Thursday, August 02, 2007

SCTV Bergman Parody + Filmmakers of Today + Chomsky on Non-War on Terror

Now for a little humor: SCTV's parody of Ingmar Bergman, Cries of the Wolf. I'd forgotten how silly and hilarious Catherine O'Hara, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, John Candy, and company were. Enjoy!


On IMDb.com, on the Ingmar Bergman page threads, someone suggested that international cinema was "weaker" because of the deaths of these two extraordinary figures, and others like Ousmane Sembène. I agree that their deaths are a tremendous loss, but there are quite a few very talented, in some cases major, relatively prolific international film artists out there. Some of them, like Manoel Oliveira, are older than either Antonioni or Bergman, and still making films, while others are close in age or only a generation younger. And then there quite a few important makers of art films (broadly construed) in the 40-60 age range. The list I came up with includes:

Woody Allen, Theodoros Angelopoulos, Olivier Assayas, Lucas Belvaux, Bernardo Bertolucci, Catherine Breillat, Jane Campion, Laurent Cantet, Souleymane Cissé, Costa-Gavras, David Cronenberg, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Claire Denis, Carlos Diegues, Atom Egoyan, Jean-Luc Godard, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Michael Haneke, Werner Herzog, Shohei Imamura, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Abbas Kiarostami, Kim Ki-Duk, Takeshi Kitano, Emir Kusturica, Spike Lee, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Terrence Malick, Takeshi Miike, Nanni Moretti, Mike Nichols, Gaspar Noé, Manoel Oliveira, Nagisa Oshima, Idrissa Ouedragou, François Ozon, Ferzan Ozpetek, Jafar Panahi, Park Chan-Wook, Alexander Payne, Roman Polanski, Alain Resnais, Eric Rohmer, Raoul Ruiz, Walter Salles, Volker Schlöndorff, Martin Scorsese, Cheikh Omar Sissoko, Aleksandr Sokurov, Todd Solondz, Tsai Ming-Liang, Agnès Varda, Ventura Pons, Andrzej Wajda, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Peter Weir, Wim Wenders, Lina Wertmüller, and Wong Kar-Wai.

(Admittedly I've listed far too few women.) Whom would you add?

Audiologo mentions: Kasi Lemmons, Lisa Cholodenko, Nancy Savoca, Lucrecia Martel, Ana Kokkinos, Alison Maclean, and Delphine Gleize.

Other directors?

***

On a completely different note, here's a link to Geov Parrish's recent AlterNet interview with Noam Chomsky on the "war on terror," or the nonexistence thereof.

Says Chomsky:

The fact of the matter is that there is no War on Terror. It's a minor consideration. So invading Iraq and taking control of the world's energy resources was way more important than the threat of terror. And the same with other things. Take, say, nuclear terror. The American intelligence systems estimate that the likelihood of a "dirty bomb," a dirty nuclear bomb attack in the United States in the next ten years, is about 50 percent. Well, that's pretty high. Are they doing anything about it? Yeah. They're increasing the threat, by increasing nuclear proliferation, by compelling potential adversaries to take very dangerous measures to try to counter rising American threats.

This is even sometimes discussed. You can find it in the strategic analysis literature. Take, say, the invasion of Iraq again. We're told that they didn't find weapons of mass destruction. Well, that's not exactly correct. They did find weapons of mass destruction, namely, the ones that had been sent to Saddam by the United States, Britain, and others through the 1980s. A lot of them were still there. They were under control of U.N. inspectors and were being dismantled. But many were still there. When the U.S. invaded, the inspectors were kicked out, and Rumsfeld and Cheney didn't tell their troops to guard the sites. So the sites were left unguarded, and they were systematically looted. The U.N. inspectors did continue their work by satellite and they identified over 100 sites that were systematically looted, like, not somebody going in and stealing something, but carefully, systematically looted.

2 comments:

  1. John,
    Re: directors. If you included more women they wouldn't all have the same number of credits as the men. For example, in the US it's rare for a woman to get to make a 3rd feature, particularly a woman of color. However, a number of them have evidenced similar promise as their male counterparts. I would add the following names to your list: Kasi Lemmons, Lisa Cholodenko, Nancy Savoca, Lucrecia Martel, Ana Kokkinos, Alison Maclean, and Delphine Gleize. Thanks for the Chomsky, you can't make up the surreal incompentence and tragic absurdity of these circumstances--who would believe the enactment of such badly drawn plans if we weren't actually living in their simultaneous unfurling and aftermath?

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  2. Audiologo, excellent point about women filmmakers and the 3rd feature barrier, and thanks for the names. I'm unfamiliar with all the names you list except Lemmons, Cholodenko and Gleize, so I'll check out the others' work.

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