Monday, February 25, 2008

Forgettable Times

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The Oscars should be aspiring, oh well, it depresses me; each year its resemblance of a funeral grows. Is Hollywood dying? Movie business is not bigger than life anymore? Is just a business like any other now? The Ceremony looks like a motivation award for the best salesman.

The american cinema is shrinking in me; it’s the size of a bean and it once was time the size of the moon. They projected some scenes from past ceremonies that made me miss the time that I cared. Is easy to tell why’s different; I watched most of their movies and none hooked me. The same last year, and the year before that. Since American Beauty I stopped caring. American Beauty and Matrix were the last whisper before the long way down.

There is no risk today, no new real talent, no breakthrough. Everything we have now in the Oscar we already had before 9/11; from Pixar, Cohens, George Clooney to PT Anderson, there is nothing new. Nothing refreshing. Nothing. Today I regret that I cursed Titanic and Gladiator.

The lack of passion disturbs. It should be ‘Surprise me, astonish me’, but in the first frame the hope of it vanishes. My bored soul makes me watch The Office instead. Or Arrested Development… the TV series have so more heart than movies these days, but still, they can’t fulfill the hole left by Hollywood.

I want to blame the marketing. Movie MKT kills its art. Because all that 4 Ps, 7 Ps, new 4 Ps in MKT theory use an underlying principle: mapping consumer behavior. And survey after survey they seek what we want to have at what price. AVP anyone? The Survey said yes.

Art became one byproduct of MKT. Spielberg knows it, and he’s the last samurai, the only one who can fight a mass marketeer. And more the MKT becomes the universal reason to make movies, more frustrated will be the viewers. Because all you need is a big opening day, it can be garbage, all you need is a brainfuck trailer. And that’s why the telly has more heart than Hollywood, TV must deliver its promise, they need to hook us episode after episode. Studio heads don’t care if a movie fulfills any promise, the ticket is already bought. They are poisoned by this short-term thinking.

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Thursday, February 21, 2008

Isso é Foda

e barato, e porra, a Nintendo não pensou nisso? Bem, é genial

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Monday, February 18, 2008

Tropa de Elite por Gringos

BOPE

I’m friggin'loving the critics reactions to our brazilian reality, I mean… movie, Elite Squad.

REUTERS:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews

“For some reason, their work involves getting second jobs so that Neto works at the police auto shop while Matias goes to law school.”

It’s from Reuters, believe it. This guy on reuters doesn’t have a clue of what he saw. It has more:

“though the story is told in a confusing mix of time-shifting flashbacks, and at the end there's still no sign of the pope.”


HE WANTED TO SEE THE POPE! Fuck me. It continues...

"Neto and Matias have to make it through an odd sort of training camp that involves ritual humiliation. Then, they're handed high-powered rifles and sent into the slums to kill everybody."


Never saw a critic so clueless. But not every surprised critic is so dumb:

http://www.screendaily.com/ScreenDailyArticle

"the film could be read as a nihilistic, even reactionary statement - to wit, that in a corrupt world, brute integrity is the only response. But you rarely feel that Padilha and his collaborators are making this stuff up"

Variety calls the movie facist so many times, and even compares it to Rambo, and also says:

http://www.variety.com/review/

"a one-note celebration of violence-for-good that plays like a recruitment film for fascist thugs (...) Though pic was Brazil’s top grosser of 2007, arthouse auds won’t coddle to the inescapable right-wing p.o.v (...) Charges of fascism by pic’s critics aren’t merely knee-jerk liberal reactions, but an unimpeachable statement of fact."


This one also didn't get what it was about. After those reviews, Elite Squad won the Golden Bear, and they changed the approach to something more respectable:

"Jose Padilha’s controversial Brazilian crime actioner "The Elite Squad,” an examination of police corruption and gang violence, took the Golden Bear at the 58th Berlinl Intl. Film Festival on Saturday."

more serious, huh? But yet, they didn't accepted the golden bear:

"The Golden Bear win took local critics by surprise due to its mixed reviews, many of which accused the film of fascism and glorifying police brutality, but Padilha said the pic reflected the reality on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Some, however, welcomed the decision to award the only action film in what many critics described as an uninspired lineup."

another one, from indiewire attending the festival after the prize:

http://www.indiewire.com/ots/2008/02/berlin

"the overwhelming ugliness of that film has stayed with me, not just for its rank misogyny, dismaying though that was (women, we learned, are either weak and liberal, or sluttish, greedy and stupid), but also for its genuinely fascist sensibility -- never more evident than when one of the cops accuses a student of being scum, "like the whores, the pimps, the abortionists ... Er, excuse me?"


The critics were blind, but the berlinale jury got it: "the international jury of the film festival praised the film's depiction of the involvement of the drug barons and the elite squad in a deadly game of mutual dependence, corruption and brutality."

Padilha, the movie director, resumed it all “Many journalists didn't seem to have understood the film. I'm very concerned about that..."

Here's a review from someone who got the movie, and says exactly what we brazillians need to hear, it could be coming from some gringo's mouth, but no... ironically, it's from a PUC's professor, the university that Elite Squad portraits:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/globalisation/tropa_de_elite

"The black gear and chilling symbol (a sword inside a skull) are not just for show: the regiment is used to getting what it wants, if necessary via torture and killing. Don't forget, this is war. (...) The effect has been felt in Brazil's television news programmes, which now show Bope's latest operation or a helicopter-led assault by black-clad caveiras (skulls) who shoot drug-dealers (real or suspected? No one is asking) as they run for their life through the favelas. Tropa de elite has thus returned the debt it borrowed from reality, and with interest.(...) Brazil needs to learn how to live peacefully as a political community. The responsibility of creating it is one that all Brazilians must accept, including Capitão Nascimento, including artists."

Even so, that's the beauty of cinema, only looking from outside to understand what we are.

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Saturday, February 16, 2008

Classified information stolen from Petrobras while in Halliburton's custody

Well, reuters is not giving this news, so what a blogger can do?

Secret deepwater research data(*) from Petrobras disappeared while they were transported in a container by Halliburton. Including information of the giant Tupi oil field (12~30 billions of light crude oil barrels) under the Santos basin at 200km (125 miles) from Brazilian cost. *Petrobras deepwater research opened up a new horizon for oil exploration held in rocks beneath salt layers that reaches thickness of over 2,000 meters (660 feet).

The brazilian government is treating the stolen data as a matter of state using federal forces and intelligence to retrieve it. Two computers and external hard-drives were missing from a container leaving a Santos basin Petrobras oil platform to Macaé, Rio de Janeiro.

And I as blogger could ask... why a fox is the caretaker of the golden egg?

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duas palavras compostas da moda:

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risktaking
& multidevice


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Friday, February 15, 2008

Obama, the band-aid

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Why there are yankee troops over there? Oil. There is nothing else besides it. Whoever wins this election will be the man, or the woman, whatever, to tell their people in the most cautious way: “we can’t afford an Oil Crisis, no one can, if we leave Iraq, if Chavez halts the American supply, and if the Saudis turn their back to us, we’ll be back to the paleolithic age. That’s what is in stake, not global warming. At any time it can happen to us, and that’s the real terrorism. If it happens, it will be the big one, it’ll cripple our economy, the oil will not cost one hundred, but a thousand. And we will pay whatever the market charges us to oblivion. Because we need it for our survival, it’s much more stronger than an addict fix, it just can’t ever happen. We were lucky that we survived the first Oil Crisis in the 70’s because we had reserves, but now we don’t. That’s why we need this war. Sorry that the government said to you that it was about terror, freedom, democracy and a little revenge for 9/11. Otherwise, you would never agree.”

Ok, and now the least worst viable candidate is Obama. I watched every interview, every youtube manifestation, and I still don’t know who is he. I see a promoter trained to only answer in the safest way to not lose consumers. He says ‘Change’ and he says changes need to be ‘Responsible’. This is double talk. This is the basic ABC in the politics manual. "We can neither retreat from the world nor try to bully it into submission". Why US can't retreat? Oil. He can't say 'bring the troops home', but can say 'phased redeploy'. "I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars" Maybe he was once against the dumb war, mainly because it was very dumb doing so without UN cooperation. But he was never against The war.

Obama talks about reducing 80% of the carbon emissions by 2050; it’s hell easier to goal 2050 with bold standards than a realistic 8% in four years. He says that he supports biofuel, but as most politicians he sustained heavy tariffs on imported Ethanol, something that doesn’t happen with imported Oil. His position is what prolongs the biological economic impossibility of corn’s Ethanol. There are billions in interest always saying to protect the good old farmers. It means that every American will pay almost a dollar of taxes per gallon of Ethanol; the ethanol’s market will never make it in those conditions... even now that the international prices of ethanol are cheaper than Oil. The US taxes policy makes the citizens to embrace foreign Oil paid with military invasions, blood, dollar inflation and social security. Americans can say that foreign Ethanol is another dependency, but then, and that’s a great BUT THEN: is not concentrated on three or four countries. Which normally means war, not trade.

There is always a teleprompter for Obama; he can’t speak his mind in the same way Bush can’t speak his; that’s why Bush sounds dumb and Barack sounds thoughtful sometimes. He’s not so different from Ms.Clinton or John Kerry. Because truth is too harmful for the US Oil survival; it’s just too greedy for young soldiers to die for. Obama says that US need to be responsible with Iraq people... Bullocks. Soldiers know it. There is no fucking way that your presence there creates stability for the Iraqis, it harms them. It’s the fucking Oil stability that matters.

And now you and I are beginning to get why there is no real democracy. In a mega-corporationed world, the politic dynamics are just a bridge between social cries and lobby interests. There is no vision, no ideology, no utopia. Republicans and Democrats… what’s the difference? Even republicans are defending welfare.

In the end Obama is just another guy who got luck to be in the right place at the right time with the right smile. What he brings to the table is the same shit with discreet fashion that neocons already brought. Including the use of a nuclear strike.

They and us know how will be the future. Its something called Green Economy. And green economies require transparency. Transparency in all levels: from countable sheets to biohazard. Information is breaking to be free; you and I know this: transparency is forcing itself to society at this very moment. The status-quo is not accepting this and never will. And you know which side Obama is. And you also must have to know who will win in the history books.

And

Obama approved several money bombs for the war. He says this is a dumb war, but, again, he was lucky to not be in the senate at that time, or he would succumb to do as his democratic colleagues did, would approve the war. The real question is how ineffectual Obama will be; he knows that he can’t move the troops from Iraq in this mandate. There is no international agreement on whom belongs Iraq’s Oil. It’s a pick or drop situation. He won’t drop. Obama’s ambition in this matter is to create other… mindset; but leave Iraq? Obama says irresponsible. Iraq is no Vietnam. For more I like Gravel, he’s wrong on this one, perhaps Ron Paul too. Vietnam was between two geopolitical forces, this one is a war over oil. Every war is different, for more that the stupid teachers said to us, history never repeats itself. There are hedge funds to prove it. The future is so unpredictable that doing nothing is one way to go. And that’s the Obama’s political position.

Maybe the most intrepid move of Obama is to cut NASA funds to give it to teachers; okay, teachers need it, but he has to cut it away from science? Why not… the military, its so much less than 1%. And that would mean something. He can’t… the Oil, damn it.

Obama will give universal health care by doing the job right. That’s the plan: to use the taxes. That’s it: an act of will. Next.

He defends Net Neutrality. If you wanted a reason to vote for him, you have at least one.

There is another thing that maybe help you to vote in Obama: Fiscal Responsibility. And that means: Reaganomics. Pretty Republican. Who cares which party is he?

And the voters will choose the next American Idol and forget it.

I wanted Ron Paul to be the next yankee president, it could be a work of fiction.

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fishes out of water

digg, reddit and slashdot didn't make any noise about Spielberg and the chinese Olympics this whole week. What's going on? What really matters in there? I guess the Top Submitters don't read newspapers.

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