https://open.spotify.com/episode/6gEB1Iv8NSgKe9mxjcurLr?si=adb4bb2c055e41d9
Cinematic Music with Pauly Deathwish
Season 1 Episode 4
Tag Archives: desafinado
Democrats [2014)
For so long I dreamed.
Of visiting Africa.
Merely in film.
To say that I was not narrow-minded.
And to honor the one friend I have ever known from that beautiful continent.
A native of Chad.
Tchad.
And a former resident of Côte d’Ivoire.
Because I love geography.
But, even more, I love people.
And I am pleased to report that this documentary, about ZIMBABWE, is a masterpiece.
Directed by a Dane (as in Denmark) by the name of Camilla Nielsson.
And currently available in the U.S. for streaming on Netflix.
It is a recursive process.
For so long I cried.
When I thought of slavery.
When I saw the beautiful face of a black man.
And the teeth with many gaps.
I now know.
I can say.
My dear friend.
You look like you may have come from Zimbabwe.
But recursion may become tiresome.
So we will plop with geography for a moment.
Sadly ignoring Chad and Ivory Coast for the time being, we must locate (firmly) Zimbabwe on a map.
Champagne Castle.
Remove your sanctions.
Remove your sunshades.
Looks like South Africa (south)…and Botswana (west)…additionally Mozambique (east)…and gets hairy from there.
But you needs must only remember that the two Zs flock together: Zimbabwe and Zambia.
And so to the north (by way of northwest [not possible]) is Zambia.
Lusaka.
And over Angola is Luanda.
Lusaka.
Luanda.
You are really getting the hang of this 🙂
Have you thought about working for the State Department?
Recursive.
Going back.
But wait…there’s less!
Just remember that Zimbabwe is southeast Afrique.
Not on the coast.
That’s -zambique.
But landlocked.
Have you ever heard the rot of colonialism?
No no.
Have you ever heard a landlocked brass band?
The pitiful, wailing clarinets…
Landlocked is potentially poverty.
At the mercy of your neighbors.
Over land. Over sea.
One. Two. If.
Recur thyself!
No…
We must say it: MUGABE!
A big, fucking rockstar of totalitarianism.
Nah…
Dictatorshit!
Yes. His dictator shit!
As when the Dalai Lama was a boy.
And they kept his turds.
Because he was some kind of golden child.
But President Mugabe (since 1980) will forever have the ignominy of that desafinado military band behind him.
Celebrations like dirges.
Gloriously out of tune!
Nothing slight about it!!
And every head bows…and every knee genuflects in fealty.
A spry 93 years old.
And President of Zimbabwe for a mere 37 years.
He ain’t a king.
And worse: he’s only 4th on the list of usurping motherfuckers!
You’d have to go to shitholes like Angola (ahh, Luanda…), Cameroon, and the kicker (!) Equatorial Guinea to find jerks who have managed to outlast the black Hitler.
But I like Mugabe.
[what?????????]
No, no…let me explain.
First: the guy does have a Hitler mustache. More or less.
But that’s not why I like him. I don’t dig Hitler.
Wait…do I like Mugabe?
Well, there’s a time and place for everything (and everyone).
As you watch Democrats (mercifully…for all involved…NOT about the U.S. Democratic Party), you might grow attached to the various fuckers involved.
Politicians.
Lawyers!
But Third World lawyers.
Some sad shit…
But most importantly: brave, noble human beings.
You wanna see a real revolution?
Watch this film.
You wanna see some real sacrifices for democracy?
Watch this film.
To be sure…democracy is ugly!
And we Americans are the best at it.
Anything goes!
Fight, fuck, kill…but more like lie, cheat, deceive…yeah.
Democracy brings out the worst in people.
But it arrives at the best result.
It’s a goddamned crucible.
Just to think…that the master copy of the Constitution of Zimbabwe (ostensibly the subject of this film) was on a fucking Dell laptop.
Dell.
Right up the road from me.
Round Rock.
In the Westerns…
&
Michael Dell’s Horatio Alger story…at UT-Austin.
Even closer to me.
And #vault7.
So that we know that every scintilla–every Oxford comma was hacked by the CIA and/or NSA and known throughout the Five Eyes…even before the leaked hard copy hit newsstands in Harare.
Ah!
Another capital…
Reçu.
I can never go back. Enough. TO give you a full telling.
I guess Paul Mangwana is still alive.
This.
The character that grows on you.
From chuckling social engineer.
To political operative shitting his pants.
How do you say “damage control” in Shona?
Exactly.
And Susan Rice is a bitch.
But that’s neither here nor there.
Because Democrats so precisely parallels the recent U.S. election.
The drama. Allegations.
The swaggering strongman.
Yeah…Juan Williams would ride to town on that correlation.
So is Trump Mugabe?
Fuck no.
Not yet.
And probably not ever.
But liberals will have a field day with this possibility.
Social justice warriors will mouth off like the surly reporter from South Africa.
What an asshole!
And so we sympathize with Mr. Mangwana.
What a precarious position he was put in!
To try and bring the illusion of constitutionality to the ZANU-PF party.
But wait a minute…wait a minute…you ain’t heard nothing yet!
Remember, remember…that a black leader can repress black people.
America thought it was fine and dandy…and candy-shop clean when it elected CIA agent Barack Obama.
That turned out to be a big mistake.
One doesn’t investigate one’s own employer pursuant to crimes against humanity (9/11) when such equates to biting the hand that feeds.
Obama lost control.
And tried to get a little African in his lame-duck months.
Oops.
Yes…only democracy in the Middle East? Israel? You’ve got to be joking.
And Zimbabweans were so hopeful after the Mwangana/Mwonzora conclave wrapped up its two-year-overlong constitutional convention.
Got a little #MAGA in you?
Check out how a constitution is crafted.
If wasn’t all ass-kissing in Philadelphia.
Some genuinely contentious points.
And the Obamacare “Repeal and Replace” that just narrowly failed.
Think that wasn’t stressful?
Freedom Caucus gonna be outta jobs.
Saving their butts.
Sorry fuckers…
But I wouldn’t take their job for anything.
To be in that position.
Because.
We live a little while.
And then we die.
And so Camilla Nielsson deserves a Nobel (or at least a can of General Snus)…because she captured REAL, FUCKING LIFE here.
She doesn’t tell you what to think.
She says (in effect): “figure it out”.
Here’s the facts. Figure it out.
“I have seen what I have seen”, wrote Ezra Pound in his second Canto.
I can’t explain it.
Some drumming.
Women making turkey noises.
Weird, macarena dances.
And a little boy gets beaten to death.
All to write a new constitution.
And Douglas Mwonzora is right: Mugabe is evil.
That is a totally valid perspective.
Having seen this film.
[ahh…]
One source.
Never was anything decided on the basis of one source.
But circumstantial runs up against direct.
Very good, Eric Bolling!
And Tony Shaffer was better with MacGuffin.
But that’s just because this is Dossier du cinema.
Not cool enough for diacritics.
One final word…
Mugabe persists from the Soviet era.
Figure it out.
Is he a friend of NATO?
Do the geopolitical math.
Ruminate on AFRICOM.
Pound…was no patriot. Of his own country. In a traditional sense.
And the most I can bring you is this.
This attestation to genius.
The genius of Democrats by Camilla Nielsson.
And the sad face of former Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai…leader of the opposition MDC party.
Sad.
Like his face had been bashed in few too many times.
And maybe we don’t wanna know.
But the cowed look says it all.
And Douglas Mwonzora risks it all.
Three days in jail without food or water. Plus another 18 days to make it a full three weeks.
Mr. Mwonzora.
So calm.
Collected.
That cool we see in Jafar Panahi.
Yes.
You can jail me.
But you will have to thoroughly kill me.
To stop me.
From doing what I love.
-PD
The Man Who Knew Too Much [1956)
Netflix seems to be down tonight.
I tried several times. Several movies. Several fixes.
And so it is only fitting that history should trump the ephemeral stages of technological development.
Yes, time for a good old VHS tape.
And not a film about which I’ve previously written.
While I have surveyed many of the early Hitchcock films, I never wrote about the original version of this film.
1934.
To my knowledge, this is the only film of Alfred Hitchcock’s early career which he chose to remake.
Just on this fact alone, it would seem that the story was either very dear to the auteur or that he couldn’t resist something about the plot.
Granted, the two films are considerably different.
Even on a surface level, the 1934 version was (of course) in black and white.
But this was a VistaVision, Technicolor production.
1956.
22 years later.
For better or worse, I was familiar first with the earlier version.
It is a film I should revisit.
But it was not what I would call a “home run”.
The one aspect of the original which one might miss in the remake is the presence of Peter Lorre.
But we must move on to the future. The present.
1956.
Jimmy Stewart plays the leading male role. A doctor from Indianapolis.
Doris Day plays his wife.
The action is set for a good bit in Morocco.
Specifically, Marrakesh.
Indeed, the beginning of the film is a sort of travelogue.
In other words, its a good excuse to show off the exotic locale in North Africa.
Camels. Veils. [that one’s important] The social tradition of eating with the thumb and first two fingers of the right hand. While leaving the left hand in the lap.
All very edifying and exciting.
But Doris Day is suspicious from the start.
If we knew nothing of Hitchcock, we’d say her paranoia was unfounded.
But, in fact, it’s Jimmy Stewart’s ease which is the fateful misstep early on.
And so this movie is about suspicion.
Who can we trust?
In this age of anxiety (thank you W.H. Auden), everyone and everything is suspect.
The only true bliss is ignorance.
[and perhaps my only wisdom is that of paraphrase]
One thing which escaped me the first time I saw this version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (in the theater…lucky me) was a funny detail about Brenda de Banzie.
Yes, dear readers (and fans of Peter Sellers), Ms. de Banzie would later appear as the annoying, flamboyant Angela Dunning in The Pink Panther (1963).
Indeed, her role as the terror of Cortina (d’Ampezzo) was her second-to-last film.
But here she is a much more mysterious character.
I will leave it at that.
We get some interesting things in this film.
“Arabs” in disguise.
Which is to say, certain personages of the spook variety in brown makeup (and native garb).
One need not look very far back in history to find a poignant parallel.
Consider, for instance, the “Basra prison incident” of 2005.
I’m guessing that T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) would provide another example, though I am no expert on this matter.
As are almost all Hitchcock films, this one is a tense affair.
Doris Day, in particular, does a surprising job of portraying the personal terror of her character.
Perhaps most notable about this film is the musical component.
As an accomplished percussionist in my own right, I heartily appreciate Hitchcock’s attention to the intricacies of an orchestral percussion section.
Indeed, the film begins with a close-up of this little-featured “choir” (in addition to the three trumpets and three trombones at the bottom of the frame).
What is most remarkable is Hitchcock’s use of the musical score (in various permutations) to tell this unique story.
Funniest is the shot of the cymbalist’s sheet music.
It is nearly a complete tacit…save for one fateful crash.
I fondly remember (with some measure of anxiety) a time when I manned the cymbals for the overture of Verdi’s La forza del destino.
It was a similar affair.
Interminable waiting.
And if you miss your one crash? Even in rehearsal?
Well, you are screwed!
The judging stares of oboists are enough to melt a man…
But the musical score appears elsewhere.
In the private box.
Perhaps a page-turner for an assassin.
Most vividly, Hitchcock makes the score come alive in a fascinating series of extreme close-ups.
It is like a very erudite version of “follow the bouncing ball”.
So yes…some of our action happens at the Royal Albert Hall.
In an interesting twist of fate, usual Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann garners copious screen time as the conductor…OF ANOTHER COMPOSER’S WORK!
Were it Beethoven, I’d understand.
But the piece is Storm Clouds Cantata by Arthur Benjamin (who?) and D.B. Wyndham-Lewis (not to be confused with [Percy] Wyndham Lewis).
And yet it is a moving piece.
The London Symphony Orchestra sounds lovely (really magical!) in their on-screen segments.
But the real Leitmotiv of our film is “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)”.
Speaking of magic…it is always a gossamer thing to hear Doris Day sing this song in The Man Who Knew Too Much.
I remember a time when I didn’t know this song at all.
Being in a studio with Corinne Bailey Rae and hearing a playback of her wonderful band own this song.
And my discovery of Sly and the Family Stone’s inimitable version (sung by Rose Stone).
But few movie music moments equal Doris Day in her Marrakesh hotel room singing “Que Sera, Sera…” with little desafinado Christopher Olson.
The only ones which come close are Rita Hayworth (actually Jo Ann Greer?) singing the Rodgers and Hart masterpiece “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” the next year (1957) in Pal Joey and Ms. Hayworth “singing” (actually Anita Kert Ellis) “Put the Blame on Mame” in Gilda (1946).
An interesting note about this version of The Man Who Knew Too Much…
It seems to be a sort of forgotten classic, wedged as it is between the first of my Hitchcock “holy trinity” (Rear Window, 1954) and the other two perfect films (Vertigo, 1958, and North by Northwest, 1959).
Actually, this was a period of experimentation for Hitchcock.
Our film most precisely follows the odd comedy (!) The Trouble with Harry (1955) and precedes the black and white hand-wringer The Wrong Man (released later in 1956).
But The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) should not be forgotten!
It is such a beautifully-shot film!
Robert Burks’ cinematography is divine.
And George Tomasini’s editing is artfully deft.
Like To Catch a Thief (which is actually on Netflix in the U.S. [last time I checked]), The Man Who Knew Too Much is a film which perhaps needs multiple viewings to be truly appreciated.
-PD
A fost sau n-a fost? [2006)
It took me a long time. To come back to Romania. Country I’ve never visited. But in film.
I do not know which Romanian film I saw first. It may have been 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
It may have been The Way I Spent the End of the World.
You can read my praise for those two perfect films here on my site.
But let me just say that I am honored to finally review what I consider the third perfect Romanian film:
12:08 East of Bucharest.
The Romanian title translates directly as “It was or was not?”
Perhaps a little massaging would render the phrase more like “Was it or wasn’t it?”
And so what is this Hamletesque sentence driving at?
That is the question!
The revolution. The Romanian Revolution.
In a particular town (Vaslui) was there a revolution or wasn’t there?
While this may sound like a rather dry premise, let me assure you that director Corneliu Porumboiu proves himself to be a master on the order of his countrymen Cristian Mungiu and Cătălin Mitulescu.
Porumboiu is helped by the fantastic acting of three stellar performers.
Mircea Andreescu plays the character Emanoil Piscoci. Andreescu’s comic timing as the awkward Mr. Piscoci is one of the defining elements of this film.
Also indispensable is Ion Sapdaru as Professor Manescu. Sapdaru’s desperation and body language also make this film the timeless gem that it is.
Though we may not completely sympathize with his brusque character, Teodor Corban does an admirable job portraying the unifying (and polarizing) Virgil Jderescu.
Finally, I cannot leave out the small-but-pithy contribution of the excellent George Guoqingyun.
[we now interrupt this horribly boring review to bring you the point]
The point?
Black humor. Bleak humor. Dark humor.
The town…looks as shitty as my town. My neighborhood.
There aren’t any explosions. No CGI.
No superheroes. In fact, there’s not even a pretty girl with whom to fall in love.
That’s reality right there. Verismo.
As the snow falls on Vaslui I feel the same desperation I feel on a daily basis.
The cracked concrete of the apartment buildings. The sad roofs. From above.
The band is a little out of tune. Desafinado. I love them.
This film isn’t like the oblivion of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. It doesn’t have a blooming flower of hope in its heart like The Way I Spent the End of the World.
But it shares with those films a country and a particular way of looking at the world. Show the bad stuff.
The difference here is, “Show the bad stuff…and then laugh a little.”
A little.
It will still make you cry.
No, it’s not a calculated Italian confection.
This is a beautifully sloppy film.
It’s films such as this which make me push on–which make me keep writing. I keep hoping.
Porumboiu…your crappy world gives me hope in my crappy world. Thank you.
-PD
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