Човек трябва да внимава какво говори на родителите си. Нямам предвид да се държиш изкуствено, да криеш важни неща от тях, или да гледаш на тях като на врагове. По-скоро, че понякога е важно да подбираш думите си. Колкото и нечувствителни (в добрия смисъл на думата), разбиращи и деликатни да са майка ти или баща ти. Забързан в живота си като на fast forward, а съответно и в мислите си, съм свикнал да говоря бързо и откровено с майка си. Често когато й се обадя, бързам за някъде – да свърша някаква въображаемо спешна работа, или да се откъсна от света след дългия ден. Затова и рядко се замислям за речника си. Тя ми е свикнала, мисля си просто. Или – те майките са затова, да разбират и търпят вечно. Ясно е, че майката (и може би в малко по-малка, или по-скоро по-различна степен – бащата) не е обикновен човек, що се отнася до твоята личност. Тя е готова от все сърце да те има и да се отнася към теб като нещо много специално, на когото обикновено страшно много неща са му простени. И сигурно заради това забравяме лесно, че и тя е просто човек. Майка ми често говори(…)

For some time, The Informant! appeared to be a movie from the same family as Erin Brockovich (Soderbergh’s again) – an exploration on corporate wrongdoing and the role of a conscious individual in exposing it. But at one point, the conscious individual in question – Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre, a real-life high-ranking executive on the giant agricultural business corporation ADM – starts acting kinda weird… And the movie goes in a completely different direction. Corporate greed is just a part of it, but it’s more a movie about Whitacre himself – a funny, bipolar, even maniacal man with an honest devotion to the truth but an even more powerful obsession with lying. Whitacre is so fascinating that I was dragged in simply following his crazy path, juggling with secret listening devices, hidden cameras, his fellow executives, Japanese and French partners whose price-fixing practices he is trying to expose, and several layers of FBI professionals who build their case on his good will and watch it unravel as his own lies come tumbling out in the open. So the morals of The Informant! are not as straightforward to decipher, and by the end it’s much more difficult to say what(…)

“I want to make movies like the ones I used to like”. That’s what Peter Bogdanovich said shortly after completing his second feature, The Last Picture Show. He was 31 at the time, and had just achieved a feat to be respected. The Last Picture Show looks like a movie made in the 1930’s, due the choice of black&white as opposed to color. And due to the simple, even naive shot selection and montage. It’s like a classic created with the purpose of being a classic. The movie sat in my computer for several months, and I was somehow not attracted to watching it, until last night. And I saw it immediately after a very new and “quirky” American indie, World’s Greatest Dad, which aimed to be original (with some degree of success), but left me unmoved when I was supposed to give in to emotions. Just the opposite to the second movie of the double-bill night. Bogdanovich’s film has this star quality, this sense of timelessness and depth that is very difficult to find in modern films. The characters live in a very ordinary world, and are very ordinarily bored and lost and prematurely wasted. But they are larger(…)

There’s four of us in the car. I know the man next to me, I know the one at the back seat. The identity of the fourth traveler is still unknown to me, but she is one of us. She brings the balance. The windows are rolled all the way down to counter the mean heat. Breathing is difficult. We start in a traffic jam on a dirty Sofia street, first car at the red light, engine purring in anticipation. There is a Soundgarden album turned all the way up, we’re all sweaty t-shirts, tattoos, shaved heads, Frusciante locks, shades and coolness. I’ve got my hands on the wheel, and I keep casting lusty looks to my left and right, seducing teenage girls with fat sneakers, nervous, plump bankers, dumb-eyed policemen, and chain-smoking home chemicals delivery guys. I’m the fucking king, and I’ve got my men by my side. We all know the lyrics to the song and own the neighborhood with our voices. Everybody wants to be us. Everybody wants to be with us. But this is an exclusive, if very rugged, club. We share the same scars. We know the same truths. We feel the same pain, and(…)

Get on that train, get on that tram, get on that bus, cause they’re all really meant to go somewhere… that place is not a big surprise, and you don’t want one anyway… you need to keep it warm, put some thick chocolate in, browse the shops, pick up a flier or catch sight of something worthy through a flying window… then you can decide if you go here or there… snow falling on channels, in a quiet, soft night… we walk on to the next bar, or maybe it’s even finally time for that midnight coffee… we live in a shipping container for a week and the water heater keeps steady almost all the time… we shop for cheap food that is so good, we love the bread, we love the cheese… we go to see the artist with the cut-off ear and his ear is the last thing we care about… his work is thorough – I love this word… never thought of his work as thorough, genius explained in a short stroll… libraries await and people in them seem warm and calm… there is a time and a place for everything and everyone, if your temperament is(…)

Here is a very good article on the nature of our combat with climate change, the change we need to make in our approach to climate change, the uselessness of Copenhagen-style forums… with its realism and soberness, it kind of gives me hope all is not doomed. It’s a long article, be warned.

Interestingly enough, I watched through this entire movie thinking I was seeing Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience. Soderbergh’s film was released an year later, in 2009, and I’ve no idea who borrowed ideas from whom, if at all… but apart from unsuccessfully straining to recognize Sasha Grey (who plays the main part in The Girlfriend Experience), I had no doubt I was watching a Soderbergh film. Pietrobruno’s GFE has the same structural boldness and self-referential elements as Full Frontal, for instance. Made as a fiction-documentary, or better said, documentarised fiction, it centres on the dissolving life of a man obsessed with paid sex. In particular, with an expensive provider of special sex+emotions services, known as girlfriend experience (GFE). Pietrobruno has a background in documentary film editing, which probably explains to some extent the assuredness with which she tackles the unorthodox narrative form. The movie is interspersed with fake “re-enactments” – episodes in which the main character, Daniel, plays himself, while another actress plays the part of Adrian, his GFE love interest. So you get an actress playing the role of another role played by another actress… sounds a bit too complicated, but it’s basically a movie within the movie, and(…)

“In contrast to the civilized view which elevates man above the animals, the primitive had an instinctive belief that he was subservient to the primal pact between the beasts of the jungle and the beast of mystery.
To the savage, dread was the natural result of any invasion of the supernatural: if man wished to steal the secrets of the gods, it was only to be supposed that the gods would defend themselves and destroy whichever man came too close. By this logic, civilization is the successful if imperfect theft of some cluster of these secrets, and the price we have paid is to accelerate our private sense of some enormous if not quite definable disaster which awaits us.” — Norman Mailer, “An American Dream”

Is “getting away with murder” one of the main (unspoken) principles of the American dream, or the Civilization dream? I think I might be getting finally what the book I’m reading is about. But let’s see…

So, how far is a director’s responsibility supposed to go? Is one supposed to try to satisfy everybody’s tastes, expectations and moral orientation? I think these questions probably have more to do with Tarantino than with any other active director. The guy gets glorified, but then he gets slaughtered too. From what I’ve heard from him, he is smart enough to generally stay away from commenting back on the innumerable attempts to dissect his greatness/lameness. Maybe this is not only the best approach, but the single one he can have. You will never make the entire world happy, so you’d better just keep your mouth shut, and stick to making movies.

Tarantino’s latest, Inglourious Basterds, is no exception to the rule – the movie is adored and hated. I quite enjoyed it. Even more – coming out of the theatre, I thought “This will be an all-time great.” I’m no movie critic – when I write, I only do it to try to understand a movie better (hmm, this actually might make me a critic, I don’t know). I haven’t read or studied enough of film history or film philosophy or film aesthetics. So after I see a movie, I(…)