Nigel Andrews reviews I ♥ Huckabees :

Every artist is allowed a failure or two. The writer-director David O. Russell uses up his entire allowance with I ♥ Huckabees. A laboriously zany plot about two "existential detectives" sucks up half a dozen themes - environmentalism, protest politics, capitalism, religion, space, time - while spitting out fluff, paperclips and carpet tacks like a bad vacuum cleaner on a bad day.

Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings made us believe that Russell was infallible, a pope of antic comedy who delivered knee-slapping encyclicals about America at play, work, love, war. His style, all riffs and rubato, coaxed new rhythms from actors whose range we thought we knew (Ben Stiller, George Clooney). But even zaniness needs discipline. Laisser-faire comic brainstorming leaves a messed-about landscape, with audiences crowding up the evacuation route to saner states.

Gaspar Noe , who directed the controversial Irreversible, in an interview:

(The film begins at the end and works its way back to the beginning, presenting scenes in reverse chronological order.)

The camera spins like a drunk fighting to keep his balance, a discordant soundtrack assaults the ears, stroboscopic lights flash. It is difficult to follow what is happening, though there is an overwhelming air of violence. "My aim was to make you feel out of your minds," explains Noe. He succeeds.

Irreversible continues to backtrack, to a bland love story, but rarely has blandness seemed so welcome.

While viewers will no doubt continue to walk out, Noe maintains there are others for whom the film becomes an "obsession", continually returning to it, looking for something new.

Dialogue was improvised and Noe insists (though I did not notice) that at one point Cassel says his name is Vincent, though his character is called Marcus.

Mohsen Makhmalbaf will shoot his next film India:

"My film will have nothing in common with popular Indian cinema," he says.

[Popular Indian cinema], he feels, does not reflect reality. "It showcases an imaginary, sanitised world meant for enjoyment, not introspection," says Makhmalbaf.

"I have visited India several times, but my understanding of the land comes primarily from Mahatma Gandhi's writings and Satyajit Ray's films," says the director, who also runs a project for Afghan refugees in Iran, a school for aspiring filmmakers and a production outfit.

Makhmalbaf is particularly impressed with India's thriving democracy.

"Iran has a lot to learn from this country," he says.

"India's democracy recognises and accommodates a multiplicity of cultures, languages, religions and views. In Iran, we have only one language, one religion and one power system."

His faith in Gandhian non-violence emerged rather late in life.

"Today I am a citizen of the world. When I think of Mahatma Gandhi, I feel I belong to India as much as I do to Iran," he says.

Makhmalbaf does not, however, expect any trouble with censors in India. "I love India far too much to ever project it in a negative light," he says.

Film Watch

Macario
Mexico, 1958
This Day of the Dead fable blends traditional folktale with Buñuelian social satire as it follows a luckless woodcutter's struggles against God, Satan, Death, and that deadliest of all beasts, the State.

Nazarín
Mexico, 1958
Gabriel Figueroa's cinematography lends stark beauty to an unforgiving landscape in this Buñuel classic about a priest whose Christlike charity is his undoing. “Marks Buñuel's creative peak in his Mexican period.”—Village Voice

Film Watch

Untitled for Several Reasons

Mortal Tissue: Beirut’s Cinema of the Vulnerable Body

These works on mortality, of the body and the image, happen to all come from Lebanon, where people are intimately familiar with the fragility of bodies and the impermanence of things.

In Untitled for Several Reasons (2003, 8 mins, Text in English, Video), Roy Samaha asks which is more real: what we see, or what our eyes feel? Received mass media images layer and thicken into pixelline matter. Sound, edited from the image feed, pushes this haptic image into the body.

Performed, shot, and edited with exquisite sensitivity, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joriege's Ashes (Ramad) (2004, 26 mins, In Arabic with English subtitles, 35mm) embodies the process of mourning. A young man returns from abroad to bury his father. The choreographed formality of a wake contrasts with the gestural life of the bereaved, as though mourning were an occasion to celebrate the fact that we still have bodies.

Mohamad Soueid's experimental documentary Civil War (2002, 85 mins, In Arabic with English subtitles, Video) investigates the mysterious death of cinematographer Mohamad Douiabes in 1999. The body of the deceased, found too late for a proper burial, haunts the memories of his friends. Soueid's irreverent tenderness connects this mortal fact to the schizophrenic life of postwar Lebanon, where the trauma of an unfinished war shows up even in people's dental hygiene.

Vijay Joshi, writing in the Financial Times:

Myth of India's outsourcing boom

1. Growth of industry, as portion of GDP, between 1960 and 2002:

China, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and Thailand: from 20% to 40% of GDP.
India: from 20% to 27% of GDP.

2. "Jobless" industrial growth in the past 10 years: The consequences for employment have been dire. In the past 10 years, employment in the organised manufacturing sector has fallen; in services, it has barely changed. Total employment, which includes informal, unorganised jobs, has done somewhat better and has risen by about 1 per cent per year in the last decade.

3. Existing industry jobs not productive whereas labour force is growing:
there remains a large amount of unemployment and low-productivity employment, and b) labour force is projected to grow by 2 per cent (8m people) per year for the next 25 years while the composition of the population shifts towards adults of working age (and much of the rise will occur in backward states). They require industrial blue-collar work with most training received on the job. This "demographic bonus" could boost growth but only if the rapidly growing labour force is productively employed.

4. Share of GDP and growth:

Agriculture(20%,2%),Industry(30%,6%),Services(50%,8%)

5. Services as "jobless" as industrial growth: which suggests that it has been skilled-labour intensive. IT-related output is currently less than 1 per cent of GDP. More significantly the sector employs less than 1m people. This could increase by another million by 2010.

6. IT growth hence pales into insignificance when one considers that India's labour force will rise by 40m by 2010 to an estimated 450m people (and much of the rise will occur in backward states).

7. The only plausible, quantitatively significant, potential source for this demand is labour-intensive exports.

8. An opportunity : East Asian countries, including China, now face higher labour costs and are moving up the ladder of comparative advantage. That gives India the opportunity to kick-start an export boom, especially as textile quotas are to be abolished in 2005.

9.Solution:
a) Small-scale industry reservations must be phased out.
b) Labour laws that hinder employment must be reformed.
c) Delivery of primary education must be enhanced.
d) Direct foreign investment should be welcomed in labour-intensive industries.
e) Power and transport facilities, essential for international competitiveness, must be drastically improved.
f) Trade liberalisation must be extended.
g) Special export zones should be put in place.
h) And adjustment assistance should be devised to cushion any adverse short-term effects of the above policies.

Peter Aspden on artistic truth:

Picasso's "Guernica" - played with the idea depicting a face so racked with pain that it seems physically to fall apart on the canvas.

During his country's civil war, he was quick to translate the sense of exhausted anarchy into a remarkable image.

Resulting from the discomfiting battle unfolding inside him because of his three lovers, were the extraordinary studies of weeping women; desolate images of anguish that capture with violent veracity the primal sense of breakdown that occurs when our emotions are wrenched beyond control.

More current work skims surfaces. It skates rather than plunges. It fulfills easy ambitions instead of setting itself impossible tasks.

The celebration of simulation and ambiguity has replaced the near-murderous drive to arrive at a moment of artistic truth.

Mr. Manmohan Singh in his interview to the Financial Times:

1. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” (watch how i act, not my soft look)

2. "Few countries in the developing world have been able to implement such far-reaching reforms within the framework of a parliamentary democracy." (Don't compare us with China)

3. “Public debate and dissent is a source of strength for us, not of weakness . . In the long run a reform programme that has the widest possible social and political support is more enduring.” (China will collapse sooner or later)

4. “Commissions are only a means to generate wisdom,” he said. “We don't have to wait for the reports to take corrective and remedial action.” (I can't avoid red tape, but will work around it)

5. “Even if we are to retain units in the public sector we would like many of these to have their shares traded on the stock exchange. There would be a market test: If they are not performing well, it will be caught by the market.” (I'll let the underperforming working-class fire itself)

6. “It is very worrisome,” said Mr Singh. “One would have hoped that six years in office would convince the BJP's leadership that India's best interests are safeguarded through the strengthening of [democratic] institutions. But recent signals that have been made at BJP meetings are not very welcome.” (If I don't learn lessons during my stint as PM, BJP will be back)

South Korea's "Every citizen is a reporter" news website.

http://english.OhMyNews.com

Nigel Andrews, FT's chief Film and Television critic, offers some of the same arguments as he tuned in to watch the presidential election coverage. Not available online yet. Some salient points:

1. The Democratic contender won all three debates and lost the campaign. The programming of the half-dozen main TV news channels, whatever their overt political sympathies (Fox is the only crudely partisan network) is so relentlessly cut up by the ad breaks and so blatantly pressured by the need to capture viewers during *other* channels' ad breaks that they subscribe without shame to the soundbyte/sightbite culture that keeps a George W. Bush on his political ventilator. Honourable exceptions such as the C-Span channel only highlight the tyranny of the trend.

2. This would be a scandal if it were not, by now, just an everyday truth of "Infotainment USA". More shocking, at least to a visiting limey, is the failure of America's TV interviewers to go after
America's politicians as Britain's do. There is no equivalent of Britain's Jeremy Paxman or John Humphrys to probe a fallible candidate's credibility, to shine the laser light of logic on the tired catchphrases of whistle-stop populism or makeweightmanifestos.

3. Even on CNN or CNBC, much of the airtime is franchised out totriviality - did you know that Bush supporters like mustard while Kerry voters prefer ketchup ? - when it is not hammering the same headline over and over, rolling around each hour, on the hour.

4. Nuance ? It does not come under "news". Nor does a patient exploration of the complexities and possibly plural perspectives, underlying bullet-point political issues. Nor does the questioning of the use and meaning of phrases such as "moral values" from a president who sends hundreds to their deaths in war but cannot abide the notion of gay marriages. Television in America is not a solution to, or even a proper commentary on, the crisis that is US democracy today. It is part of the problem. It may even be the main problem.

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As an aside...

TV frontpersons hector, joke, gossip, pontificate. They wear beards, braces or stern looks if men, and cheerleader smiles and fashion-statement hairdos if women. At election nights they try to make s long night seem entertaining, but there is a frightening sense of fear that history will outpace them even as it is being made, fear that the rivals are getting the big new first.Meanwhile they flash up tickertape statistics remorselessly and stroboscopically.

In the US, democracy - or the freedom to choose democratically at voting time - is wasted on the free.

Bush : a cuddly uncle sprinkling quips and cornball wisdoms when not incarnating a tongue-tied, just-one-of-us folksiness.
Kerry: resembles a waxwork effigy of Abraham Lincoln, greyed up, de-bearded and wheeled in to do set stump speeches or peddle word-perfect speeches that unfortunately need a brain-perfect audience.