Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Chile: A Fantastic Woman

It’s Oscar season and a Chilean film is nominated for Best Foreign Language film:

A FANTASTIC WOMAN

Country: Chile

Language: Spanish

Chile’s track record in this category: The country’s second nomination

Director: Sebastian Lelio

Story: Orlando (Francisco Reyes) is a middle-aged businessman in the Chilean capital Santiago who’s in a relationship with the much younger Marina (Daniela Vega). After an evening out together, Orlando suffers an aneurysm and is taken to hospital. His relatives, including his former wife, cannot cope with the fact that Marina is a transgender woman: only Orlando’s brother accepts her for who she is. The police and hospital authorities are mistrustful and seem to suspect Marina of involvement in Orlando’s death.

Official website here.

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The two Hayeks: Madame Pinault (finally) speaks out on Weinstein

Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed Mexican actress Selma Hayek for a decade. She finally spoke out in a NYT article,
Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too.

I had already mentioned that I’m done with the sex scandals, since they are a distraction from the great moral question of our times, but I’ll make an exception.

Clearly, it took a of of agonizing for Hayek to come forward. As the wife of one of the richest men in the world, she must have decided that it’s worth the trouble to do so now.

But she had nothing to lose had she done it sooner.

Not to be nit-picky,
Hayek says,

it was unimaginable for a Mexican actress to aspire to a place in Hollywood.

Hayek forgets Dolores del Río, who 92 years ago made her first Hollywood film. Del Río’s house, designed and decorated by her second husband, Cedric Gibbons, is an Art Deco classic.

Back to freedom, the great moral question of our age,
I highly recommend the other Hayek, who famously said,

We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.

UPDATE
Trending at BadBlue

Cross-posted at WoW! Magazine

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The Watchers forum: Favorite filmmakers

Every week on Monday, the WoW! community and our invited guests weigh in at the WoW! Forum, short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture, or daily living. This week’s question: Who Are Your Favorite Film Makers? Why?

Fausta Rodriquez Wertz: Joel & Ethan Coen.

My first Cohen Bros. movie was Fargo, followed by The Big Lebowski, and I’ve been a big fan since.

I haven’t watched all their films, but I greatly enjoyed, in addition to the above,
– their musical version of The Odyssey (O Brother, Where Art Thou?)
– Miller’s Crossing‘s gloominess
– No Country For Old Men, with Bardem as the scariest villain this side of the Rio Grande
– Burn After Reading, which made me laugh out loud
– Bridge of Spies on the Cold War
– and Hail Caesar! on the Hollywood communists.

Bookworm Room : I don’t have a favorite director, but I do have a favorite producer: I love musicals made under Arthur Freed’s aegis. Here are just a few of the dazzling movies he produced during Hollywood’s golden years:

The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Strike Up the Band (1940)
Cabin in the Sky (1943)
Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Yolanda and the Thief (1945)
Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)
Good News (1947)
The Pirate (1948)
Easter Parade (1948)
Words and Music (1948)
On the Town (1949)
Annie Get Your Gun (1950)
Royal Wedding (1951)
Show Boat (1951)
An American in Paris (1951)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
The Band Wagon (1953)
Silk Stockings (1957)
Gigi (1958)
Bells Are Ringing (1960)

While I don’t have a favorite director, I definitely have a least favorite director. I hate Steven Spielberg movies, which I find clunky, predictable, and subordinate to special effects and fancy camera work. I also invariably dislike his characters and their thought processes. I’ve been watching at HBO production about Spielberg and it’s given me an insight into why I dislike his characters: I don’t like him.

The one good thing about Spielberg is that his Holocaust work has been exemplary. I don’t like how he directed Schindler’s List, but it educated a generation about the Holocaust. His Shoah project is also something very important and I admire his complete commitment to that work.
[Read more…]

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Don’t go anywhere with Tom Hanks!

Hanks was hounded by a cabal which counted as a member a self-flagellating albino in The Da Vinci Code. East German punks stole his coat in Bridge of Spies, and Somali pirates his ship in Captain Phillips. He even played Chesley ‘Sully‘ Sullenberger, the most-skilled pilot who landed an airplane full of passengers on the East River. Speaking of passengers, his character was stranded for months at JFK airport in The Terminal.

But Tom Hanks’s most famous movie involving disastrous travel is Cast Away (2000), where he plays Chuck Noland, a FedEx executive who spends years talking to a volleyball named Wilson while stranded on an island somewhere in the Pacific.

Read my article, Don’t go anywhere with Tom Hanks!

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Mexico: Snakes on a plane

Three Spaniards on Mexico flight arrested with 260 reptiles in luggage. Dutch police that say many protected species were found among the haul

Dutch police have arrested three Spaniards on charges of illegally transporting animals after more than 260 reptiles – including lizards, chameleons, snakes and tortoises, many of them protected species – were found in their luggage after they arrived from Mexico at Amsterdam Airport.

LANGUAGE NOT SUITABLE FOR WORK:
[Read more…]

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Sunday palate cleanser: The Mikado

D’Oyly Carte Opera Company’s 1992 production celebrating the 150th anniversary of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s birthday

Libretto. The Mikado at the Gilbert and Sullivan Archive.

Special thanks to the visitors who purchase through my ads!

UPDATE
Swing by The Pink Flamingo for some Dmitri love.

[WARNING: If you click on the link you’ll be exposed to both politics and bad music] Richard Fernandez has some political thoughts on Florence Foster Jenkins.

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Argentina: Los Abandonados, the movie I want to see but can’t find. UPDATE: FOUND!

UPDATE:

Website: Los Abandonados Movie

Facebook page

Vimeo

Prior post:

Frances Martel writes about a new documentary, Los Abandonados (The Abandoned),

As Americans reflect on months at the negotiating table with Ali Khamenei, the new filmLos Abandonados (“The Abandoned”) demands a deeper look at another Iran deal: the one Argentina made to absolve the perpetrators of the largest terrorist attack in their history.

Part historical account and part spy novel, Los Abandonados tells the story of the death of Alberto Nisman, an Argentine prosecutor who was found dead of a gunshot to the head the day before he was to testify to Congress. He was to accuse President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of making a secret deal with the Iranian government to protect Hezbollah-linked terrorists. The terrorists in question are the orchestrators of the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA), the worst terror attack in Argentina’s history and the worst attack on the Western Hemisphere prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Readers of this blog know that I’ve been following the Nisman story, so I’m keenly interested in seeing the film.

However, it has no IMDB listing, movie times, or official website that I could find. It does have a YouTube channel.

Any information on where it’s playing will be greatly appreciated.

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