Up Too Late: An Endless Search for Mr.Right & Other Important Things in Life

Directed by the Academy Award nominated director Steven Cantor, "James Blunt: Return to Kosovo" is a moving medley of James Blunt's songs and his memories of Kosovo in 1999, when he happened to be part of the first group of 50 soldiers to enter the war-ravaged land.


In 2006, Blunt returned to Kosovo, to see how much has changed since he returned from his mission of defending the border between Kosovo and Serbia. Blunt finds that lots of things have indeed changed for the better.

One of the most difficult bits for me to watch in the documentary is the discussion Blunt has with one of his interpreters about the interpreter's father, whose bones were found six years after he went missing. Blunt's abrupt change of topics was a little distracting: He turns to the girl next to him and asks her about her family.

While I appreciate that this documentary was a commercial device for creating a James Blunt fan machine, it had lots of genuine emotion. It was raw, emotional, and, most of all, honest. Maybe I like James Blunt just a hint more thanks to this doc. Damn the media team for James Blunt! :)

Labels: documentary, Kosova, Kosovo, music

Hmmm...I have much to write about, but I choose this precious post to be on three docs I saw in the last two days, courtesy of FIFA (Festival International des Films sur l'Art) in Montreal.

1 - L'art du nu 2: Made by a Quebec filmmaker, Bernar Hebert, this documentary explores the relationship that exists between the painter and his model. Interviews in the documentary are great, ranging from interviews with Maillol to Cezanne's model to insightful stories by contemporary models. The models are mostly female, with the exception of a few men used in the doc. to portray they 70s, the birth of the modern feminist era as we know it, when women began to portray men in the same objectifying method men had been portraying women for centuries. I didn't find the documentary so involving... It was rather dry.

There was, however, a positive side to this, which has to do with the post-screening wine party held to launch the "L'art du nu" calendar. The party was a regular artsy fundraiser with one exception: Nude models posing everywhere while the painters painted them, paying detailed attention to every curve, every turn. This was rather interesting, so I stayed and looked at a nude male model for about, oh, I don't know, 15 minutes. HE DIDN'T MOVE! It was as if he were frozen in time. It was amazing! I mean, they must have some special training for it...As for wine, no, I didn't have it, to the surprise of the waiters who kept going around, offering as much as they could. I am determined not to ever try it... I'm stubborn like that sometimes :)

2 - Sinatra: Dark Star : I absolutely loved this documentary. I learned so much about Frank Sinatra, things I'd never known and would probably never have found out had it not been for this video. For example, did you know that the FBI tried half a dozen times to charge Sinatra for mafia links? Upon his death, the FBI file on Frank Sinatra was 2403 pages. See? Romantic men aren't just romantic. They are also troublemakers :)

3 - Making the Balkans Erotic: Before I tell you how I felt about this documentary, I have to make one thing clear. I have an issue with the title of this video. It is called "Making the Balkans Erotic", yet it only touches on one community out of at least a dozen Balkanic communities that are all so different from one another that it is impossible to include them in the traditions of one of the cultures (Serbian).

Marina Abramovic, a well-known Serbian conceptual artist, prepared an exhibition in NYC in late 2005 on old rituals existent in the Serbian (though she calls it Balkanic) culture, things like women showing genitals to the demons who may endanger the crops, bring drought, etc. or men having sex with the Earth . The documentary Making the Balkans Erotic is a sort of a "The Making of:...", in this case, so-called the Balkan Erotic Epic exhbition, only the making of part is actually a mockery of the work itself, which is a complete paradox.

I mean, she prepared Balkan Erotic Epic as a serious work of art that looks into the culture of eroticism existent in the pagan times of Serbian culture, yet in Making the Balkans Erotic , none of that seriousness and conflict between the honourable tradition and the erotic body zones is existent. Rather, Abramovic makes fun of her own work of art, in a way, mocking the men and women who take part in her piece. What is most remarkable to notice (and this is visible in every documentary involving paid crew members from Southeast Europe), is the poor men and women who, pressured by poverty, are forced to take part in mockeries such as this one.

Miranda B. mentioned it last night and though I had thought of it before, I decided to rationalize by saying that these men and women could have chosen not to expose their bodies. Yet, when you're poor, unemployed and in desperate need of money, do you have a choice? At the beginning of the documentary, the men ask to be paid in advance, as they have heard of porn filmmakers who get their video and disappear the next day.

These are the faces that you see in Making the Balkans Erotic: Men and women who will do anything they are told, as long as they get the money for it. As Abramovic says, you don't actually see eroticism in her work, despite being exposed to men with erections you rarely see in public. Somehow, though, I don't think she empathized with her crew. Instead, in the documentary, she says repeatedly that she thinks the footage looks better when the crew is more tired and when everyone looks exhausted. There is a terrible thing that comes to mind when I think of her words, and it's called slave labour.

What you see, after the layer of humour that you can associate with the image of Serbian men in national costumes jerking off to a porn movie playing on a portable dvd player is the face of those who aren't comfortable in the skin they are in. The humour is biting and the viewing is exploitative ...

I youtube'd Marina Abramovic and found a parody of a part of her collection. Here's the excerpt from Abramovic's exhibition (external link/ You need Real Player to access the video)

The parody, seen below, is actually pretty funny...



P.S: I've been getting hundreds of new visitors. A comment wouldn't hurt when you visit.

Labels: art, Balkans, documentary, film festival, Frank Sinatra, Montreal, Serbia

I am at Starbucks, partly because i'm trying to do something other than just watch old episodes of Mad TV (shhhh, don't tell anyone) and Six Feet Under and partly because i was shaken by something I watched this morning that made me realize how optimistic and naive i am at times.

I'd started watching a documentary called Jesus Camp for weeks now. I couldn't watch it to the end. Somehow, I couldn't accept the reality that in the so-called "secular" world we live in, a religious minority was planning on bringing about a regime of "one nation under God". By the time you will have read the last sentence, you will have figured out I am talking about the Evangelical movement and its influence in American politics. Maybe, just maybe, you didn't get that because you are not aware of the power of the Evangelical Christian movement, which George W.Bush belongs to, as a "born-again" Christian. I won't delve into this issue, as I am sure you can google "evangelical christians & US politics".

I do want to concentrate on how I felt about Jesus Camp.

First of all, kudos to the filmmakers for getting footage of a summer camp that teaches fundamentalism. Most of the time, we see training camp videos with shaky cameras, bad quality images, etc. so it was a break from all that to see this was a good quality doc with some artistic merit.

Second of all, i have to say the music played in this doc is terrible. I understand that the point of the filmmakers was to show the tempting Christian rock music that youth are attracted to, but those youth must really be different from me because I WOULD NEVER, EVER in my life, listen to sad-sounding rock music...ewww...It does go with the doc subject, though.

The doc follows a group of 10-14 year olds who, led by Becky a pastor obviously out of her mind, in a summer camp of "Christian learnings" in Devil's Lake, ND, are filled with hate propaganda. Are you kidding me? DEVIL'S LAKE?? "Hey kids, we met here at Devil's Lake to create an army of God-fearing soldiers who will fight the devil"...you what???

Pastor Becky encourages the parents to send their children to the camp called "Kids on Fire" (oh, God) because, she says, the camp is a camp for training children to sacrifice themselves for God.

(Loosely paraphrased ->) "in Muslim countries, they teach kids from the age of 5 to be ready to sacrifice their lives for God. And they are not afraid to give up their lives for the ultimate reward of serving God. This is how we should be. We should be ready to give up everything we have, including our lives, for God. [This is what the camp is]"

Becky says things like "Take these prophecies and do what Apostle Paul said and make war with them" (them=non-Christians/non-believers) and "This [your dedication to Christianity] means war! This means war! Are you a part of it or not?"

At one point, I expect a break from all the crying and sadness the children are subjected to. The pastor's assistant says he has a fun activity in mind. Instead, fun is a synonym for an activity whereby children are told that abortion has killed 50 million children. To demonstrate this, the organizers tape children's mouths with red tape ,which has "life" written on it. They hear a speaker shout out statistics like "50 million children who were killed" / "one third of your friends won't be with you because they are dead", etc. while these pieces of tape are put on their mouths. Earlier, these poor children are told they will rot in hell if they don't repent for the bad words they use, or for non-Christian shows they watch, including Harry Potter. A boy who looks like Harry Potter is looked down upon. It comes to a point where pastor Becky uses the analogy of little teddy bears as origins of sin. Abortion is quoted often as the evil of all evils, a crime beyond crimes.

In one of the scenes, a patriotic mother invites her children to a meal. As they all gather, she takes out the Bible, they get little flags of North Dakota, US and Israel in their hands and start singing the "Star-spangled Banner".Every now and then, they look at the photo of their father who is serving in the US army Iraq.

At one point, Ted Haggard, an ultra-conservative Bush advisor and Evangelical pastor, most recently implicated in a scandal involving a male prostitute he used drugs with [and apparently had sex with], comes out in front of a huge congregation of passionate Evangelists. He calls on the United States to become one nation under God as it confirms an appointment of the super-conservative judge Samuel Alito to the US Supreme Court.

A desperate radio anchor, the only moderate in the whole documentary, seems to be losing hope. As he ponders on whether the American Evangelist Christian movement is gaining momentum in the United States, which may contribute to the end of the world, I wonder, is the world ignoring the creation of another extremist, fundamentalist force, whose sole aim is furthering its own interests? Is there place for "others" in this kind of a world? What kind of a world will this be, if a summer camp indoctrinates evil and negativity in children's minds, the future politicians, average citizens, etc. of the United States?

Labels: conservatism, documentary, evangelicalism, jesus camp, religion, United States