East, West, Spain is best...

[terrykb]

...at least when considering the three films I saw a couple of weeks ago.

First was Blue Gate Crossing, a Taiwanese film depicting the friendships and loves between three teenagers at school. While it was different from the formulaic Hollywood high school comedy, and showed a little of what life might be like in Taiwan, I'm afraid I didn't find it particularly engaging.

Next was Fahrenheit 9/11: Michael Moore's film charting George W Bush's career before politics, links between the house of Saud and the Bush family's business interests, the scandal of the 2000 Presidential election, and the US government's response to the events of 11 September 2001 (including the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Americans' civil liberties through the PATRIOT Act).

It is, straightforwardly, anti-Bush propaganda. There are some solid attacks on his record. And there are innuendos, rhetorical questions (after all, one can't be accused of inaccuracy if all one has done is ask a question), and easy sympathy winners (e.g. a mother grieving the loss of her son serving in Iraq) distracting attention from the real argument. While it is an interesting (and frequently entertaining) film, one should walk into the cinema aware that Moore may have replaced the sword of truth with a mere dagger of difficult-to-prove-technically-false, and mislaid the trusty shield of fair play altogether, when making this film. (Dave Kopel's Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11 provides sceptical assessment.)

(In the UK, it would be difficult to describe party political broadcasts as popular and compelling viewing. (I seem to remember that broadcasters here were once all obliged to show their party political broadcast simultaneously, to deny viewers the option of escaping to a different channel.) Yet Fahrenheit 9/11 has done incredibly well both in the US and in the UK, and people pay to see this: a nice trick if one can pull it off: despite its nickname, I don't think 1987's Kinnock: The Movie quite had the same impact...)

Finally came Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education. The seeds of the story are sown in a abusive Catholic boarding school (Catholic boarding school rarely seem to get a glowing treatment in fiction) in Spain, but the film opens as two apparent friends from that school meet again years later... Whilst it was sometimes difficult to sympathise with the protagonists, I found the storyline (other than the school scenes) intriguing, and more than once there are revelations which cast a whole new light over what we had seen so far (although any more would be spoilerish, so I shall stop there): a thoroughly worthwhile trip to the cinema, this one.

Comments

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

A small point, but some people watched Bad Education and some La Mala educación. I think one only has the right to quote the Spanish title if one sees the original version, but in the 1990s there was a rare instance of a film released in both dubbed and subtitled versions in Britain. The subtitled version retained the title Gazon maudit while the dubbed version became French Twist.

(Another trivial point of translation is when the aspirant actor demands to be known as Angel because 'Ignacio Rodriguez' is such a pedestrian name. Common in Spain, certainly, but exotic to the West End audience!)

The flashbacks to the boarding school did seem cliched, because it's such a familiar story - I felt they could have been dispensed with entirely without loss. The rest of the film was fascinating and surprising, with tender scenes like the visit to the parents in the countryside, and it all looked great as is apparently Almodóvar's style.

[tkb.livejournal.com]

Does seeing a subtitled version count as the "original"? I believe Spirited Away is another example of a film released in the UK in both subtitled and dubbed versions.

(As for it all looking great, I did read an Irish commentator - perhaps on IMDB - remark that Almodóvar had the advantage over them because the Spanish sun is more reliable than that the other side of the Irish Sea.)