The End of the Affair

I watched Neil Jordan’s ‘The End of the Affair’ again recently, and inevitably I was thinking of Yash Chopra’s ‘Jab Tak Hain Jaan’. When the film was released, I was telling my friends, who’d care to listen, the movie is based on the Graham Greene novel (now, Wikipedia, sort of, confirms it). At least, the crux of the plot is similar. The girl in a made-for-each-other pair vows not to see her lover again if he only lives. The lover is presumably dead; in the original text and the film, following the bombing during WWII and in the modern retelling of the Hindi film, due to a road accident, but of course, in London. In both the cases, the God in the other end of the bargain is the Christian God, the Catholic one.

This is where, however, the similarity ends. While Greene’s novel and in turn, Jordan’s movie is, as the narrator himself confesses, about jealously, Chopra’s film is, as usual, a Bollywood study of unrequited love, which at the end becomes a triumph of love. And, instead of the Sarah’s husband in the original, the Bollywood film has another girl to love the hero, played by Shah Rukh Khan, an eye candy in hot pants for the audience, to heighten the tragic plight of the hero so that audience are all very happy when he finally gets the girl.

The Jordan film begins with Ralph Fiennes’s Maurice Bendrix writing in the typewriter, “This is a story of hate.” It begins with the hatred for Sarah, the great love of his life who left him to fulfill her vows. Seething with jealousy and hate, he hires a private eye to follow Sarah. Finally, he learns the truth and envisions God, for whom Sarah had left him, as his enemy. There is a Yash Chopra happy ending, but briefly, as it is God who finally wins, as Sarah dies, in the process making Maurice, a non-believer, acknowledge the existence of the Christian God, even if grudgingly. In the end, the story becomes a meditation on faith, and in an ironic twist, Greene even makes Sarah a martyr for love and almost a saint; she at least performs one miracle, healing a young boy.

In ‘Jab Tak Hain Jaan’, on the other hand, God and the entire promise to God plotline, remains a plot point, an artificial way of separating the lovers, so that we can witness how great their love is. There is no great tension, and whenever there is a friction, it is, in the tradition of a Bollywood masala film, loud and melodramatic, like the church scenes. Consider the subtlety of ‘The End of the Affair’: There’s only one church scene in the film. This is when the lovers reunite. There’s no talking to Gods in front of alter, for God’s sake. Yet, the tension is palpable. Here, God almost appear to be character, a nemesis so to speak. In ‘Jab Tak Hain Jaan’, he is just a mere prop.


The End of the Affair (1951) is a novel by British author Graham Greene, as well as the title of two feature films (released in 1955 and 1999) that were adapted for the screen based on the novel. Set in London during and just after the Second World War, the novel examines the obsessions, jealousy and discernments within the relationships between three central characters: writer Maurice Bendrix; Sarah Miles; and her husband, civil servant Henry Miles. Graham Greene's own affair with Lady Catherine Walston played into the basis for The End of the Affair. The British edition of the novel is dedicated to "C" while the American version is made out to "Catherine." Greene's own house at 14 Clapham Common Northside was bombed during the Blitz.
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The End of the Affair is a 1999 drama film directed by Neil Jordan and starring Ralph Fiennes, Julianne Moore and Stephen Rea. The film is based on The End of the Affair, a 1951 novel by British author Graham Greene.
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The End of the Affair is a 1955 film directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Deborah Kerr, Van Johnson, Peter Cushing and John Mills. It is based on the novel The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. It was filmed largely on location in London, particularly in and around the picturesque Chester Terrace. This version was made in black and white. The film was entered into the 1955 Cannes Film Festival.
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Showing & Telling

My review of Sanjiv Batla’s novel ‘Mr J Has Left Us’, published in Indian Literature, the bi-monthly magazine published from the Sahitya Akademi.

Now, I think I was little harsh about it. This is because I really liked the novel and I had really high expectation. It’s a good read nonetheless.

Here is an excerpt:

It’s true. Bhatla’s description of lower-middle class Mumbai is spot on. He describes the scenes with the eye of a painter, detailed, yet full of humour and insight. In the beginning of the novel, Bhatla describes a drinking scene in a seedy bar which is so realistic that you can almost smell the booze. He describes the streets, the guest house where Mr J resides, his friends, the struggling actors who end up working as extras and struggling screenwriter who hide their frustrations in Marxism and Chaplin with clear-eyed realism, which would remind of Henry Fielding’s classic ‘Tom Jones’.

This is high praise indeed, and Bhatla’s efforts deserve it. Unlike the modern crop of Indian writers in English, who are inspired by Chacha Choudhury, Bollywood films and religious tele-serials to writer popular fiction, Bhatla knows his Eng Lit. His literary ambition is mainstream British Literature, from its picaresque tradition of Fielding to the social realism of Charles Dickens to the suburban drama of Kingsley Amis to the tradition of modern British fiction of Ian McEwen and Martin Amis.

In fact, in ‘Mr J Has Left Us’ Bhatla attempts an Indian novel in the vein of Martin Amis. That he is fails to achieve his lofty aims is understandable. The attempt itself is a tall order.

It is interesting, however, to figure where Bhatla fails. This is an easy question to answer.

The premise is easy – contrast a naïve young man against the backdrop of a microcosm of modern India that is Mumbai and observe the results with a wry, ironic eye and repot about it with dollops of humour. Bhatla tries his best, and almost succeeds.

But. There’s always a but.

World War Z

India is a black hole a zombie apocalypse hits the world. Now, it’s all up to Brad Pit in Israel. In Marc Forster’s World War Z (2013)

Iron Man Three

I’m not a fan of Iron Man movies, despite the fact that I am a big fan of Robert Downey Jr antics, and I especially like his megalomaniac, playboy superhero persona in these films. The films themselves are not really great, with flying robots battling flying robots in the sky, or whatever. I did not like the first film at all, though I saw it in the theatre and it was great to look at. I liked the second film in patches, especially the beginning, till the Iron Man suit takes over.

Despite this, I was looking forward to seeing Iron Man Three, after seeing the character of Mandarin, played by Sir Ben Kingsley, in the trailers. He was a magnificent villain in the trailer.

So, imagine my surprise when the reality of Kingsley’s Mandarin turned out to be something else altogether. Yet, without doubt, he is the best part of the film. Apart from playacting his villainy, he has just two scenes, and he is magnificent in them. His comic timing is impeccable. I think it is his best comic work since ‘Sexy Beast’, that film was something else altogether.

Other than Kingsley, another thing I liked about the new Iron Man film is that, as the Tony Stark feels more and more venerable after the New York Incident (as depicted in last year’s ‘The Avengers’), he is more and more outside his Iron Suit. Which, of course make more interesting, even during the action sequences. There is a whole extended sequence of him in Tennessee sans the suit, which was good. And Stark is quite resource defending himself even without his armour.

Apart for that, it’s the usual fare. The main villain of the piece Guy Pierce gets to show off his abs at the end and combusting himself, and he could breathe fire, literally. I am actually a big fan of Don Cheadle, but his presence in Iron Man is really underwhelming. Even here, he doesn’t do anything exciting. Another of my favourite actor, Rebecca Hall, too have nothing much to do here, and to die at the end, trying to save the hero.

And the climax! All those flying Iron Men! Thanks heavens they are all finally gone. As the film ends, I have a hunch that this is it for the Iron Man standalone movies. Three times the charms, I guess. But, when it’s Hollywood, you never know.

Byzantium

Writes Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian:
And it is by a typically bleak British beach that Neil Jordan has created this florid, preposterous but watchable soap opera of the undead; it's a dark fantasy that contains a trace of his slight weakness for whimsy, but in some ways it's his most effective film for some time, adapted for the screen by Moira Buffini from her stage play A Vampire Story. The seaside town is unnamed, but it appears to be shot in Hastings, making full use of that town's eerie Graham Greeneian spectacle: the charred pier that was torched by arsonists in 2010. Its restoration may not be easy. The town may in any case decide the pier is more of a morbid attraction for sightseers and film crews the way it is.

Gemma Arterton plays Clara, a hardworking prostitute and lap-dancer with a mysterious past; she's on the run from a couple of nameless individuals and shows up at this wintry anti-Riviera with her daughter, Eleanor, played by Saoirse Ronan. They need money, of course, so Clara hangs out by the funfair and agrees a price of £50 to perform a sex act on Noel, a furtive, bespectacled, anorak-wearing businessman played by Daniel Mays. But poor Noel blubberingly fails to go through with it, because his mum has just died. Shrewd Clara elicits the information that Noel's late mother owned a run-down boarding-house-cum-B&B called Byzantium that she reckons could easily be repurposed into a lucrative seafront brothel. Meanwhile, Eleanor enrols at sixth-form college and horrifies her teacher (Tom Hollander) by making him think she must be a victim of abuse with an autobiographical writing assignment in which Eleanor claims that she and her mother are hundreds of years old. The story intercuts with sinister, occult events that took place on the same town two centuries previously, with two dashing veterans of the Napoleonic wars: Darvell and Ruthven (pronounced "Riven") played by Sam Riley and Jonny Lee Miller.

Any story about vampires set in what is recognisably 21st-century reality has to decide how to negotiate the dominance of Stephenie Meyer and her world-conquering creation, Twilight. You either ignore it, or treat it ironically, like the spoof movie Vampires Suck, which had one good line: "In the 80s, coke was all the rage; the 90s, grunge. Now it's the era of vampires." Jordan prudently ignores it, though in the real world Eleanor's teacher would not be horrified or even surprised at a pupil's essay claiming vampire status. Every girl and boy in his class would be writing a vampire confession. The teacher himself would be writing a vampire confession – and knocking it out at 99p a pop, direct to the Amazon Kindle.
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Stray Dogs

The NEW Tsai Ming-liang film, JIAOYOU (Stray Dogs), which won the GRAND JURY PRIZE at the recently concluded 70th Venice Film Festival.

Cannot wait to behold the film! I am not really a fan of "slow films," but with Ming-liang, the experience is always hyptonic, distrubingly so. I still remember watching his last film 'Visage (Face) (2008) three years back, that too in a big screen.

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Synopsis: A father and his two children wander the margins of modern day Taipei, from the woods and rivers of the outskirts to the rain streaked streets of the city. By day the father scrapes out a meager income as a human billboard for luxury apartments, while his young son and daughter roam the supermarkets and malls surviving off free food samples. Each night the family takes shelter in an abandoned building. The father is strangely affected by a hypnotic mural adorning the wall of this makeshift home. On the day of the father’s birthday the family is joined by a woman—might she be the key to unlocking the buried emotions that linger from the past?

Director’s Statement: There is no story to tell. Hsiaokang is a good for nothing who holds signboards for a living. He smokes and pisses in the streets that are ever flowing with vehicles and pedestrians. The only people in his life are his two children. They eat together, brush their teeth together, get changed together and sleep together. They have no water or electrical supply and sleep on the same mattress with a head of cabbage, tightly embracing each other. The whole city has become a dumping ground for stray dogs and the river is far, far away. Then, one stormy night, he decides to take his children on a sailing trip.
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In a small concrete room, with black mould climbing up its crumbling walls, a woman is watching two children sleep. She runs a brush through her hair, and the gentle scruff-scruff-scruff noise of the bristles mixes with the sound of falling rain. One of the children starts breathing heavily, in little half-sighs, half-snores, and as time passes, you realise that your own breath, and the breath of the audience, has synchronised with his. This single shot, the first in Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs, runs for seven minutes. Welcome to slow cinema.

Stray Dogs screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival earlier this week, although even the idea of pitting it against Philomena and Tracks for the Golden Lion is utterly bizarre — like admiring the buns and scones on a village fete’s baking competition table and noticing someone has entered a photograph of a sock.

Those films tell you stories with beginnings, middles and ends, but Tsai, a long-standing hero of slow cinema fans, is offering something very different. This is a meditation on the way time flows through our lives, when seconds can stretch into hours and entire months can be swallowed by a single cut. It perhaps goes without saying that you have to be in the mood for it, as does everyone else: if you think hearing a mobile phone ring during Iron Man is bad enough, wait until it happens in the middle of a heartbeat-slowing eight-minute shot of a woman staring at a mural of a mountain lake.
The mongrels of the title are a middle-aged father, played by Tsai’s regular leading man Lee Kang-sheng, and his young son and daughter (who are played by Lee’s real-life nephew and niece). During the day he works as a ‘human billboard’, holding adverts for estate agents beside a busy road, while his children roam the city’s parks and streets. At night, they bed down in a ruined tower block. Later, the boy and girl meet up with a woman who may or may not be the same one we see in the first scene: she is played by a different actress, but the film suggests she may be the same person.
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“I have become tired of cinema,” Tsai rather grandly announces in the press notes for his latest, adding that he has no interest in making “the kinds of films that expect the patronage of cinema audiences.” Viewed as a corroborating statement in that manifesto, “Stray Dogs” works with effective perversity: Never the most broadly accessible of filmmakers, Tsai here seems to be stripping his ornately eccentric style down to formal fundamentals. A certain pictorial grace remains; his sense of humor, sadly, appears to have been largely tossed out with the bathwater.

The film opens on the image of an elegant, initially faceless young woman (Yang Kuei-mei) repeatedly brushing her lustrous mane of hair as two kids we presume are her own (real-life siblings Lee Yi-chieh and Lee Yi-cheng, the director’s godchildren) snore soundly behind her. It’s a witchily seductive image held just long enough to be hypnotic, though the film’s showpiece shots will get longer and less compelling from there. The woman disappears for the remainder of the film, though her character returns in the guise of two other actresses — a gambit likely to fox even diligent arthouse audiences, who could easily be forgiven for puzzling over the family structure of this semi-broken home.

For the film’s first half, at least, it’s the disenfranchised man of the house (Lee Kang-sheng, real-life uncle to his onscreen offspring) who drives what we shall call, for the sake of convenience, the action. Introduced while braving the elements as a human signpost at a busy intersection — where we shall visit him on several further occasions — he appears to have been left to fend on his own for the children.

This mode of largely wordless breadline realism, complete with solemn smoke breaks and outdoor urination, is sustained until a scene that is sure to be the film’s talked-about creative coup: an 11-minute take in which our unnamed hero by turn smothers, eats and nurses a whole cabbage found in his bed, weeping all the while. Cole-crop asphyxiation is a psychological low from which any man can only recover, and the film’s more enigmatic remainder does seemingly take the family to a point of reparation — though this bizarre emotional pivot doesn’t prompt anything so cathartic as a full tilt into madness. There is, however, at least one longer take to come, all stoic silence complete with single tear rolling down a character’s cheek; Tsai’s self-professed rejection of cinema, it seems, does not require a rejection of sentimentality.
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In a festival that's seen a number of endurance tests—Philip Groning's three-hour, 59-chapter "The Police Officer's Wife," the abstracted imagery of "Under The Skin," the brief but unrelentingly terrible duration of "Parkland," no film seemed to inspire more walk outs than "Stray Dogs." The return of acclaimed Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang after a 4-year absence (and longer since he made a film at home: 2009's "Play" mostly featured French actors), it's not that it’s particularly lengthy, or particularly provocative in its content.

But anyone familiar with Tsai's earlier work—"Goodbye Dragon Inn" is perhaps the best known—will be aware that he marches very much to his own pace and to his own beat, and almost as much as anything he's ever made, "Stray Dogs" frustrates those looking for answers or traditional narrative, and moves at an especially sleepy pace, with some shots lasting around the ten minute mark. But those who stayed to the end were rewarded with one of the most distinctive and beguiling films of the festival.

Tsai sets the tone for what's to follow with a lengthy shot of a moldy flat, where two children (Lee Yi Cheng and his sister Li Yi Chieh) sleep while a woman, presumably their mother, watches over them, brushing her hair over her face. Soon, she's gone, and the children are left living in a shipping container with their father (Lee Kang-Sheng), who makes a meager living, most of which is spent on alcohol and cigarettes, holding up an advertising sign in the middle of the motorway.

The children don't seem to be in school anymore, instead spending their days playing and living off free supermarket samples. The woman returns, in a way; two other actresses return as maternal figures, in the shape of Lu Yi Cheng and Chen Shang Chyi, but it's not totally apparent from the film itself that they're meant to be the same character (though Tsai suggests otherwise in the press notes, saying he split the role into three after a health scare, in case he never had another chance to work with the actresses).

It should be fairly apparent at this point that "Stray Dogs" is not going to be for everyone, even before a narrative shift midway through that essentially restarts the film. This is Art Cinema in very deliberate upper case, with a languid naturalism that, while highly grounded, creates a mood more dream-like than kitchen sink.
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Taipei-based Chinese director Tsai Ming-liang announced at the Venice Film Festival, where his latest film "Stray Dogs" is in competition, that the movie would be his last, but left himself some wriggle room. READ THE COMPLETE INTERVIEW IN REUTERS HERE>

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China's Taiwan-based director Tsai Ming-liang won the new Grand Jury Prize for his film "Jiaoyou" (Stray Dogs) at the 70th Venice International Film Festival on Saturday. When awarded the prize, given to a film that was particularly appreciated by the members of the international jury, the 55-year-old director earned warm applause from the audience of the festival's closing ceremony. "I thank all the jury members and the public in Venice for slowing down their pace to watch my movie," he said referring to some slow framings, defined by many as almost paintings, that last for several minutes.

"Jiaoyou," which premiered on Thursday, tells the story of a disgraced man, Hsiao Kang (played by Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng,) who holds signboards for a living in Taipei's streets that are ever flowing with vehicles and pedestrians. The only people in Hsiao Kang's life are his two children, and the single-parent family moves from one abandoned building to another until it is unexpectedly joined by a woman who might be the key to unlock the buried feelings that linger from the past. In a press conference earlier this week, Tsai said that "Jiaoyou" might be his last movie, though he does not know what are "the destiny's plans" for him.
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Like Benning's austere landscape contemplations -- "casting a glance" is breezy and speedy compared with much of his output -- "Stray Dogs" is heavily concerned with time and duration, and their effect on the audience. It runs 138 minutes and contains 76 or 77 shots (I lost count both times), so the average shot-length is less than two minutes. But in this story of a poverty-stricken dad (Tsai's regular alter ego Lee Kang-Sheng) and his two children eking out an existence on the rainy streets of Taiwan's third largest city Taichung, five shots run more than five minutes apiece, and that has caused some viewers severe problems.

Most testing are the picture's "unholy trio" comprising of the following: a bedroom scene in which Lee's drunken dad cradles, attacks and eats a white cabbage (10 min 43 sec); a night scene in which Lee and a woman contemplate a mural in an abandoned building (13 min 45 sec); a shot of the mural itself that runs a mere seven minutes. There’s no hardier scourge of slow-cinema poseurs than yours truly, but to put Tsai into that category is rather like sticking Veronese or Titian in with the clods whose gaudy daubs of Piazza San Marco can be bought in every other shop on and around Piazza San Marco.

There's nothing remotely gratuitous or affected about Tsai's film, edited by Lei Zhenqing, and by the final third our conception of time itself has been so thoroughly warped that many "Stray Dogs" viewers were stunned that the picture ended when it did, so convinced there was perhaps another half-hour to go. Not that everyone got so far, the instantly notorious "cabbage scene" (the humble brassica's finest big-screen cameo) sorting the sprouts from the broccoli, as it were. And not even the international critics of Fipresci – invariably champions of the "difficult" and the unfairly abused - were convinced, giving their prize to Xavier Dolan's "Tom at the Farm."
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SEE MING-LIANG'S 2012 SHORT FILM 'WALKER' HERE>>>>

The Great Gatsby

I didn’t quite fancy the 3D spectacle, old sport!

I’m not a fan of the book either, though I have read it twice. I read it the first time after I saw the book on the table of my senior in the hostel. It was a part of his syllabus. I finished it in one day. I found Jay Gatsby’s love for Daisy fascinating, and his longing at the green light on Daisy’s balcony. Of course, I found the ending sad.

The second time I read it when the book was slotted second in the list of 100 great books of 20th Century (I was on an unrealistic schedule to read all the 100 books, one after another, which of course did not happen. I couldn’t even finish the first book in the list, ‘Ulysses’.). Anyways, this time round, I found the book good, but not necessarily interesting. This time round, I, however, liked how the book ended, with both Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s lovers ending up dead. A poetic justice, if ever there was one. Now, they can console each other.

I also saw the Robert Redford-Mia Farrow version of the film, with Redford looking dapper in his cap and Farrow, alluring as ever. I found Redford in the film desperate enough to look like Gatsby.

Now, coming back to Baz Luhrmann spectacle, I don’t know, it is spectacular enough, it’s in 3D, it’s grandiose and Carey Mulligar looks million bucks, but do I like the film? I don’t know.

Talking about spectacle, the film almost looks like a brainless Bollywood blockbuster. Luhrmann re-imagination of the Jazz Age comes via Bollywood over-the-top visuals. Luhrmann is a fan of Bollywood, of course. Remember the ‘chamma chamma’ song for a fleeting second in ‘Moulin Rouge!’ And, this one has Amitabh Bachchan!

To begin with, the visuals are eye-popping. Even Nick’s modest flat is filled with exotic flowers. And, ah, those parties that Gatsby hosts! You can almost single-handedly blame him for the coming of the Great Depression. Such excess!

My biggest problem was, however, the verbal assaults, with Tobey Maguire’s Nick incessantly talking in the background (that too in a peculiar accent), even when we can very well see the subject of his description on screen. It’s like storytelling for dummies. This goes to such an extent that when there is no visual to show for the talk that Nick is giving, we are show the words he speaks floating on the screen, along with snowflakes. Whatever!

Then, there is Leonardo DiCaprio’s Gatsby mouthing ‘Old Sport’, at every possible opportunity he gets, sometimes just for the heck of it. We know, the film explains where he learnt the words and why he uses them. It gives him this ‘old money’ affectation. But the way DiCaprio uses the words, it’s a bit too much.

In the book, despite Gatsby being a villain, we learn to appreciate him, following Nick’s justifications; it’s a tragic love story after all. But, amidst Luhrmann’s spectacles, that love story is somewhat lost. If there is a love story in this film, it actually Nick’s unrequited love for Gatsby. The way he worships Gatsby and goes nuts after he is dead, it’s nothing short of love.

We Didn't Start The Fire

This song. This song.

Listen to this song and you don't have to read World History of the 20th Century. It got everything. And, how cleaverly!

And, what I song!

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray,
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio,
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe,
Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, "The King and I" and "The Catcher in the Rye"
Eisenhower, vaccine, England's got a new queen,
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc,
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron,
Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock"
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team,
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland,
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev,
Princess Grace, "Peyton Place", trouble in the Suez
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac,
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai"
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball,
Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide,
Buddy Holly, "Ben Hur", space monkey, Mafia,
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go,
U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy,
Chubby Checker, "Psycho", Belgians in the Congo,
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion,
"Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania,
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson,
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex,
JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say?
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again,
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock,
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline,
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan,
"Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide,
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz,
Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law,
Rock and roller cola wars, I can't fight it anymore
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
Will it still burn on, and on, and on, and on
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire

Songwriters
JOEL, BILLY / O'BRIEN-DOCKER, JOHN (MetroLyrics)

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"We Didn't Start the Fire" is a song by Billy Joel. Its lyrics include brief, rapid-fire allusions to more than 100 headline events between January 1949 (Joel was born on May 9 of that year) and 1989, when the song was released on his album Storm Front. The song was a No. 1 hit in the US.

Joel got the idea for the song as he was talking with someone on the verge of turning 21, who averred that the world was an unfixable mess. Joel replied to him, "I thought the same things when I was 21". The person replied, "Yeah, but you grew up in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties". Joel retorted, "Wait a minute, didn't you hear of Korea, the Hungarian freedom fighters or the Suez Crisis?" Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.

Joel has said, "I'm a history nut. I devour books. At one time I wanted to be a history teacher". According to his mother, he was a bookworm by the age of seven. Unlike most of Joel's songs, the lyrics were written before the melody, owing to the somewhat unusual style of the song. The song was a huge commercial success and was Joel's third Billboard No. 1 hit. It was nominated for the Grammy Award for Record of the Year.
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Seamus Heaney

30 August 2013 | Poet Seamus Heaney dies aged 74

Seamus Heaney, acclaimed by many as the best Irish poet since WB Yeats, has died aged 74. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past". Over his long career he was awarded numerous prizes and received many honours for his work. He recently suffered from ill health.

His 2010 poetry collection The Human Chain was written after he suffered a stroke and the central poem, Miracle, was directly inspired by his illness. Heaney's publisher, Faber, said: "We cannot adequately express our profound sorrow at the loss of one of the world's greatest writers. His impact on literary culture is immeasurable. "As his publisher we could not have been prouder to publish his work over nearly 50 years. He was nothing short of an inspiration to the company, and his friendship over many years is a great loss."

Heaney was born in April 1939, the eldest of nine children, on a farm near Toomebridge in County Derry, Northern Ireland, but as a child moved to the village of Bellaghy. He was educated at St Columb's College, Derry, a Catholic boarding school, and later at Queen's University Belfast, before before training as a teacher. He settled in Dublin, with periods of teaching in the US. Heaney was an honorary fellow at Trinity College Dublin and, last year, was bestowed with the Seamus Heaney Professorship in Irish Writing at the university, which he described as a great honour.

Heaney's first book, Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966, reflected his rural upbringing, but as Ireland's troubles increased his work took a more political turn. In 2011, Heaney donated a collection of his literary papers to the National Library of Ireland. It included manuscripts of his poetry, a comprehensive and vast collection of loose-leaf, typescript and manuscript worksheets and bound notebooks. The collection spanned Heaney's literary career, from the publication of Death of a Naturalist (1966), to volumes such as Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975), right through to Station Island (1984), Seeing Things (1991) and his most recent publications, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010). The latter won the prestigious £10,000 Forward Prize in 2010.
Heaney described the collection, his 12th, as his most personally revealing collection of poems. He had been nominated for the Forward Prize three times before, but this was his first win. Judge and author Ruth Padel described Heaney's volume as "painful, honest, and delicately weighted".

Over the course of his career, Heaney also won the TS Eliot Prize, and was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Heaney was the professor of poetry at Oxford University between 1989 and 1994.In an interview with the Today programme's James Naughtie in early 2013, Heaney remembered how he felt when he first discovered poetry. "It was the voltage of the language, it was entrancing," he said. "I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on." Heaney is survived by his wife, Marie, and children, Christopher, Michael and Catherine Ann.
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Heaney won the Nobel prize for literature in 1995 and was celebrated for his many collections of poetry during his lifetime. He won the TS Eliot Prize in 2006 for his collection District and Circle. In 2010 he won the Forward poetry prize for Human Chain, a volume of verse inspired by his experiences after a stroke; his earlier collection The Spirit Level was shortlisted in 1996, as was District and Circle in 2006. Heaney was born on a small farm near Toomebridge in County Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1939, "the eldest child of an ever-growing family". In his Nobel address in Stockholm he spoke lovingly of his childhood in a three-roomed thatched farmhouse at Mossbawn where, in their early years, he and his siblings passed "a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world".

After attending boarding school at St Columb's College in Derry city as a scholarship boy – a transition, as he has said, "from the earth of farm labour to the heaven of education" – Heaney went on to study at Queen's University Belfast, where he joined a generation of "Northern poets" that included Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. He published his first major collection, Death of a Naturalist, in 1966. He contributed a first edition of Death of a Naturalist to a recent auction in aid of the writers' charity Pen, writing in pencil, above the poem "At a Potato Digging", that the critic 'Anthony Thwaite once described me (to my face) as "laureate of the root vegetable"'.

On another page, he wrote: "These two poems (along with 'Digging') were published by Karl Miller in the Christmas issue of The New Statesman, 1964 - and the poems caught the eye of the editors at Faber. Whence this volume." Many of the poems he wrote in the 1970s and the 1980s, during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, are unflinching threnodies for a terrible time. On receiving the David Cohen prize for lifetime excellence in writing in 2009, Heaney chose to sum up his achievement in poetry by reading his lyrical evocation of a moment during his honeymoon, The Underground, and his sonnet A Drink of Water. The Underground sees him and his wife, Marie, "Honeymooning, moonlighting, late for the Proms", running down the corridor from the underground to the Royal Albert Hall. Heaney imagines himself as an Orpheus who won't look back, and therefore keeps his bride. A Drink of Water recalls a memory from his childhood, of an old woman who drew water every morning, "Like an old bat staggering up the field", who is revealed later as a muse of sorts to the poet. Heaney said it was "about receiving a gift and being enjoined to 'remember the giver'" – something he said he would always do when remembering that evening.

At the close of his Nobel address he spoke of "poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit": "the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being".
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>>>>> Seamus Heaney (/ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/; 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born at Mossbawn farmhouse between Castledawson and Toomebridge, he resided in Dublin until his death.

Other awards that Heaney received include the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the PEN Translation Prize (1985), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999).He has been a member of Aosdána since its foundation and has been Saoi since 1997. He was both the Harvard and the Oxford Professor of Poetry and was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996. Heaney's literary papers are held by the National Library of Ireland. On 6 June 2012, he was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry.

Robert Pinsky observed of Heaney, "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller". Robert Lowell called him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats" and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have echoed the sentiment that he was "the greatest poet of our age".
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Seamus Heaney read his poem, 'Bogland' at RTE Archives.

>>>>>> With the publication of Selected Poems, 1966-1987 (1990) Heaney marked the beginning of a new direction in his career. Poetry contributor William Logan commented of this new direction, "The younger Heaney wrote like a man possessed by demons, even when those demons were very literary demons; the older Heaney seems to wonder, bemusedly, what sort of demon he has become himself." In Seeing Things (1991) Heaney demonstrates even more clearly this shift in perspective. Jefferson Hunter, reviewing the book for the Virginia Quarterly Review, maintained that collection takes a more spiritual, less concrete approach. "Words like 'spirit' and 'pure'… have never figured largely in Heaney's poetry," Hunter explained. However, in Seeing Things Heaney uses such words to "create a new distanced perspective and indeed a new mood" in which "'things beyond measure' or 'things in the offing' or 'the longed-for' can sometimes be sensed, if never directly seen." The Spirit Level (1996) continues to explore humanism, politics and nature.

Always respectfully received, Heaney’s later work, including his second collected poems, Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 (1998), has been lavishly praised. Reviewing Opened Ground for the New York Times Book Review, Edward Mendelson commented that the volume “eloquently confirms [Heaney’s] status as the most skillful and profound poet writing in English today." With Electric Light (2001), Heaney broadened his range of allusion and reference to Homer and Virgil, while continuing to make significant use of memory, elegy and the pastoral tradition. According to John Taylor in Poetry, Heaney "notably attempts, as an aging man, to re-experience childhood and early-adulthood perceptions in all their sensate fullness." Paul Mariani in America found Electric Light "a Janus-faced book, elegiac" and "heartbreaking even." Mariani noted in particular Heaney's frequent elegies to other poets and artists, and called Heaney "one of the handful writing today who has mastered that form as well."

Heaney’s next volume District and Circle (2006) won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the most prestigious poetry award in the UK. Commenting on the volume for the New York Times, critic Brad Leithauser found it remarkably consistent with the rest of Heaney’s oeuvre. But while Heaney’s career may demonstrate an “of-a-pieceness” not common in poetry, Leithauser found that Heaney’s voice still “carries the authenticity and believability of the plainspoken—even though (herein his magic) his words are anything but plainspoken. His stanzas are dense echo chambers of contending nuances and ricocheting sounds. And his is the gift of saying something extraordinary while, line by line, conveying a sense that this is something an ordinary person might actually say.”

Increasingly seen as an “elder statesman” of poetry, Heaney’s prose constitutes an important part of his work. Heaney often uses prose to address concerns taken up obliquely in his poetry. In The Redress of Poetry (1995), according to James Longenbach in the Nation, "Heaney wants to think of poetry not only as something that intervenes in the world, redressing or correcting imbalances, but also as something that must be redressed—re-established, celebrated as itself." The book contains a selection of lectures the poet delivered at Oxford University as Professor of Poetry. Heaney's Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2001 (2002) earned the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the largest annual prize for literary criticism in the English language. John Carey in the London Sunday Times proposed that Heaney's "is not just another book of literary criticism…It is a record of Seamus Heaney's thirty-year struggle with the demon of doubt. The questions that afflict him are basic. What is the good of poetry? How can it contribute to society? Is it worth the dedication it demands?" Heaney himself described his essays as "testimonies to the fact that poets themselves are finders and keepers, that their vocation is to look after art and life by being discoverers and custodians of the unlooked for."
>>Read more at the Poetry Foundation HERE>

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Speaking of roaming round the world, do you collect anything?
HEANEY
Nothing systematic, but I am a bit of a fetishist, so stuff does gather up around me. Stones, bits of stick, birch bark, postcards, boxes, paintings, many paintings over the years and books, of course. I have two bits of birch from New England, for example. One is a beautiful objet trouvé, a bit like a tilted-back human torso, a hollow section of birch trunk, a birch-bark Apollo. I picked it up off the ground years ago when we were visiting Don Hall and Jane Kenyon up at Eagle Pond. And I have this other thing I got recently when I traveled up with Bill and Beverley Corbett to Dunbarton in New Hampshire to see Robert Lowell's grave. I found a birch stick beside the burial ground and then found myself holding on to it. That's what happens. I've got stones from Beeny Cliff and bits of granite from Joyce's Tower and sea-green slate from Yeats's. A stone from Delphi. A view of Tintern Abbey. Orpheus on a vase. And on a plate. And on a medal.
Read the complate interview in The Paris Review.

Captain Phillips

The most important thing that attracts me about the upcoming Oscar-bait thriller is the film's director Paul Greengrass, who directed the last two Bourne films, both of which are rivetting. The way he shoots action scenes and edits them is something else altogether...

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Captain Phillips is an upcoming 2013 American action thriller film directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks. The film is a biopic of Captain Richard Phillips who was taken hostage by Somali Pirates during the Maersk Alabama hijacking in 2009. Set on an incontrovertible collision course off the coast of Somalia, both men will find themselves paying the human toll for economic forces outside of their control.

The film is directed by Greengrass, from a screenplay by Billy Ray based upon the book, A Captain's Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea, by Richard Phillips with Stephan Talty. The film is produced by Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, and Michael De Luca. It is scheduled to be released on October 11, 2013 and will have its premiere showing at the 2013 New York Film Festival.
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MORE on Captain Richard Phillips HERE>>>
MORE on Paul Greengrass HERE>>>>

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With his irrepressibly kinetic style, Greengrass could probably make the opening of a cereal box exciting, so it was almost a no-brainer that he could successfully handle a story like this, which features not only logistical challenges but the sort of volatile political backdrop he has favored in most of his work. Still, for a story that pits locals versus Americans in the Middle East and boasts a climax that involves Navy SEALs, U.S. choppers and warships, the taut screenplay by Billy Ray (Shattered Glass, The Hunger Games) essentially makes no mention of religion, al-Qaida or the war on terror, concentrating on the more essential reality of impoverished young men, some of them fishermen, pushed to extreme measures by the big bucks bandit bosses offer for Western hostages, for whom they can demand millions. It's "just business," as so many criminals throughout history have said.

The usual Greengrass skill is evident with the diverse settings and mix of languages and accents, the combination of technologies high and low, the laying out of logistics and constant movement from place to place and the outer limits of human resilience and endurance in dealing with severe threats to them. The director has long since mastered relaying exposition as economically as possible and, visually, he and ace cinematographer Barry Ackroyd make the tiny open motorboats that pursue the hulking, graceless container ship look like minnows bird-dogging a whale.
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The breakneck sequence during which the terrorist pursue and board the cargo ship effectively kicks "Captain Phillips" into high gear, and Hanks' performance follows suit. His calculated responses to the pirates demands, as his eyes dart back and forth, set aside questions associated with the questionable accent and foreground his speedy calculations. Matched by newcomer Abdi, who possesses a cunning instinct to match Phillips' trained calm, Hanks takes on the role of negotiator before the real negotiators arrive, carefully playing along with the kidnappers' agenda while coordinating with his men to fight back. The friction between the two men creates a terrifically thick power play that grows exponentially dramatic when the pirates force Phillips into a lifeboat and face down a cavalcade of U.S. authorities.

Greengrass finds an intriguing contrast between the entire showdown and the almost casual workplace frustrations of everyone involved. "They're not paying me enough to fight pirates," argues a union man onboard the ship. That sentiment is echoed by a pirate later on, when Phillips tries to reason with them to take the small amount of cash onboard (instead of demanding millions more) and flee. "I have bosses," he sighs. "They have rules."

By then, you don't have to know every aspect of the real life events to recognize that the kidnappers are doomed to fail. During the movie's final third, entirely set onboard the lifeboat with occasional cutaways to the Navy boat nearby, they face a formidable show of force. From constant tactical chatter to casting choices that include non-professionals playing fictionalized versions of themselves, Greengrass' emphasis on authenticity is undeniably effective, and all the more impressive in the context of a studio film. For that same reason, it's acutely subversive: Greengrass shifts the plot into an institutional critique less concerned with the possibility of Phillips' danger than the obvious lack of resources that doomed the pirates from the outset. "This game isn't for the weak," Muse tells the youngest of his group, implying the kamikaze nature of their mission.
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Hard as it is to believe, Tom Hanks hasn't been nominated for an Academy Award since Cast Away in 2000. The two-time winner hasn't exactly sworn off awards bait entirely — Road to Perdition, Charlie Wilson's War, and The Terminal were all potential Oscar vehicles — but for whatever reason, the Academy hasn't bitten as of late. Can Captain Phillips turn the tide? At first while watching, we were inclined to say no: For most of the film's running time, Hanks delivers what may be the least showy performance of his career, since Phillips remains calm, even-keeled, and deferential even in the face of danger and potential death. It isn't until the very end of the film, when the character has back-to-back scenes of explosive emotional catharsis, that Hanks really gets to go all out; were you to pull a clip from his performance for the Oscar telecast, you'd almost certainly have to select something from the last ten minutes of the movie. Those last few scenes may be enough to push Oscar voters over the top, but the Best Actor category is so brutally tough this year that even a veteran like Hanks is no guarantee. Can he make the cut over other actors — like Robert Redford in All Is Lost, Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave, and Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club — who appear to have pushed themselves to the limit in draining, physical, transformative roles?
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It takes real skill to build genuine suspense when telling a story the ending of which everyone already knows, but Ray and Greengrass keep us on our toes, mainly by portraying the pirates as dangerous opponents, even when they’re surrounded by aircraft carriers.

But while Phillips comes off as resourceful, brave and dedicated, his captors more often than not resemble zombies — Greengrass often shoots them in a way that makes their eyes invisible, rendering them soulless. The group’s leader Muse (Barkhad Abdi) gets in a few lines about how his people are victimized by larger nations (who have overfished the waters) and the local warlords (who pocket whatever fortunes these pirates manage to pilfer), but he mostly comes off as a mere monster, constantly chewing khat leaves and glowering.

Greengrass is obviously no colonist — his “Bloody Sunday” was an impassioned tale of Northern Ireland bearing the brunt of British violence — but his portrayal here of a noble white officer suffering at the hands of insidious black pirates smacks of Rudyard Kipling.

Still, it’s a fine showcase for Hanks, who captures the captain’s quiet authority in calm seas, his fortitude under duress and his overwhelming shock when the ordeal ends. It’s too bad his most extended bit of dialogue is a horribly written exchange with the missus (played by Catherine Keener in a terrible wig), in which they speak in the broadest terms about the world today and things sure are rough and all. His performance picks up substantially once he leaves the suburbs and assumes command of the bridge.
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We first meet the future kidnappers on the beaches of Somalia as the film jumps back and forth between them and the crew of the Maersk Alabama. By the time the attack finally happens, we know these people. We don't like what they are doing, but there's just enough familiarity with them (due, too, to the wonderful performances of Barkhad Abdi, Barkhad Abdirahman, Faysal Ahmed and Mahat M. Ali) that we just wish they'd stop all of this before someone gets hurt. (Unfortunately, if you know the true story, you know this is unavoidable.)

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The pirates (who also get one too-brief context-establishing scene on the Somalia mainland) first arrive in two small skiffs ill-equipped to challenge the Alabama’s speed, though it’s a clever bit of radio theater concocted by Phillips that ultimately thwarts them. But the crew knows it’s only a matter of time before their unwanted visitors return — which they do, in a sharply executed setpiece that pits the undersized skiff (just one this time, with four occupants) against the Alabama’s pressurized water jets and evasive maneuvers. It’s a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in one of Greengrass’ “Bourne” pics, suggesting how much the director’s immersive, handheld aesthetic has been sharpened by his season in the Hollywood tentpole trade.

Where Greengrass’ earlier true-life tales were principally group studies, his latest is very much a tale of two captains — Phillips on the one hand, and the pirate leader Muse (Abdi) on the other. Though he himself is but a low-ranking functionary in a vast piracy hierarchy, Muse is head honcho on the Alabama, and Abdi (a Somali-born American emigre making his film debut) plays the role with the hungry intensity of an oppressed man taking his turn at being the oppressor. In a movie that affords little dimensionality to its characters, Abdi finds notes to play you scarcely realized were there, until this reedy young man with jutting brow looms as large as Othello.

Hanks is predictably sturdy as the embattled captain (save for a come-and-go Boston accent), playing the kind of Everyman facing extraordinary circumstances he’s played many times. He never quite disappears into the role, in part because there isn’t all that much there to disappear into, and in part because Hanks has a bag of actorly tics and indications that follow him almost everywhere he goes. But he seems confident handling the tools of the nautical trade, and his scenes opposite Abdi bristle with a quiet electricity. Much of the movie’s first half is devoted to Phillips’ stealth efforts to keep the pirates away from his crew (who huddle in hiding down in the engine room), feigning mechanical failure and offering to send the marauders on their way with $300,000 in cash from an onboard safe (except, they want millions). At every step, Hanks excels at showing what’s really going on in the character’s mind while maintaining his facade of almost folksy calm. It isn’t one of the actor’s rangiest roles, but it culminates in an eruption of emotional fireworks of exactly the sort Oscar dreams are made of.

Like in life, “Captain Phillips” makes a sharp turn at almost the exact midpoint, as the pirates flee the ship in an enclosed lifeboat with Phillips as their hostage. In turn, Greengrass and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (“United 93”) collapse the visual space of the film from the relative expansiveness of the Alabama to a crucible of claustrophobic tension.  As Phillips and the pirates head towards Somalia — and their fated rendezvous with a U.S. Naval destroyer — you can almost smell the sweat and grime hanging in the air of the poorly ventilated 28-foot capsule.
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