past 25 years or so, finance has boomed, becoming ever more powerful. The boom began with the Reagan years, and it only gained strength with the deregulatory policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Several other factors helped fuel the financial industry's ascent. Paul Volcker's monetary policy in the 1980s, and the increased volatility in interest rates that accompanied it, made bond trading much more lucrative. The invention of securitization, interest-rate swaps, and credit-default swaps greatly increased the volume of transactions that bankers could make money on. And an aging and increasingly wealthy population invested more and more money in securities, helped by the invention of the IRA and the 401(k) plan. Together, these developments vastly increased the profit opportunities in financial services.


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Not surprisingly, Wall Street ran with these opportunities. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.

The great wealth that the financial sector created and concentrated gave bankers enormous political weight—a weight not seen in the U.S. since the era of J.P. Morgan (the man). In that period, the banking panic of 1907 could be stopped only by coordination among private-sector bankers: no government entity was able to offer an effective response. But that first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent.

The Wall Street–Washington Corridor

Of course, the U.S. is unique. And just as we have the world's most advanced economy, military, and technology, we also have its most advanced oligarchy.

In a primitive political system, power is transmitted through violence, or the threat of violence: military coups, private militias, and so on. In a less primitive system more typical of emerging markets, power is transmitted via money: bribes, kickbacks, and offshore bank accounts. Although lobbying and campaign contributions certainly play major roles in the American political system, old-fashioned corruption—envelopes stuffed with $100 bills—is probably a sideshow today, Jack Abramoff notwithstanding.

Instead, the American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Once, perhaps, what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America's position in the world.

One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington. Robert Rubin, once the co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served in Washington as Treasury secretary under Clinton, and later became chairman of Citigroup's executive committee. Henry Paulson, CEO of Goldman Sachs during the long boom, became Treasury secretary under George W.Bush. John Snow, Paulson's predecessor, left to become chairman of Cerberus Capital Management, a large private-equity firm that also counts Dan Quayle among its executives. Alan Greenspan, after leaving the Federal Reserve, became a consultant to Pimco, perhaps the biggest player in international bond markets.

These personal connections were multiplied many times over at the lower levels of the past three presidential administrations, strengthening the ties between Washington and Wall Street. It has become something of a tradition for Goldman Sachs employees to go into public service after they leave the firm. The flow of Goldman alumni—including Jon Corzine, now the governor of New Jersey, along with Rubin and Paulson—not only placed people with Wall Street's worldview in the halls of power; it also helped create an image of Goldman (inside the Beltway, at least) as an institution that was itself almost a form of public service.

Wall Street is a very seductive place, imbued with an air of power. Its executives truly believe that they control the levers that make the world go round. A civil servant from Washington invited into their conference rooms, even if just for a meeting, could be forgiven for falling under their sway. Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. I vividly remember a meeting in early 2008—attended by top policy makers from a handful of rich countries—at which the chair casually proclaimed, to the room's general approval, that the best preparation for becoming a central-bank governor was to work first as an investment banker.

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan's pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known. Yet Greenspan was hardly alone. This is what Ben Bernanke, the man who succeeded him, said in 2006: "The management of market risk and credit risk has become increasingly sophisticated. ... Banking organizations of all sizes have made substantial strides over the past two decades in their ability to measure and manage risks."

Of course, this was mostly an illusion. Regulators, legislators, and academics almost all assumed that the managers of these banks knew what they were doing. In retrospect, they didn't. AIG's Financial Products division, for instance, made $2.5 billion in pretax profits in 2005, largely by selling underpriced insurance on complex, poorly understood securities. Often described as "picking up nickels in front of a steamroller," this strategy is profitable in ordinary years, and catastrophic in bad ones. As of last fall, AIG had outstanding insurance on more than $400 billion in securities. To date, the U.S. government, in an effort to rescue the company, has committed about $180 billion in investments and loans to cover losses that AIG's sophisticated risk modeling had said were virtually impossible.

Wall Street's seductive power extended even (or especially) to finance and economics professors, historically confined to the cramped offices of universities and the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. As mathematical finance became more and more essential to practical finance, professors increasingly took positions as consultants or partners at financial institutions. Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, Nobel laureates both, were perhaps the most famous; they took board seats at the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1994, before the fund famously flamed out at the end of the decade. But many others beat similar paths. This migration gave the stamp of academic legitimacy (and the intimidating aura of intellectual rigor) to the burgeoning world of high finance.

As more and more of the rich made their money in finance, the cult of finance seeped into the culture at large. Works like Barbarians at the Gate, Wall Street, and Bonfire of the Vanities—all intended as cautionary tales—served only to increase Wall Street's mystique. Michael Lewis noted in Portfolio last year that when he wrote Liar's Poker, an insider's account of the financial industry, in 1989, he had hoped the book might provoke outrage at Wall Street's hubris and excess. Instead, he found himself "knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share. ... They'd read my book as a how-to manual." Even Wall Street's criminals, like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, became larger than life. In a society that celebrates the idea of making money, it was easy to infer that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington. Faith in free financial markets grew into conventional wisdom—trumpeted on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and on the floor of Congress.

From this confluence of campaign finance, personal connections, and ideology there flowed, in just the past decade, a river of deregulatory policies that is, in hindsight, astonishing:

• insistence on free movement of capital across borders;

• the repeal of Depression-era regulations separating commercial and investment banking;

• a congressional ban on the regulation of credit-default swaps;

• major increases in the amount of leverage allowed to investment banks;

• a light (dare I say invisible?) hand at the Securities and Exchange Commission in its regulatory enforcement;

• an international agreement to allow banks to measure their own riskiness;

• and an intentional failure to update regulations so as to keep up with the tremendous pace of financial innovation.

The mood that accompanied these measures in Washington seemed to swing between nonchalance and outright celebration: finance unleashed, it was thought, would continue to propel the economy to greater heights.

America's Oligarchs and the Financial Crisis

The oligarchy and the government policies that aided it did not alone cause the financial crisis that exploded last year. Many other factors contributed, including excessive borrowing by households and lax lending standards out on the fringes of the financial world. But major commercial and investment banks—and the hedge funds that ran alongside them—were the big beneficiaries of the twin housing and equity-market bubbles of this decade, their profits fed by an ever-increasing volume of transactions founded on a relatively small base of actual physical assets. Each time a loan was sold, packaged, securitized, and resold, banks took their transaction fees, and the hedge funds buying those securities reaped ever-larger fees as their holdings grew.

Because everyone was getting richer, and the health of the national economy depended so heavily on growth in real estate and finance, no one in Washington had any incentive to question what was going on. Instead, Fed Chairman Greenspan and President Bush insisted metronomically that the economy was fundamentally sound and that the tremendous growth in complex securities and credit-default swaps was evidence of a healthy economy where risk was distributed safely.

In the summer of 2007, signs of strain started appearing. The boom had produced so much debt that even a small economic stumble could cause major problems, and rising delinquencies in subprime mortgages proved the stumbling block. Ever since, the financial sector and the federal government have been behaving exactly the way one would expect them to, in light of past emerging-market crises.

By now, the princes of the financial world have of course been stripped naked as leaders and strategists—at least in the eyes of most Americans. But as the months have rolled by, financial elites have continued to assume that their position as the economy's favored children is safe, despite the wreckage they have caused.

Stanley O'Neal, the CEO of Merrill Lynch, pushed his firm heavily into the mortgage-backed-securities market at its peak in 2005 and 2006; in October 2007, he acknowledged, "The bottom line is, we—I—got it wrong by being overexposed to subprime, and we suffered as a result of impaired liquidity in that market. No one is more disappointed than I am in that result." O'Neal took home a $14 million bonus in 2006; in 2007, he walked away from Merrill with a severance package worth $162 million, although it is presumably worth much less today.

In October, John Thain, Merrill Lynch's final CEO, reportedly lobbied his board of directors for a bonus of $30 million or more, eventually reducing his demand to $10 million in December; he withdrew the request, under a firestorm of protest, only after it was leaked to The Wall Street Journal. Merrill Lynch as a whole was no better: it moved its bonus payments, $4 billion in total, forward to December, presumably to avoid the possibility that they would be reduced by Bank of America, which would own Merrill beginning on January 1. Wall Street paid out $18 billion in year-end bonuses last year to its New York City employees, after the government disbursed $243 billion in emergency assistance to the financial sector.

In a financial panic, the government must respond with both speed and overwhelming force. The root problem is uncertainty—in our case, uncertainty about whether the major banks have sufficient assets to cover their liabilities. Half measures combined with wishful thinking and a wait-and-see attitude cannot overcome this uncertainty. And the longer the response takes, the longer the uncertainty will stymie the flow of credit, sap consumer confidence, and cripple the economy—ultimately making the problem much harder to solve. Yet the principal characteristics of the government's response to the financial crisis have been delay, lack of transparency, and an unwillingness to upset the financial sector.

The response so far is perhaps best described as "policy by deal": when a major financial institution gets into trouble, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve engineer a bailout over the weekend and announce on Monday that everything is fine. In March 2008, Bear Stearns was sold to JP Morgan Chase in what looked to many like a gift to JP Morgan. (Jamie Dimon, JP Morgan's CEO, sits on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which, along with the Treasury Department, brokered the deal.) In September, we saw the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America, the first bailout of AIG, and the takeover and immediate sale of Washington Mutual to JP Morgan—all of which were brokered by the government. In October, nine large banks were recapitalized on the same day behind closed doors in Washington. This, in turn, was followed by additional bailouts for Citigroup, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup (again), and AIG (again).

Some of these deals may have been reasonable responses to the immediate situation. But it was never clear (and still isn't) what combination of interests was being served, and how. Treasury and the Fed did not act according to any publicly articulated principles, but just worked out a transaction and claimed it was the best that could be done under the circumstances. This was late-night, backroom dealing, pure and simple.

Throughout the crisis, the government has taken extreme care not to upset the interests of the financial institutions, or to question the basic outlines of the system that got us here. In September 2008, Henry Paulson asked Congress for $700 billion to buy toxic assets from banks, with no strings attached and no judicial review of his purchase decisions. Many observers suspected that the purpose was to overpay for those assets and thereby take the problem off the banks' hands—indeed, that is the only way that buying toxic assets would have helped anything. Perhaps because there was no way to make such a blatant subsidy politically acceptable, that plan was shelved.

Instead, the money was used to recapitalize banks, buying shares in them on terms that were grossly favorable to the banks themselves. As the crisis has deepened and financial institutions have needed more help, the government has gotten more and more creative in figuring out ways to provide banks with subsidies that are too complex for the general public to understand. The first AIG bailout, which was on relatively good terms for the taxpayer, was supplemented by three further bailouts whose terms were more AIG-friendly. The second Citigroup bailout and the Bank of America bailout included complex asset guarantees that provided the banks with insurance at below-market rates. The third Citigroup bailout, in late February, converted government-owned preferred stock to common stock at a price significantly higher than the market price—a subsidy that probably even most Wall Street Journal readers would miss on first reading. And the convertible preferred shares that the Treasury will buy under the new Financial Stability Plan give the conversion option (and thus the upside) to the banks, not the government.

This latest plan—which is likely to provide cheap loans to hedge funds and others so that they can buy distressed bank assets at relatively high prices—has been heavily influenced by the financial sector, and Treasury has made no secret of that. As Neel Kashkari, a senior Treasury official under both Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner (and a Goldman alum) told Congress in March, "We had received inbound unsolicited proposals from people in the private sector saying, 'We have capital on the sidelines; we want to go after [distressed bank] assets.'" And the plan lets them do just that: "By marrying government capital—taxpayer capital—with private-sector capital and providing financing, you can enable those investors to then go after those assets at a price that makes sense for the investors and at a price that makes sense for the banks." Kashkari didn't mention anything about what makes sense for the third group involved: the taxpayers.

Even leaving aside fairness to taxpayers, the government's velvet-glove approach with the banks is deeply troubling, for one simple reason: it is inadequate to change the behavior of a financial sector accustomed to doing business on its own terms, at a time when that behavior must change. As an unnamed senior bank official said to The New York Times last fall, "It doesn't matter how much Hank Paulson gives us, no one is going to lend a nickel until the economy turns." But there's the rub: the economy can't recover until the banks are healthy and willing to lend.

The Way Out

Looking just at the financial crisis (and leaving aside some problems of the larger economy), we face at least two major, interrelated problems. The first is a desperately ill banking sector that threatens to choke off any incipient recovery that the fiscal stimulus might generate. The second is a political balance of power that gives the financial sector a veto over public policy, even as that sector loses popular support.

Big banks, it seems, have only gained political strength since the crisis began. And this is not surprising. With the financial system so fragile, the damage that a major bank failure could cause—Lehman was small relative to Citigroup or Bank of America—is much greater than it would be during ordinary times. The banks have been exploiting this fear as they wring favorable deals out of Washington. Bank of America obtained its second bailout package (in January) after warning the government that it might not be able to go through with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch, a prospect that Treasury did not want to consider.

The challenges the United States faces are familiar territory to the people at the IMF. If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say: nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary.

In some ways, of course, the government has already taken control of the banking system. It has essentially guaranteed the liabilities of the biggest banks, and it is their only plausible source of capital today. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has taken on a major role in providing credit to the economy—the function that the private banking sector is supposed to be performing, but isn't. Yet there are limits to what the Fed can do on its own; consumers and businesses are still dependent on banks that lack the balance sheets and the incentives to make the loans the economy needs, and the government has no real control over who runs the banks, or over what they do.

At the root of the banks' problems are the large losses they have undoubtedly taken on their securities and loan portfolios. But they don't want to recognize the full extent of their losses, because that would likely expose them as insolvent. So they talk down the problem, and ask for handouts that aren't enough to make them healthy (again, they can't reveal the size of the handouts that would be necessary for that), but are enough to keep them upright a little longer. This behavior is corrosive: unhealthy banks either don't lend (hoarding money to shore up reserves) or they make desperate gambles on high-risk loans and investments that could pay off big, but probably won't pay off at all. In either case, the economy suffers further, and as it does, bank assets themselves continue to deteriorate—creating a highly destructive vicious cycle.

To break this cycle, the government must force the banks to acknowledge the scale of their problems. As the IMF understands (and as the U.S. government itself has insisted to multiple emerging-market countries in the past), the most direct way to do this is nationalization. Instead, Treasury is trying to negotiate bailouts bank by bank, and behaving as if the banks hold all the cards—contorting the terms of each deal to minimize government ownership while forswearing government influence over bank strategy or operations. Under these conditions, cleaning up bank balance sheets is impossible.

Nationalization would not imply permanent state ownership. The IMF's advice would be, essentially: scale up the standard Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation process. An FDIC "intervention" is basically a government-managed bankruptcy procedure for banks. It would allow the government to wipe out bank shareholders, replace failed management, clean up the balance sheets, and then sell the banks back to the private sector. The main advantage is immediate recognition of the problem so that it can be solved before it grows worse.

The government needs to inspect the balance sheets and identify the banks that cannot survive a severe recession. These banks should face a choice: write down your assets to their true value and raise private capital within 30 days, or be taken over by the government. The government would write down the toxic assets of banks taken into receivership—recognizing reality—and transfer those assets to a separate government entity, which would attempt to salvage whatever value is possible for the taxpayer (as the Resolution Trust Corporation did after the savings-and-loan debacle of the 1980s). The rump banks—cleansed and able to lend safely, and hence trusted again by other lenders and investors—could then be sold off.

Cleaning up the megabanks will be complex. And it will be expensive for the taxpayer; according to the latest IMF numbers, the cleanup of the banking system would probably cost close to $1.5 trillion (or 10 percent of our GDP) in the long term. But only decisive government action—exposing the full extent of the financial rot and restoring some set of banks to publicly verifiable health—can cure the financial sector as a whole.

This may seem like strong medicine. But in fact, while necessary, it is insufficient. The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.

Oversize institutions disproportionately influence public policy; the major banks we have today draw much of their power from being too big to fail. Nationalization and re-privatization would not change that; while the replacement of the bank executives who got us into this crisis would be just and sensible, ultimately, the swapping-out of one set of powerful managers for another would change only the names of the oligarchs.

Ideally, big banks should be sold in medium-size pieces, divided regionally or by type of business. Where this proves impractical—since we'll want to sell the banks quickly—they could be sold whole, but with the requirement of being broken up within a short time. Banks that remain in private hands should also be subject to size limitations.

This may seem like a crude and arbitrary step, but it is the best way to limit the power of individual institutions in a sector that is essential to the economy as a whole. Of course, some people will complain about the "efficiency costs" of a more fragmented banking system, and these costs are real. But so are the costs when a bank that is too big to fail—a financial weapon of mass self-destruction—explodes. Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.

To ensure systematic bank breakup, and to prevent the eventual reemergence of dangerous behemoths, we also need to overhaul our antitrust legislation. Laws put in place more than 100 years ago to combat industrial monopolies were not designed to address the problem we now face. The problem in the financial sector today is not that a given firm might have enough market share to influence prices; it is that one firm or a small set of interconnected firms, by failing, can bring down the economy. The Obama administration's fiscal stimulus evokes FDR, but what we need to imitate here is Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting.

Caps on executive compensation, while redolent of populism, might help restore the political balance of power and deter the emergence of a new oligarchy. Wall Street's main attraction—to the people who work there and to the government officials who were only too happy to bask in its reflected glory—has been the astounding amount of money that could be made. Limiting that money would reduce the allure of the financial sector and make it more like any other industry.

Still, outright pay caps are clumsy, especially in the long run. And most money is now made in largely unregulated private hedge funds and private-equity firms, so lowering pay would be complicated. Regulation and taxation should be part of the solution. Over time, though, the largest part may involve more transparency and competition, which would bring financial-industry fees down. To those who say this would drive financial activities to other countries, we can now safely say: fine.


Two Paths

To paraphrase Joseph Schumpeter, the early-20th-century economist, everyone has elites; the important thing is to change them from time to time. If the U.S. were just another country, coming to the IMF with hat in hand, I might be fairly optimistic about its future. Most of the emerging-market crises that I've mentioned ended relatively quickly, and gave way, for the most part, to relatively strong recoveries. But this, alas, brings us to the limit of the analogy between the U.S. and emerging markets.

Emerging-market countries have only a precarious hold on wealth, and are weaklings globally. When they get into trouble, they quite literally run out of money—or at least out of foreign currency, without which they cannot survive. They must make difficult decisions; ultimately, aggressive action is baked into the cake. But the U.S., of course, is the world's most powerful nation, rich beyond measure, and blessed with the exorbitant privilege of paying its foreign debts in its own currency, which it can print. As a result, it could very well stumble along for years—as Japan did during its lost decade—never summoning the courage to do what it needs to do, and never really recovering. A clean break with the past—involving the takeover and cleanup of major banks—hardly looks like a sure thing right now. Certainly no one at the IMF can force it.

In my view, the U.S. faces two plausible scenarios. The first involves complicated bank-by-bank deals and a continual drumbeat of (repeated) bailouts, like the ones we saw in February with Citigroup and AIG. The administration will try to muddle through, and confusion will reign.

Boris Fyodorov, the late finance minister of Russia, struggled for much of the past 20 years against oligarchs, corruption, and abuse of authority in all its forms. He liked to say that confusion and chaos were very much in the interests of the powerful—letting them take things, legally and illegally, with impunity. When inflation is high, who can say what a piece of property is really worth? When the credit system is supported by byzantine government arrangements and backroom deals, how do you know that you aren't being fleeced?

Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can't seem to get into gear.

The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we'll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because eastern Europe's banks are mostly owned by western European banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration's current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy "stress scenario" that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks' balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.

Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump "cannot be as bad as the Great Depression." This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.

Quote from: mac on 03-06-2009, 11:54:39
Hmm, biće da sam ja gledao neki drugi Push s istim glumcima, jer mu ne bih ni tri zvezde dao. Al' dobro, ja nisam išao u te kritičarske škole. Možda je problem bio u kopiji.

Sasvim je moguće da je mene ponela emocija i da film nije toliko dobar. Prosto ponekad se desi da film ubode neke stvari po tvom ukusu i onda ga preceniš.

Quote from: crippled_avenger on 03-06-2009, 12:45:56

Quote from: mac on 03-06-2009, 11:54:39
Hmm, biće da sam ja gledao neki drugi Push s istim glumcima, jer mu ne bih ni tri zvezde dao. Al' dobro, ja nisam išao u te kritičarske škole. Možda je problem bio u kopiji.

Sasvim je moguće da je mene ponela emocija i da film nije toliko dobar. Prosto ponekad se desi da film ubode neke stvari po tvom ukusu i onda ga preceniš.

tako je.
dešava se i najboljima.
zato ja ni samom sebi ne verujem dok ne prođe neko vreme.
ali češće mi se desi da neki film precenim nego da potcenim.
obično kad gledam svoje ocene od pre 6-12 meseci revidiram ih u smislu da ponečemu oduzmem po pola ocene, vrlo retko, skoro nikad, ne dodajem.

a PUSH mi uopšte nije delovao vrednim gledanja, mada, posle dimbove dijatrib,e MOŽDA mu i poklonim bar pokušaj ako ne i celo gledanje.

Quote from: Ghoul on 03-06-2009, 15:51:33

Quote from: crippled_avenger on 03-06-2009, 12:45:56

Quote from: mac on 03-06-2009, 11:54:39
Hmm, biće da sam ja gledao neki drugi Push s istim glumcima, jer mu ne bih ni tri zvezde dao. Al' dobro, ja nisam išao u te kritičarske škole. Možda je problem bio u kopiji.

Sasvim je moguće da je mene ponela emocija i da film nije toliko dobar. Prosto ponekad se desi da film ubode neke stvari po tvom ukusu i onda ga preceniš.

tako je.
dešava se i najboljima.
zato ja ni samom sebi ne verujem dok ne prođe neko vreme.
ali češće mi se desi da neki film precenim nego da potcenim.
obično kad gledam svoje ocene od pre 6-12 meseci revidiram ih u smislu da ponečemu oduzmem po pola ocene, vrlo retko, skoro nikad, ne dodajem.

a PUSH mi uopšte nije delovao vrednim gledanja, mada, posle dimbove dijatrib,e MOŽDA mu i poklonim bar pokušaj ako ne i celo gledanje.

@Ghoul

Znaš kako, ja mislim da se filmovi snimaju kako bi se gledali jednom. To je njihova primarna funkcija. U tom smislu, ja cenim filmove koji ostavljaju dobar utisak posle prvog gledanja. Filmovi koji su groweri naravno imaju neki drugi kvalitet, ali ni filmovi koji su dobri samo čim se pogledaju nisu za potcenjivanje.

Što se PUSH tiče, nisam siguran koliko će ti se dopasti, to nije vrsta filma koju pratiš i ceniš. Mislim, on samo u nekom širem okviru ima veze sa SCANNERSom, ali u suštini to je jedna comic book priča obogaćena vibrantnošću wongkarwaijevskog Hong Konga i McGuiganovom vrlo energičnom režijom i lucidnim dizajnom. S druge strane, isto tako nije sad to neki landmark klasik koji bi uprkos tome štp tu vrstu filmova ne gledaš, trebalo da vidiš. Ovaj film je ipak više pomak u tom mulju žanra koji će pre prepoznati ljubitelji & poznavaoci.

Ja sam ga jutros ponovo pogledao, i na nivou priče sam primetio neke nove detalje (a pošto je reč o ljudima koji imaju sposobnost da manipulišu tuđim mislima, falsifikuju sećanja i sl. tu postoji nešto složenija struktura) koji mi sinoć nisu nedostajali, a danas mi čak rediteljski deluju još šmekerskije jer su potpuno ležerno ugrađeni u priču, bez nekih gromoglasnih akcenata sa kojima bi inače bili postavljeni u nekom tipičnom major filmu.

Summit sa tim B a opet theatrical žanrovskim filmovima sve više počinje da odmenjuje New Line. To je vrlo zanimljiva tendencija.

ja sam, naravno, bliži stanovištu da ono što ne vredi gledati bar dvaput, ne vredi nijednom – ali od toga često odstupam, naročito zbog horora koje ipak po dužnosti ispratim čak i onda kada mi je jasno da su osrednji, ili gore od toga, ali zbog nečeg žanrovski zanimljivi i vredni fenomenološki ili već kako; a slično važi i za poneke ne-horore za koje se ubedim da su značajni iz nekog razloga, iako privatno ne očekujem previše od njih.

na osnovu kritika, a i svoje grbe koja me retko prevari, PUSH mi deluje kao materijal za mojih **(*) tj. 3- , dakle, nešto što MOŽE ALI NE MORA, 50-50 razloga za (ne)gledanje. uostalom, ja ni JUMPERA nisam gledo, a javlja mi se da je ovo along those lines of quality.
možda se prelomim zbog dakote.

Quote from: Ghoul on 03-06-2009, 16:40:11uostalom, ja ni JUMPERA nisam gledo, a javlja mi se da je ovo along those lines of quality.

Nemoj. Nisam još pogledao Push, ali Jumper je užasan i ne zavređuje ni to jedno gledanje, ocena: 2-

Upravo tvoje poređenje sa JUMPERom pokazuje da nisi čovek za ovu vrstu filma. PUSH je znatno drugačiji i ozbiljniji film, a o veštini egzekucije na svim nivoima da i ne govorim.

molio bih da uđe u zapisnik da sam ja upoređivao svoje SLUTNJE o ta 2 filma, a nisam upoređivao FILMOVE (koje nisam ni gledao).
ako sam pogrešio u svom hunchu da je PUSH tek generic teen-oriented mild-SF programmer, i ako je PUSH značajno drugačija vrsta filma, to ću adekvatno i naglasiti u svom rivjuu kad/ako ga pogledam.

Cripp hoće da kaže da je Push vrlo-dobar-do-odličan generic teen-oriented mild-SF programmer.

Uzgred, šta je to programmer?

Quote from: macšta je to programmer?

To ti je valjda nešto između A i B muvija. Ovde izgleda više naginje ka B. Jebena reč.

programmer je repertoarski film sa vrlo jasnim fokusom i mestom u programskoj politici nekog producenta/distributera. Obično je reč o filmu čiji se parametri znaju još pre pisanja scenarija. Dakle, recimo, treba nam teen oriented mild SF jer to puštamo u proleće, tad nam je program u bioskopima tako profilisan. Otud izraz programmer.

U pricipu ta reč se najviše vezuje za dane studio-sistema kada su studiji imali specijalizovane reditelje i glumce i štancovali filmovi određene vrste, recimo warner Bros gangsterske filmove. Sad su se stvari malo promenile pa reditelji imaju više dostojanstva premda im je suština posla u mnogim slučajevima ista kao u vreme studio sistema.

Pogledao sam OSMA VRATA Nikole Tanhofera.

Nikola Tanhofer je jedan od zanimljivijih reditelja ex-SFRJ filma, reč je o vrhunskom stilisti jugoslovenskog filma sa izraženom nakolonšću ka suspense filmu i noir zahvatima.

OSMA VRATA je drama sa elementima suspense trilera smeštena u vreme okupacije i po tome je vrlo sličan Novakovićevom VETAR JE STAO PRED ZORU koji je izašao iste godine.

Ova dva filma su filmovi blizanci. Oba govore o starom profesoru zarobljenom u deliktanoj situaciji jer mu je unuka/ćerka povezana sa ilegalcima a kvislinška policija joj je na tragu.

Oba filma su stilski na vrhunskom nivou, sa ubedljivom crno-belom fotografijom, i oba donose likove harizmatičnih agenata Specijalne Policije. Kod Novakovića u toj ulozi briljira Branko Pleša, kod Tanhofera igra je Jovan Milićević, vlika noir faca našeg filma.

Tanhoferov kolaboracionista čak i ima nedićevsku retoriku, govori o napaćenoj Srbiji, redu koji mora da se uspostavi u njoj, i tome kako Srbi po okupacijom moraju da se ispomažu kako bi preživeli okupatore koji hoće da ih satru. Međutim, iz Milićevićeve glume je jasno kako je to samo jedan od pokušaja zlog kvislinga da prevari glavnog junaka.

Glavno težište filma je dilema glavnog junaka, penzionisanog peofesora peplašenog ratom ako da reaguje kada mu tokom najobičnije vožnje tramvajem, ilegalac u bekstvu odradi hand-in-hand i prosledi osetljivi dokument koji bi mogao kompromitovati celu organizaciju. Profsor ne želi da bude potkazivač ali se plaši posledica ukoliko to bude tajio pred policijom i drama kreće sartreovsko-camusovskim putem.

Ono gde je Tanhoferov film u izvesnoj prednosti u odnosu na Novakovićem jeste to što se u principu ne ulazi u odnose unutar partizanske organizacije tako da ni nema tipične naivnosti i plemenitosti partizana koja kvari ovu vrstu zaoštrene moralne drame. Novaković je pak jači u tom domenu akcije jer je njegova priča raspoređena na više lokacija dok je Tanhofer dominantno smešten u profesorov stan.

Ipak, Tanhofer donosi u film dve briljantne sekvence. Prva je potera za tramvajem koja je onako vintage chase u našoj kinematografiji a druga je suspense sitiuacija sa kolicima za bebu koja pokazuje da Tanhofer ima (odnosno da je imao) cluzotovski dar za napeto.

Te dve sekvence su antologijske. Ako tome dodamo da izuzev izvesne preterane kamernosti srdišnjeg dela, film nema većih nedostataka, mislim da su OSMA VRATA jedan od važnijih filmova o urbanim ilegalcima za vreme NOBa.

Što se istorije našeg žanrovskog filma tiče, treba naglasiti da su asistenti režije na filmu bili Miki Stamenković i Stipe Delić.

* * * / * * * *

Pogledao sam TAE-POONG Kwak Kyung-taeka, akcioni film koji je važio za najskuplji u istoriji južnokorejskog filma, sa budžetom od 15 miliona. na korejskim blagajnama je zaradio oko 25 miliona dolara što je solidan skor ali nije uspeo da postigne značajniji internacionalni uspeh, o čemu će biti reči nešto kasnije.

TAE-POONG spada u red holivudizovanih južnokorejskih akcionih filmova. Zahvaljujući visokom budžetu, on i izgleda kao vrlo solidan američki akcioni film. Južnokorejski holivudizovani žanrovski filmovi su najbolji onda kada sa većom ozbiljnošću od samog Holivuda prilaze nekoj žanrovskoj matrici koja bi tamo inače bila rutinski odrađena bez truda, novca i inspiracije. U slučaju, TE-POONGa, bave se matricom koja je možda za današnji Holivud malo prevaziđena ali kada se radila, bila je tretirano vrlo ambiciozno. U tom smislu, TAE-POONG ostavlja sličan utisak kao SHIRI ili TUBE, impresionira svojom mogućnošću falsifikovanja holivudskog ugođaja, ali ti filmovi su ipak, pre svega na nivou priče korak nazad.

Naravno, TAE-POONG je za klasu iznad prve generacije ovih epigonskih filmova kao što su bili PAHNTOM SUBMARINE i sl.

Međutim, za razliku od SHIRI i TUBE, TAE-POONG pokušava i da unese neke korejske toucheve u celu priču iako je okosnica i dalje rip-off američkog filma (PACEMAKER i THE ROCK). Korejska dopuna svemu tome je teška melodrama na korejski način kojom se objašnjava motivacija glavnog negativca. Naime, negativac je pokušao da kao dete da pobegne sa Severa na Jug, međutim diplomate Južne Koreje su ih izigrale u Pekingu, porodica je vraćena na Sever i on i sestra su jedva izbegli pokolj ali su pošli putem koji ih je koštao raznih poniženja, a nju i zdravlja.

Središnji deo filma i završnica ulaze u weepie teritoriju sa svim mogućim touchevima korejske patetike, uključujući i objektifikaciju sablasno lepe sestre na umoru u OLDBOY maniru. Posle akcione završnice, sledi još jedna deonica teške melodrame, i na neki način tu Kwak i poentira ključnu karakteristiku svog akcijaša, a to je da je reč o filmu sa jasnom političkom porukom koja ne samo da je data implicitno, već i vrlo agresivno, ne samo kroz tu gotovo incestuoznu melodramu već i kroz glavnog junaka koji shvata negativca kao svog zabludelog prijatelja (premda film suštinski ne nudi nikakav mannovski ili wooovski dualizam).

A šta je politička poenta? Pre svega, Sever je naravno mesto potpunog zla, beznađa i gladi. To je uzeto kao aksiom pa film ni ne polemiše sa tim. Zatim, Južna Koreja nije dovoljno učinila za braću sa Severa i ne sme da prestane da misli na njih-njihove muke su strašne i niko im zapravo ne može pomoći osim Juga. Film nameće da treba još agresivnije razmišljati o tome kako da im se pomogne jer administracija ponekad zaboravi na njih kako bi vodlila globalnu politiku. I konačno, treće, Amerika se peviše meša, ona jeste saveznik ali je Jug je mnogo kompetentniji da rešava svoje probleme od njih.

U principu, antiameričko raspoloženje je sasvim legitimno u južnokorejskom filmu, uostalom zar THE HOST nije jedan od simbola antiamerikanizma u recentnoj produkciji.

E sad, ono što čudi je da je TAE-POONG u jednom trenutku uzeo da distribuira DreamWorks u Americi. Ovaj film ima production values i to nije sporno, ali realno, nije reč o nekom cutting edge žanrovskom filmu koji bi bio interesantan Dream Worksu. U to vreme je bila i priča o rimejku, što je tek potpuno besmisleno, jer upravo je TAE-POONG rip-off Dream Worksovog PEACEMAKERa.

Čini mi se da iza odluke da tako ugledan distributer plasira film u Americi stoji neka vrsta lobističke priče pošto ni mnogo uspešniji & kvalitetniji korejski filmovi nisu imali tako moćnog distributera.

Film je vrlo loše prošao u Americi, zaradio je tek 100ak hiljada dolara. Kritika ga je primila dosta polovično, premda je bilo onih kojima se umereno dopao. Međutim, razlog za neuspeh je vrlo jasan, iako TAE-POONG nije dosadan, s jedne strane na nivou akcije nije naročito senzacionalan a s druge, sa tom depresivnom melodramom naprosto nije zabavan. Ljubitelji azijske akcije vole kada im je film začinjen nekom vrstom patetike i melodrame, ali ovde su ti weepie delovi malo izdvojeni iz celine, i zaista deluju nametljivo. Štaviše, neki od tih flešbekova su lako mogli biti uklonjeni.

Stoga, TAE-POONG je holivudizovani akcijaš preopterećen svojom političkom agendom. Kwak je postigao istorijski uspeh sa svojim filmom FRIENDS a posle toga je dosta lutao sa naslovima poput CHAMP i TYPHOON. Čini se da se sa novim filmom vratio u formu, ali taj još uvek nisam pogledao.

Iako TAE-POONG nije loš film, čini se da je zapadna kritika od njega ipak više očekivala.

U svakom slučaju, ukoliko se spremate da gledate ovaj film očekujte nešto kao apgrejdovanu, sentimentalniju verziju SHIRIja.

* * 1/2 / * * * *

Push je itekako vredan gledanja i preporučio bih ga svima, pa i Ghoulu, pošto mislim da film nadilazi inicijalni kocept i dotični (pod)žanr i mada nije klasik, u pitanju je odličan bioskopski film koji je pritom inteligentno i vešto napisan. Dakle, potpuna antiteza bezveznog Jumpera. U 1h i 45 minuta je uspostavljen i izuzetno živo predstavljen jedan univerzum sa svojim pravilima i junacima koji u njemu obitavaju da sam ja nakon filma imao osećaj da sam pogledao čitavu sezonu jedne serije i da jedva čekam na narednu! Ovako se pravi film koji je zaokružen kao celina, a da ujedno ostavlja prostor za nastavak. Takođe, osim naracije tokom najavne špice u toku samog filma nema previše objašnjavanja, iako se stalno uvode novi i novi detalji koji obogaćuju i komplikuju zaplet. Obrti sutakođe vrlo logični i onaj glavni me je iznenadio, mada nije u pitanju ništa preterano pametno, već sam bio dovoljno zabavljen filmom da mi nije ni padalo na pamet: "šta ako..." U tom smislu, potpuno mi je jasno zašto je film slabo prošao u bioskopima, pošto film više igra na kartu trilera i dinamike među likovima, dok je akcija gotovo sve vreme u drugom planu; dok loše kritike mogu samo da objasnim lenjošću kritičara kojima je isto tako lakše da razmišljaju po fiokama, a očito da Push nisu znali gde da utrpaju. 4

Miloshe, dobro je, taman sam pomislio da ludim. Sada sam ponovo stekao samopouzdanje...

TERMINATOR TIMELINE 

http://www.empireonline.com/features/terminator-timeline/

Pogledao sam BRONSON Nicolasa Winding Refna.

Opus ovog reditelja je bogat i sjajnim filmovima i promašajima a BRONSON je jedan od njegovih najambicioznijih promašaja. Nije reč o promašaju koji ga degradira kao reditelja, štaviše pre bih rekao da je reč o promašaju koji ga reafirmiše kao reditelja sklonog eksperimentima, što je za svaku pohvalu, ako imamo u vidu da je vrlo lako mogao da se prepusti formulama koje su mu uspevale.

U ovom filmu, Refn pokušava da ide stazama koje su pre njega prešli Kubrick, Fassbinder i mnogi tanki pozorišni reditelji, uzima priču o prestupniku koji sebe doživljava kao umetnika i zabavljača i proučava njegovu priču.

Refn pokušava da film postavi u tri ravni, kao rekonstrukciju događaja iz Bronsonovog života, kabare u kome on priča životnu priču i okvir u kome se on direktno obraća publici. Ta rešenja već sama po sebi ističu da Refn u ovom filmu donosi nekakav rediteljski postupak, i Refn tretira taj postupak sa velikim P. Otud na svakom koraku pokušava da nam pokaže kako ovo nije običan film i kako je Postupak na delu, otud intenzivna upotreba klasične muzike a potom, i plesne elektronske muzike, bez ikakvog naročitog opravdanja pošto ukoliko je želeo da spaja sliku i zvuk u neku vrstu video rada, u tome svakako nije uspeo pošto je na nivou inscenacije BRONSON krajnje mediokritetski film, sa dosta ravnim i konvencionalnim, čak tromim kadriranjem, sporadičnim pokušajima krajnje banalne simobolike u kompoziciji kadra, ali ni u tome nije konzistentan.

Sama Bronsonova priča je po svom karakteru repetitivna, a film zbog svoje fassbinderovske stilizacije ne nudi čak ni dokumentarnu dimenziju cele priče. Događaji se ponavljaju, on divlja na prvom, drugom, trećem, četvrtom mestu, lik se ne razvija, i na kraju se sve završi tamo gde se i počelo. Bronson je bio i ostao idiot ali čak nemamo ni istorijski pregled njegovog idiotizma, koji je verovatno impresivan čim je od 34 godine robije, 30 proveo u samici, niti postoji neka iole smislena politička dimenzija priče, sukob njega sa sistemom, ili bilo šta.

Čak ni ta banalnost BRONSONa ne može da bude servirana na efektan način zbog neobično suvog rediteljskog pristupa i krajnje konvencionalne vizuelnosti koja se graniči sa arhaičnošću. BRONSON se po svojoj ispraznosti može porediti sa sličnim britanskim filmom McVICAR s tim što ovaj film Toma Clegga barem ima neke dobro režirane suspense scene kojima pokriva tu banalnost.

BRONSON se pojavljuje u trenutku kada su se jdan za drugim pojavili filmovi o Andreasu Baaderu, Jacques Mesrineu i Vladi Vailjeviću, trojici elinkvenata iz sedamdesetih koji su svaki na svoj način manipulisali medijima, ponašali se iracionalno i postali zvezde. BRONSON ne liči ni na jedan od ova tri filma po Postupku, ali je istovremeno i neuporedivo slabiji i besmisleniji od sva tri.

Tom Hardy je u glavnoj ulozi na nivou imitacije. U njegovoj bučnoj interpretaciji teško da se može govoriti o izgrađenom karakteru, on se samo transformisao u persiflažu Bronsona i to je to.

No, kako rekoh, čini mi se da Refn nije uzalud potrošio vreme snimajući ovaj film i smatram da se nije ni mnogo ponovio. Nadam se da će mu sledeći eksperiment biti uspešniji.

Pogledao sam sinoć THE MIRACLE Neil Jordana. Uprkos velikoj ljubavi prema ovom reditelju, taj konkretan naslov mi je uvek delovao prilično nezanimljivo i stalno mi je promicao. Sada sam se naterao da ga pogledam i smatram da je reč o minornom naslovu u opusu ovog velikog reditelja.

Jedina stvar koja se može izdvojiti kao značajna u ovom filmu jeste to što Neil Jordan u njemu dotiče neke od svojih opsesija koje će biti prisutne u kasnijim (ali i ranijim) filmovima, tematizaciju atmosfere džez klubova (kao u DANNY BOY), sklonost ga grotesknoj prirodi izvođačkih umetnosti i crikusa, pregnantnim ljubavnim pričama itd.

Ono što ubija ovaj film baziran na relativno interesantnoj premisi koju neću iznostiti da je ne bio spoilovao, jeste pretncioznost Jordanovog postupka u kome on pokušava da prikaže coming-of-age priču o odrastanju dvoje mladih savremenih Iraca pod uticajem francuskog Novog talasa, italijanskog neorealizma pa čak i noira. Sve te uticaje pre svega integriše u scenario i čini likove krajnje neuverljivima i antipatičnima i priča se ruši upravo pod tom pretenzijom.

Ako pored toga još imamo u vidu, da Jordan uprkos svojim pretencioznim kontinentalnim Euro uticajima, na kraju krajeva obično drži tempo holivudskog filma i da THE MIRACLE uprkos svojoj sporadičnoj ispraznosti, ima dosta pitak ritam, onda film ne uspeva da bude čak ni dosledna arty gnjavaža.

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Pogledao sam izvanredno zanimljiv dokumentarac FRITSUD JA BLONDINIID Arbo Tammiksaara koji govori o baltičkim glumcima koji su igrali naciste u sovjetskim filmovima. Film je dostupan i pod nazivom NAZIS AND BLONDES.

Reč je o estonsko-letonskom filmu u kome je zabeležn hepening u jednom dvorcu kada su dodeljene nagrade najboljim baltičkim glumcima zapamćenim po ulogama nacista. Sama dodela je organizovana u nacističkom dekoru, sa kukastim krstovima, devojčicama u uniformama i sl. i sve je imalo jednu kemp dimenziju.

Međutim, stvar prestaje da bude kemp onda kada se ispostavi da većina baltičkih glumaca dolazi iz zemalja koje su zapravo bile na strani nacista, i da oni sami, na neki način, po svojim sećanjima iz Drugog svetskog rata, Nemce pamte u mnogo boljem svetlu nego Sovjete, da se na neki način trude da opravdaju svoj angažman u komunističkoj propagandi, i da je zapravo njihovo igranje Nemaca danas njima njima ipak više od nekog običnog posla.

Ako imamo u vidu da su mnogi ozloglašeni nacisti upravo potekli iz baltičkih država, pa uostalom i sam Rosenberg, kao i da su u tom kraju danas najaktivnije udruge veterana koji su se borili na strani nacista, cela priča sa tamošnjim glumcima koji igrajunaciste dobija još dublju ideološku dimenziju.

Na svu sreću, autori ovog filma su svesni te dublje ideološke dimnezije. Nisu do karaja sposobni da se sa njom izbore, međutim, za svaku je pohvalu to da su je sagledali kao deo teme. Kao sagovornik, paradoksalno najslabiji je ruski kritičar koji pokušava da imitira Žižeka i to radi dosta nemušto, praktično ne nudeći nikakav dublji uvid u mehaniku sovjetskog filma.

Inserti i primeri iz filmova su vrlo razmovrsni, mnogi naslovi su mi bili nepoznati, a koliko shvatam ima i nekih zanemarljive umetničke vrednosti ali u svakom slučaju podrobnije ću se raspitati o njima i videti da li se tu mogu iskopati neki izgubljeni klasici.

Ono što je meni kao buffu za partizanski film vrlo interesantno to je tema igranja nacista i kolaboracionista u okolnostima u kojima se odjednom promene okolnosti i oni koji su do juče bili negativci sada postanu neka vrsta žrtava ili čak pozitivaca. Kao što se u baltičkim epublikama, danas maltene izjdnačila uloga komunista i nacista, tako se i u ex-SFRJ promenio odnos prema četnicima, kvislinzima, ustašama itd. u tom smislu bi bilo zanimljivo napraviti neku našu varijantu ovog dokumentarnog filma o negativcima koji to više nisu.

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Pogledao sam Joheunnom nabbeunnom isanghannom Kim Ji-Woona, poznatiji pod naslovom THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE WEIRD.

Poznato je da sam ja prema prethodnim Kimovim filmovima imao prilične rezerve, TALE OF TWO SISTERS mi je ostavio utisak dosta kičaste reakcije na japanske horore, a BITTERSWEET LIFE mi je bio mediokritetska, ponovo kič reinterpretacija najprežvakanijih klišea HK krimi filma.

THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE WEIRD mi je u tom smislu korak napred za Kima, iz prostog razloga što se u ovom konkretnom slučaju bavi žanrom koji je legitimnije reciklirati (dočim su TALE i LIFE bili više u domenu imitacije jer nijedan od datih žanrova nije retro) a pošto mu je primarna potreba da polemiše sa špageti vesternom, dakle sa jednom aproprijacijom izvornog vesterna, ovde je reč o znatno održivijoj žanrovskoj pozajmici. Naime, kada se imitiraju konkretne miteme već poznate u žanrovskim, a u slučaju špageti vesterna i širim, okolnostima, onda je jako bitno da se film jasno pozicionira u svojim namerama. Ili se radi o rip-offu čija je ideja da se preuzme aktuelna ili uspešna žanrovska matrica i da se predstavi na novi, svežiji način koji bi bio konkurentan na žanrovskom tržištu (što je u neku ruku Kim radio sa svojim prethodnim filmovima, ali realno nije bio bolji od onih od kojih je pozajmljivao) ili se ekshumira neka poznata matrica koja se onda ili ponovo oživljava ili interpretira unekom drugom ključu. Izvorni špageti vesterni su bili exploitation koji je u pojedinim izdanjima postajkao vrhunska umetnost (naročito u radu Sergio Leonea). Kim preuzima špageti vestern kao polazište i od njega pravi film koji istovremeno želi da bude i omaž žanru ali i kurentan exploitation, i u tome uglavnom uspeva.

Leone je reditelj koji je danas mezimče čak i najpretencioznijih art reditelja. U tom smislu, Kimu nije teško da svaki njegov omaž Leoneu bude prepoznat kao hvale vredan umetnički zahvat. Ipak, isto tako, na leonoevsku konstrukciju, Kim je nadogradio odlično postavljene akcione sekvence i dinamičnu priču koji danas imaju itekakvu exploitation vrednost o čemu najbolje svedoči sjajan rezultat sa južnokorejskih blagajni. Jedina stvar koja vuče na art u filmu jeste skor koji je i najslabiji deo filma sa nekonzistentnim konceptom koji je u rasponu od nekih bregovićevskih polki, do morikoneovskih tema pa čak i hip-hop beatova, s tim što taj miks nije tako vešt kao recimo u KILL BILLu u kome je i izbor muzike umetničko delo. Izvesna ironija izražena u muzici na svu sreću uglavnom ne remeti sada već poznatu južnokorejsku pefrekciju u tehničkoj izvedbi.

Iako se ponovo radi o žanrovskoj matrici koje se Holivud ne bi latio sa ovim stepenom budžetske i zanatske ozbiljnosti, što sam već ranije pepoznao kao jednu od karakteristika južnokorejskog repertoarskog filma,  u konkretnom slučaju THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE WEIRD važno je napomenuti da je prošle godine baš Holivud imao jedan film sa vrlo uporedivom poetikom. To je bio četvrti INDIANA JONES, koji u poređenju sa THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE WEIRD izgleda kao inferioran proizvod nastao u jednoj manje razvijenoj kinematografiji.

Po osmišljenosti pokreta kamere i montaže u akcionim scenama kao i na nivou egzekucije stuntova THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE WEIRD je na vrhunskom nivou, naročito ako imamo u vidu konkretan milje u kome se sve dešava a to je Mandžurija u svojim vestern aspektima. Nekih 40ak godina posle izvornih špageti vesterna, Kim daje u tehničkom smislu ultimativnu interpretaciju te estetike.

Jedino što Kimu nedostaje u odnosu na špageti vesterne jesu američki glumci koji su obeležili ključne Leoneove naslove. Iako ni Kimovi nisu loši, on je jedan od poslednjih internacionalno afirmisanih korejskih reditelja čiji se likovi ponekad ne razlikuju, gledano iz vizure zapadnog gledaoca. Ipak, čini mi se da je to mnogo manje nego ranije.

S druge strane, to što nema američkih glumaca, u startu je onemogućilo ovaj film da bude interacionalna bioskopska senzacija kao što su bili Leoneovi vesterni. Naravno, nisu azijski glumci jedina prepreka. Kim ima odeđenu azijsku iracionalnost u ambiciji svog filma, kako u trajanju tako i u količini događaja, i čini mi se da su savremeni blokbasteri svedeniji od ovoga. Iako se ne može reći da THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE WEIRD dosadan, može se konstatovati da je malo presadržajan i da su izvesni delovi mogli biti uklonjeni.

Primetna je tendencija raznih vanameričkih kinematografija u poslednje vreme da se izražavaju kroz filmove koji su pravljeni po matricama određenih vesterna. Kod nas su najbolji primeri toga DUST, ČARLSTON ZA OGNJENKU i SVETI GEORGIJE, a THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE WEIRD je sjajan primer kako se to radi.

Iako se formalno reći da THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE WEIRD donosi nešto novo u tehničkom i formalnom smislu (kao što se moglo reći za THE HOST), činjenica je da se jako etko viđaju akcinose sekvence realizovane sa takvom pažnjom i ambicijom, i da je Kim očigledno jedan od retkih savremenih reditelja koji akciju smatra umetničkom formom, pa za to zaslužuje sve pohvale.

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Eto sad konfuzije. Meni je ovaj zaslužio veću ocenu od Pusha.

Znaš kako, filmovi se razlikuju po svojim dometima, pretenzijama, kapacitetima, uslovima u kojima su nastali. PUSH je film koji ima znatno manju pretenziju od THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE WEIRD, proporcionalno manji budžet i manju autorsku autonomiju, a čini mi se da je McGuigan napravio skladniju i kompaktniju celinu u tim uslovima. Njegov film nije savršen ali u uslovima u kojima je nastao i sa ambicijama koje je imao, nije mogao biti mnogo bolji, a još je manji prostor za napredak na planu onoga što je sam reditelj mogao da uradi.

THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE WEIRD upravo ima nešto veći broj stvari u kojima je Kim mogao biti mudriji i lucidniji, nastao je u većoj slobodi i kvalitet svojih pojedinačnih segmenata nije spojio u sasvim skladnu celinu. Upravo na nivou detalja THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE WEIRD je upečatljiviji od PUSH, kao i po svojoj egzotičnosti, ali filmovi imaju i neku svoju unutrašnju prirodu i smatram da je PUSH mnogo više u skladu sa svojom unutrašnjom prirodom.

U tom smislu, ono što čini ocenu jeste ispunjavanje određenih kriterijuma o okviru zadatih parametara. E sad, razumljivo je da nešto voliš manje, nešto više, pa ti se onda i čini da je to što više voliš kvalitetnije.

Sa tri godine zakašnjenja pogledao sam film WORLD TRADE CENTER Olivera Stonea. Ovaj film se davao u vreme kada sam bio u bolnici. Dok sam stao na noge, izašao je iz bioskopa. Potom sam imao neku piratsku kopiju koja je iz razumljivih razloga bila neupotrebljiva pošto se film većim delom dešava u tami. Onda mi je nestao sa radara uprkos tome što sam veliki Stoneov fan i smatram ga jednim od najvećih aktivnih američkih reditelja.

Konačno sam pogledao film i mogu reći da je WTC verovatno najbliže što je Stone prišao lošem filmu računajući i njegove početničke horore THE HAND i SEIYURE. Stone je u svojoj karijeri svakako snimao filmove koje su neki smatrali lošim ali su jako retko ti filmovi imali izražene zanatske probleme, izuzev već pomenutih THE HAND i SEIZURE. Za razliku od ova dva početniča, niskobudžetna filma, WTC nema problem na nivou puke egzekucije koliko na nivou same koncepcije.

Ideološka pregnantnost 11. septembra je nesporna, i do nje se kao predmeta analiza Stoneovog filma neumitno mora doći. Međutim, osnovni problem filma WTC je dramaturško-rediteljski.

Naime, reč je o filmu po istinitoj priči te su likovi i radnje pre svega definisani onim što se stvarno desilo. A likovi o kojima se priča su policajci se na glavu srušio WTC i oni su ostali zaglavljeni u ruševinama a drugu liniju čine likovi članova njihovih porodica.

Tu nastupaju dva problema. Prvo, zaglavljeni ljudi u ruševinama su zatočeni u tami i nepomični su. To stanje nije filmično i podesno je za neku dramu apsurda ili polemičku dramu, s tim što istinita priča ne dozvoljava beckettovski ili sartreovski dijalog. tako da su njihove diskusije predviljdive i banalne, kao i život sam. Možda bi u nekim drugim uslovima, dva junaka zaglavljena u ruševinama bili sjajna premisa. U okvirima ove istinite priče naprosto nisu.

Drugo-porodice koje čekaju ishod njihove situacije su u toliko dramatičnoj poziciji da se ona sasvim prirodno jako teško može dočarati u formi istinite priče, kroz radnje likova baziranih na stvarnim ličnostima.

Šta radi čovek u tako dramatičnoj situaciji? U principu, isto što radi i neko kome nije toliko dramatično.

Ono što je sveobuhvatan osećaj jeste da je stvarnim ličnostima koje su prošle kroz ovu životnu dramu sigurno bilo mnogo zanimljivije nego nama kao gledaocima. I to je veliki poraz za Stonea.

Ono što se u svemu ovome Stoneu ne može prebaciti jeste to da manipuliše emocijama. Iako je njegov rediteljski postupak uvek vrlo direktan i bez previše diskretnih zahvata, u ovom filmu Stone više ide linijom Gus Van Santa i gomilanja događaja koji bi valjda trebalo da ostave nekakav ukupan utisak kod gledaoca, nego što istinski vodi priču sa razvojem likova, dramskim sukobom i sl.

Ipak, što se mene tiče, ukupan utisak je da je Andrea Berloff napisao najmanje zanimljivu od svih priča koje su se desile 11. septembra. Interesantno je to da su dva filma o 11. septembru, UNITED 93 i WTC zapravo vrlo slični po tome što pokušavaju da se bez većih intervencija fokusiraju na "male priče" koje su se zbile tog dana, s tim što je Greengrassova ipak kudikamo bitnija.

U ideološkom smislu, interesantan je taj fokus na "malu priču", na stradanje pojedinaca, i kod Stonea i kod Greengrassa. Naime, obojica su poznati kao politički angažovani autori i očigledno je da su se oni našli zbunjeni 11. septemborm. s jedne strane, sve o čemu su ranije pričali se obistinilo, a s druge strane, osetili su se da su deo kolektiva koji je ušao u "pustinju realnog". osetivši potrebu da se obojica izjasne o 9/11, oni su se opredelili za "male priče"-možda ubeđeni da se "veliku priču" već ranije ispričali.

Međutim, unutar te male priče, ono na šta nisu udarili jeste upravo odgovornost malih ljudi za 9/11, i činjenica da je taj gest cena koju je Amerika morala da plati za svoju političku i ekonomsku dominaciju koja je omogućila poslove i prihode protagonistima svih tih "malih priča". Elementa krivice te vrste nema ni kod Greengraasa ni kod Stonea. Razlika je samo u tome što je Greengrass snimio dobar film a Stone nije.

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The crimes of the real-life Bernard Madoff make "Wall Street's" Gordon Gekko look like a three-card Monte dealer. But Gekko would never have been perp-walked before a phalanx of New York photographers in a baseball cap and windbreaker. If anything, he would have worn a Brioni suit. And we would have loved it. Because even on Wall Street, we want our pirates to be swashbucklers.
And that's why few cold, calculating and ruthless characters have been as incongruously romantic as Gordon Gekko.

"Gekko continues to be a larger-than-life character," says director Oliver Stone, who, like Michael Douglas, will be reprising his role on the "Wall Street" sequel, "Money Never Sleeps," currently in pre-production. "Like Tony Montana, even 20 years later, I get more reactions to him than most characters in my films."

That Stone would compare Gekko to the hero of "Scarface" is not insignificant: He and co-writer Stanley Weiser created their corporate raider at the height of the go-go Reagan '80s, as a reflection of that avaricious era and its rogue's gallery of predatory financiers (Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Carl Icahn). Stone says people continue to describe Gekko to him in various ways: "Pathologically evil." "Heroic bandit." "Financial cowboy." All spell "outlaw," which is how Douglas played him, earning the 1987 best actor Oscar in the process.

Douglas captured the same two traits that have made villains from Iago to Michael Corleone irresistible: an outsider status imposed by birth (which he can't control), crossed with superior intellect and cunning (which he can). Gekko is supposedly a graduate of New York's City College, working in an Ivy League world; that he has gone bad is partly seen as an issue of class, which makes Americans reflexively love him.

"The consistency between Gordon Gekko and Michael Douglas was in their charisma and passion," says Stone, "except that Gekko's motives were malevolent. But both are survivors -- men who find a way to succeed, who have willed themselves to second acts in their lives.

"Here's a guy who fell from grace but never lost his ambition and voracity for success," Stone adds of Gekko. "He's a quintessentially American story. And seeing how he manages to survive in this new shark tank 22 years later is a fascinating and challenging proposition. So much has changed. Not just Gordon Gekko. The world, too."

Alex de la Iglesia, the incoming president of the Spanish Film Academy, is planning to tackle piracy and improve the quality and distribution of local film during his tenure.


Speaking exclusively to ScreenDaily, he said he wants to recover the respect for the Spanish film industry that has been hit hard by piracy and improve distribution of local titles at home and abroad.

The director of The Oxford Murders, who takes on the presidency later this month, is planning to hold discussions with distributors, exhibitors and sales agents over the next few months in a bid to help develop and promote the industry.

"We have a lot of talented directors and producers in Spain, and I want to make sure they are happy working here. Too often we see local film makers doing well and then leaving straight for Hollywood."

In terms of tackling piracy, de la Iglesia says that the industry needs to work with internet service providers to stop people accessing illegal content but that the industry also needs to find alternatives, such as simultaneous release patterns.

Speaking at the Madrid De Cine event, he also confirmed that Kiefer Sutherland will play the role of Philip Mortimer in his new English-language criminal thriller The Yellow Mark.

Sutherland and Hugh Laurie had been rumoured to take the lead roles in the $34m Spanish (Tornasol Films)- French (La Fabrique De Films) co-production, but de la Iglesia confirmed that only Sutherland has so far signed on. It will shoot later his year.

Pogledao sam I LOVE YOU, MAN Johna Hamburga, čoveka koji je poznat kao scenarista filma MEET THE PARENTS i reditelj solidne komedije sa Ben Stillerom ALONG CAME POLLY.

Kao i uvek kad je Hamburg umešan reč je o high concept romantičnoj komediji. U ovom konkretnom slučaju reč je o čoveku koji je oduvek lepo komunicirao sa ženama ali nije imao puno bliskih muških prijatelja. Kako bi to prevazišao, on kreće da traži novog čoveka za ulogu najboljeg prijatelja i kada ga nađe oni postaju najbolji prijatelji ali to prijateljstvo počinje da ugrožava njegovu bsprekornu vezu sa verenicom.

Moram priznati da sam za vreme ovog filma bio malo dekoncentrisan, tome su doprineli neki događajii neposredno pre projekcije, a i sama sala bioskopa Kolosej u kojoj se čuo ton TERMINATOR SALVATIONa iz susedne sale kao i vrlo bučan klima uređaj. Iako sam odrastao gledajući filmove u groznim bioskopima i uopšte nemam fetiš za te nove fensi bioskope, ukoliko neko insistira na tome da je napravio jako kvalitetan bioskop onda bi bilo lepo da on zaista bude takav. Projekcija dakle nije uspela da me fokusira na film, tako da mi je utisak o filmu I LOVE YOU, MAN to da je smešan, ali nekako i tanak na nivou onog nekog suštinskog katarzičnog dejstva koje savremene komedije obično nose.

Naime, nove komedije koje stižu u Holivuda su upravo i potentne zbog tog nekog terapeutskog dejstva koje imaju i koje je smešteno ispod gegova. Ovaj film pak je smešan ali je u suštini prazan čemo doprinose i vrlo bledi glumci u glavnim ulogama.

Paul Rudd i Jason Segel su ipak drugopozivci iz sveta Judd Apatowa i sa njihovim likovima uvek imam problem u tome što me ne zanimaju i ne navijam za njih, iako to priča traži od mene. Kao i FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL (Segelov vehicle) koji je kudikamo čak i bogatili u tom suštinskom smislu, ili ROLE MODELS (Ruddov vehicle), i I LOVE YOU ostaje na pola puta.

Štaviše, čini mi se da je ovo film koji bi tu željenu dubinu svakako dobio da je njemu zaigrao Jim Carrey jedan od najvećih shrinkova savremene američke komedije.

Uostalom, i sam Hamburg je svoju reputaciju igradio radeći sa Stillerom, jednom nadmoćnom glumačkom zvezdom.

Na svu sreću taj nedostatak produbljenosti verovatno neće smetati publici koja nema prevelika umetnička očekivanja od bioskopske komedije, o čemu svedoče i solidan box office i solidne američke kritike ovog filma.

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http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/but_if_we_started_dating_it?utm_source=most_pop_pop

Quote from: crippled_avenger on 10-06-2009, 12:26:42Alex de la Iglesia, the incoming president of the Spanish Film Academy, is planning to tackle piracy and improve the quality and distribution of local film during his tenure.

Alex da la Iglesia je PREDSEDNIK IČEGA?!
Pa to je fenomenalno! 

Od njega sam gledao samo Acción mutante, El día de la Bestia i Perdita Durango i svime sam bio oduševljen!
Video sam da je posle radio manje sektaške filmove, al da postao prez, pa to je krajnje zabavna činjenica

DEPS Antuna Vrdoljaka je nastao u periodu kada su se Dragan Nikolić i Bekim Fehmiui još uvek nadmetali za poziciju najvećeg badassa u jugoslovenskoj kinematografiji.

U ovom filmu Bekim igra hrvatskog delinkventa koji je kroz vezu sa pohotnom Srpkinjom (igra je Milena Dravić) kojoj čak nije strana ni prodaja ljubavi bacio rukavicu na koju će 15 godina kasnije Gaga Nikolić odgovoriti scenom sa pohotnom autostoperkom iz MONCE. Film prati priču naslovnog junaka, delinkventa čiji je otac bio politički obeležen a majka mu je bila prostitutka (takođe je igra Milena Dravić) i njegov mentalni dvoboj sa inspektorom (igra ga Fabijan Šovagović) koji želi da ga smesti iza rešetaka.

U stilskom smislu, Vrdoljak je vrlo konfuzan u tretmanu ove priče. Naime, u filmu se smenjuju pristupi filmskom prizoru, kako na nivou mizanscena tako i ritma. Pojedine reminiscencije traju kratko a neke se protežu na maltene trećinu filma i na kraju se gubi jasna ideja o čemu ovaj film zapravo govori. Da li je to biografija jednog prestupnika, priča o potrazi jednog marginalca za ljubavlju ili žestoka psihoanalitička provokacija ako imamo u vidu njegovu ljubavnu priču sa ženom koju igra ista glumica kao i njegovu majku.

Očigledno je Vrdoljak upao u jednu od čestih klopki koje su čekale naše reditelje tog vremena a to je želja da krenu iz žanra i obuhvate sve moguće aspekte a na kraju su završavali ne obradivši nijedan.

U konkretnom slučaju DEPSa, film je i najzanimljiviji zbog ljubavne priče između muškarca i žene koja deli istu profesiju i lik kao i njegova majka. Ako imamo u vidu edipalnu dimenziju majčinog bavljenja kurvanjem, onda to svemu daje vrlo interesantnu dimenziju koje je Vrdoljak morao biti svestan.

Šta je onda problem u tom veoma zanimljivom domenu? Hm, pa problem je u tome što ishodište te priče ljubavi sa majkom/devojkom ne proističe iz njihovog fatalnog odnosa nego se priča završi iz spoja kriminalno-socijalnog motiva koji je vezan za Depsovo bavljenje kriminalom.

Kao što znamo još od James Cagneya i WHITE HEAT, poznati su primeri snažne edipalne vezanosti lika gangstera za majku. U tom smislu DEPS nije izuzetak niti novina, osim u jugoslovenskim okvirima. Međutim, isto tako, u fikcionalnim filmovima o usponu i padu gangstera obično ulazak žene u život glavnog junaka dovodi do njegovog sloma ili krize.

I na Depsa utiče žena, i to prilično blagotvorno, ali teško je reći da njen ulazak u njegov život ima ikakav uticaj na rasplet ove priče.

Vrdoljak je u ovom periodu već bio označen kao nepodoban zbog svog nacionalizma i povezanosti sa "proljećem". Film se završava optimistično zahvaljujući tome što Deps i njegova izabranica odlaze iz zemlje. Vrdoljak se u filmu bavi čitavom serijom likova i nekima koji su nebitni za priču daje značajnu ulogu i vreme čime potpuno razbija ionako labavu formu. ono što su tisci iz te priče je da socijalistički Zagreb trune, vladaju malograđanština, lažni moral, prostitucija, ljudi su spremni za okretanje vidžilantizmu (jedan od junaka koji čekaju na isleđivanje sa Depsom je vigilante koji se preoblači u kauboja) i društvo je generalno nespremno da rehabilituje gubitnike i odbačene svake vrste. Politička nepodobnost Depsovog oca sasvim sigurno nije slučajan motiv, na njoj se ne insistira ali ne može se reći da je sasvim nevažna.

Relja Bašić je takođe interesantan u psihoanalitičkom smislu. On naime predstavlja sve ono što Deps prezire, grotesknog alkoholičara, uličnog filozofa, džeparoša i skitnicu. Međutim, ono što je jedina transformacija Depsa kroz film jeste to što on u finišu filma shvati da je njegova budućnost da se jednog dana pretvori u lik Relje Bašića i to saznanje ga prelomi da krene drugim putem.

DEPS je film pun vrlo zanimljivih elemenata. Izuzev deonica u kojima Milena Dravić groteskno našminkana igra Depsovu majku gluma je solidna. Vrdoljakovi dijalozi su pretenciozni i često prekomplikovani ali Bekim i Milena uglavnom uspevaju da ih savladaju, kao i Fabijan, koji je uostalom dobar špreher, to se zna.

Bekim i Milena uspevaju da stvore utisak o ubedljivom odnosu iako taj odnos suštinski nije produbljen. Ipak, njih dvoje su dovoljno harizmatični glumci da ga učine ubedljivim i da izazovu emociju u gledaocu.

Bekim luči coolness u ulozi Depsa i šteta je što nije imao više uloga na ovoj tough guy/krimos liniji, jer definitivno ima sjajan attitude i izdvaja se sa svojim izuzetnim izgledom

U svakom slučaju, izuzev ljudi koje zanimaju curio naslovi ili neki od motiva koje sam naveo, DEPS svakako nije film koji bi trebalo da reprizira šira publika.

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Koga zanima jedan pretenciozan članak o jugonostalgiji, evo...

http://www.kvartmagazin.rs/active/sr-latin/home/clanak/_params/kv_clk_id/2352.html

Volim kada me neki film opovrgne u crnim slutnjama. Od filma HITNA POMOĆ sam očekivao da će biti strahota, da će biti jedan od onih filmova koji će probuditi sakrivenog pisca saopštenja Hezbolaha i poslati me na jednu sesiju suicidalnog blogovanja, što su donekle potrkepljivale i najave sa nekih internih projekcija.

I onda kada sam pogledao film, ne mogu reći da mi je dobar, ne mogu reći da mi se dopao, niti da bih ga opet pogledao, ali svakako bih rekao da je ovo legitiman vid problematičnog filma.

Kada sam izašao sa projekcije, sreo sam Purišu Đorđevića koji je potpuno otkinuo na film i bio iz fazona da je ovo najbolji film u poslednjih nekoliko godina. Purišine filmove ja teško i da mogu da gledam, ali ne mogu da kažem da nemam nikakvo poštovanje za stvari koje je radio niti da sporim da je to nekada & nekome imalo smisla. Isto tako potpuno mogu da poštujem njegov stav i da ga smatram nekom vrste potvrde utiska koji sam ja izneo sa ovog filma.

Naime, HITNA POMOĆ je pre svega film koji u sebi sadrži nešto što se inače u filmovima podrazumeva a to je da postoji neka vrsta kadriranja, u smislu da događaj nije samo zabeležen nego i da se vodilo računa o tome gde stoji kamera i odakle snima koju situaciju. Imajte na umu, ne kažem da je HITNA POMOĆ vizuelni spektakl, daleko od toga, ali jeste film u kome reditelj pokušava da bude pismen, da snima neke kadrove koji su konsekventni i čine neku celinu ne samo pukkim smenjivanjem planova, nego i nekim pomeranjima u odnosu na ugao snimanja. Kao što rekoh to VEĆINA NORMALNIH filmova ima, i teško da će to iko ko nije duboko zagazio u mulj srpskog filma primetiti, ali oni koji malo pšromišljaju film svakako hoće.

Gornja konstatacija je naravno tužna, jer ni u jednoj normalnoj kinematografiji HITNA POMOĆ ne bi bila posmatrana kao film bilo kakve vizuelnosti, ali mi smo spali na to da je već pismen film apsolutni izuzetak.

Zatim, priča. Film se negde od polovine potpuno raspada u paramparčad. Iako ne dolazi do potpunog gubitka uverljivosti filmskog prizora kao kod Puriše, kapiram da je Puriša digovao ou drugu polovinu. Međutim, prva polovina je sasvim cool i donosi neke ingeniozne scene i neke vrlo kompetentne delove.

Ingeniozne deonice su u segmentu u kome se osuđuje NGO sektor kroz reinterpretaciju čuvenog događaja sa edukatorom maslačkom i onim seks skandalom koji se desio u NGO kampu. Kod Radovanovića postoji čitav plotline o tome koji je užasno zanimljiv, na neki način čak i kinky te verujem da će oni koji uživati u objektifikovanju dečjih tela u ovome naročito uživati. Agenda osude NGO sektor anije kao u MILOŠU BRANKOVIĆU gde je to srovedeno dosta direktno i agresivno, koz stilizovane likove zlih NGO lezbijki, dočim je kod Radovanovića to dosta ozbiljnije i smešteno je u jedan širi politički plot u kome sam se moram priznati i ja izgubio.

Naime, Radovanović ubacuje dosta dokumentarnog materijala u film. Priča počinje pred 5. oktobar i privodi se kraju recimo 2005. godine. U toj priči, gledamo slom Miloševićevog režima oličen kroz potpunu agoniju starih prvoboraca i odmazdu prema voditeljki RTSa iz Miloševićevog doba, gde nekako s jedna strane, radovanović prikazuje da je režim bio truo ali s druge strane ne uživa u tim scenama odmazde, štaviše, meni te scene odmazde ni ne liče na nešto što se dešavalo. Ovde recimo ima scena šišanja deteta. Koliko se sećam nekom SPSovcu jeste bilo ošišano dete, da li Bojiću ili tako nekom, ali kada se to prikaže u filmu izdvojeno onda se stvori utisak da je to generalna sudbina Miloševićevih ljudi.

U dokumentanim snimcima koji su uneti prati se dosta i Điniđićev rad u tranzicionoj Srbiji, njegova smrt je bitan plot point u jednom trenutku. S jedne strane, količina Đinđićevih dokumentrnih snimaka zaista može zasmetatai svakom koji nije poštovalac, ali s druge strane, Radovanović u istom tom delu filma pokazuje jedan sunovrat u Srbiji, NGO koje vršljaju sa nekim besmislenim pa čak i perverznim programima, prikazuje sudbinu dvojice dečaka izbeglih sa Kosova kojima su tamo ubijeni roditelji,. i na kraju ja zaista ne znam da li je to unošenje Đinđićevih snimaka neka prođinđićevska ili antiđinđićevska agenda.

Iako se film toliko do detalja bavi politikom da se definitvno može okarakterisati kao politički film, mislim da mu je politička agenda konfuzna, što je možda i u redu jer su razna čitanja moguća. Međutim, ako je žleo neko jedno konkretno čitanje, Radovanović onda nije uspeo.

Glumci su ujednačeni. Nema tu sad nekih izvanrednih uloga niti odskakanja od nekog nivoa koji je ranije uspostavljen kod tih glumaca. Deca su sporadično solidno, a nekada malo poziraju, no to je rizik sa kojim se mora računati. Drago mi je da je Tanasije Uzunović ostvario još jednu vrlo solidnu ulogu i da ima neku vrstu comebacka. On je sjajna filmska pojava, kao uostalom i Miki Krstović i što se mne tiče on je sledeći za resurrection!

HITNA POMOĆ u krajnjem zbiru nije sad neki naročito značajan art house film, ali za razliku od arhaičnih i prizemnih gluposti poput TURNEJE koje su art samo zato jer su suviše nevešta za mejnstrim, HITNA POMOĆ jeste kakav takav art house, ili kako bi to naši neuki novinari rekli "autorski film". To što meni takav film može da prija samo ako je jako kvalitetan, to je moj problem, ali ovo jeste ta vrsta filma, i mislim da će imati svoju publiku, mahom na festivalima, na kojima neće imati neki značajan uspeh, ali će biti isto ono što je i 40% filmova na FESTu a to je neki osrednji domet.

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