Salt

[Note: there's no way to discuss this film without getting into some spoilers. It's just the way the film is structured. So, fair warning.]

In a year already saturated with numerous '80s throwbacks that celebrate the worst decade of modern times -- and, implicitly, the blind capitalist joy of the Reagan years to let us forget about the current era, in which the aftermath of those years finally caught up to us -- I had absolutely no desire to see Salt, a reheated Cold War thriller that looked as if it had been in development hell for 30 years until someone decided to send it through in an attempt to make an unlicensed Bourne movie.

Then, some reviews trickled in. More than any major release this year, Salt has split critics almost exactly down the middle: either it is the best action film in years, or a derivative, self-serious bore that tries and fails to plagiarize Paul Greengrass. It is my firm belief that a film, any film, that sparks such contention is worth seeing, no matter how I ultimately feel about the picture. Such films always contain something worth looking at, even if that something isn't necessarily what its supporters enjoy. So, surprised beyond measure that this of all films was to be the noteworthy split of 2010, I headed out to see Angelina Jolie's latest star vehicle.

For the first 20, maybe 30 minutes of the film, I was in the camp with the detractors. Salt opens with too many flashbacks -- nearly all of which are, one hopes, the result of forced changes because of poor test screenings and not something writers Kurt Wimmer and Brian Helgeland thought was enlightening -- too many absurdities and no reason to care despite everyone speaking gravely about some sort of sleeper agent that will kill the Russian president.

That sleeper agent, as told in the film's trailer, is Evelyn Salt (Jolie), a CIA agent we first see being beaten in a North Korean prison two years before the events of the film, maintaining her cover and seemingly proving her commitment to the United States beyond reproach. However, when a Russian defector named Orlov shows up and claims she will assassinate the Russian president, other CIA agents immediately suspect her as a lie detector says that the man is telling the truth. Never mind the gross inefficiency of a detector, even a fancy one like this neural scan, how could a lie detector test actually verify what someone else is supposed to do in the future? Then this guy kills two agents and manages to stroll right out of the building, while gates pop up from nowhere to seal Salt when she attempts to leave.

OK, this is a movie about Salt, therefore focusing anything interesting like doors slamming down in the corridors of the CIA building, but there's still the matter of the known Russian agent who took out two men and casually walked out of the place as if it really was just an oil company after all. These are holes too large to ignore, and they immediately sidetrack the film, creating an unease exacerbated by those awful flashbacks of Salt's happier times with her husband, Michael (August Diehl of The Counterfeiters and Inglourious Basterds, at least getting more American screentime if nothing else), forcing Jolie to make googly eyes when she's completely focused and steely in the present. And when Salt improvises a projectile grenade out of office supplies and leaps out of her high-rise apartment to climb undetected across thin precipices, is there any remote doubt that she's more than we think?

Then, something changes. Salt doesn't become smarter, oh no. If anything, it becomes even more ludicrous, up to and including a climax in the ultra-secure-but-maybe-not-so-secure War Room bunker of the White House -- I half expected George C. Scott to appear waving his arms and screaming about the Big Board. But the movie embraces its camp, adding an underlying layer of cheek to even the most dour scenes and breathing life into a film that had been gasping for air mere minutes into its duration.

A freeway chase gets the pulse pounding, including not one but two leaps onto passing trucks, motorcycle theft while the motorcycle driver is in transit on it, and various other stunts that Jolie admirably performs herself. Later, in the back of a police car, Salt overpowers the officers and continuously zaps the driver in the neck with a taser to control the patrol car's speed. These are silly but visceral sequences, never stopping to get in some wry one-liner that lets everyone know that the filmmakers are making one big joke.

That is exactly, I feel, the reason that Salt grabbed me, glaring plot holes, physical impossibilities and all. I recently re-read David Foster Wallace's classic essay "E Unibus Pluram," in which he argues that over-reliance on irony has made us a people who do not simply stand outside something for the means of evaluation but now safeguard ourselves against anything too revealing. We're afraid, in fiction or reality, to be ourselves, lest we slip up in public and do something embarrassing. Wallace wrote that 17 years ago, and since then matters have only gotten worse. Just look at the films this year: Iron Man 2, The A-Team, Kick-Ass and The Losers were all unforgivably inane and lazy in conception and execution, but what made them most unbearable was the minimal effort the filmmakers put into saying, "Hey, we know this sucks, but because we know it, that means all the dumb stuff is actually cool." This reasoning poisons the well of entertainment, denying the pleasures of kitschy action cinema while reinforcing an increasing condescension on behalf of Hollywood toward the paying customers, who continue to allow themselves to be abused financially and emotionally by cynics who find new ways to make people fork over extra for technological relics like 3-D, packaging the old and failed as new and chic. And is there any way of watching a film more inherently ironic than 3-D, which is a distraction that takes people even further out of the experience than the tedium of the converted movies do?

Contrast the smugness of Iron Man 2 and Kick-Ass to the one moment of Salt that overplays its hand. Our protagonist, on the cusp of completing her predicted mission (quite a while before the end of the film, to my pleasant surprise), shoots out the pumps of a church organ, filling the cathedral where the Russian president is speaking with the atonal chords that precede dastardly events in old-time horror movies. It is the grandest absurdity in the film, yet one so jubilant in its goofiness -- and one that ultimately makes sense once various pieces of the unexpectedly complicated puzzle fall into place -- that it brought a grin to my face so wide that it threatened to split the corners of my lips.

As was just mentioned, the assassination spoken of at the beginning is only the first piece of the film's twisting plot, not the payoff, and Salt works infinitely better for going deeper. We know immediately that Orlov's story matches up too perfectly to be coincidence, but the aftermath of Salt's mission shows her one-note character suddenly deepening. Sure, anything involving actual character is perfunctory and clichéd, Jolie is running so fast that she can not only outpace her hunters but keep up with the plot, and at some point the line between character and narrative dissolves; you won't learn anything about the human condition from watching this double agent, but you will go on one wild ride.

More impressive, however, is the manner in which the film treats gender. Originally written for Tom Cruise, the lead role changed sexes when Jolie expressed interest, and the result is the finest big-screen heroine since Ellen Ripley in Aliens. As with Cameron's character, Salt is defined by her gender only insofar as it applies to her core being -- maternal instincts in Ripley, romantic ones in Salt. The writers turn items of femininity sideways and play on them in ingenious ways: a wounded Salt uses a tampon to staunch the blood, and she takes off her panties -- certainly a distracting move for most men -- and then literalizes the shift in male focus by throwing them over the lens of the security camera on which her bosses, Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber, once again playing the semi-supportive heavy) and Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor), are monitoring her. Whatever thoughts one has initially about watching a woman Bourne soon vanish as Jolie continues to put her own body on the line for the film's mostly physical stunt work: you're left merely admiring an actor willing to sacrifice that much in an age when even stunt performers are slightly phased out by CGI.

Even when I found my mind swayed by the critical attention given to the film, I did not expect to like Salt. Indeed, those initial 20 minutes so overloaded my brain with plot holes and contrivances that I considered walking out on the film and never mentioning the experience to anyone, simply unwilling to endure one more awful blockbuster this year. The beginning ultimately holds the film back from being a pure piece of action filmmaking at its finest, but thank God I stayed, for I was treated to the first blockbuster of the summer to highlight what was best about those old, high-concept '80s flicks while successfully merging those aspects with the more gripping elements of modern blockbusters. Salt piles on the twists as fast as it can introduce new ones, but each one made the film simultaneously more ludicrous and more beguiling because the film seemed to enjoy itself, not in a smug way but a manner befitting an entertaining piece of escapism, an eager kid beckoning people over to join his game. Salt may be something of an idiot, but it's my idiot, and I'll be dropping by to see it again along with a second viewing of Nolan's Inception. Could it be? Have I at last found something worth living for this summer season? Things are looking up, dear readers.

Zinedine Zidane

It Might Get Loud

It Might Get Loud is based on a foundation so simple and ingenious that it's incredible that a dozen fan films haven't been made in the same fashion: director Davis Guggenheim, who directed Al Gore's portentous slide show An Inconvenient Truth, gets three guitar heroes in a room, and then just lets them do their thing for an hour and a half. His choices -- Jimmy Page, Jack White and U2's The Edge -- are great picks, but their sheer placement in the same room, each telling his story, instantly makes the mind think of other groupings that never were: what if Stevie Ray Vaughan got to tell Robert Fripp how much he liked the King Crimson's mastermind's work on Bowie's Scary Monsters and "Heroes"? What if Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead sat in a room with ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons and Yes' Steve Howe?

What's intriguing is the obvious fact that even Guggenheim didn't think up this brilliance, at least not at first. In fleeting moments, moments that should have been cut in post-production, It Might Get Loud displays tatters of its original intent, to chart the history of the electric guitar. Clearly, once he got his three stars in a room talking, the film changed to a focus on these three icons and these three alone, and the director attempts to piece together the possibilities of the electric guitar through the personal connection these players take to their unique approaches.

Impressively, Guggenheim gets to the root of each man's style quickly without relying solely on archival footage of songs we know and love: It Might Get Loud opens with Jack White standing at a workbench on a farm, piling assorted objects onto a block of wood. A glass Coca-Cola bottle, a guitar string, a couple of nails. Only when he nails in a rudimentary set of pickups does it become clear that White's fashioned a one-string contraption that crackles when connected to an amp, sounding as dangerous and wobbly as it looks. But White slips on a finger slide and rocks out for a few seconds before unplugging the thing before it catches fire and calmly turns to the camera. "Who says you need to buy a guitar?" he deadpans.

True to form, we meet The Edge processing his guitar through a bank of knobs, buttons and switches that morph every note into echoing walls of sound that create new notes out of the combination of effects. As for Jimmy Page, does he need an introduction? Page has the carriage of a man who knows he's royalty, lazily strolling around his country château occasionally picking up a lute like a poet prince. He doesn't break out the double neck Gibson and start wailing; instead, he lets you in to see the true Page, the one no one appreciated until long after Led Zeppelin became the most over-saturated band on classic radio and fans had to dig deeper so as not to go insane.

Once he gets them into the same room, Guggenheim splits the film between a running conversation/jam session with the guitarists and an oral history of how they came to the guitar, who they looked to for inspiration and how they evolved. We get tours through record collections, listen to early tapes of the guitarists' earliest, simplest recordings and pore over favorite six-strings, and one can easily see that none of these men is an egotistical prima donna. They all care deeply and unequivocally for their profession.

Amusingly, each has a certain aspect to his playing that annoys the others: Guggenheim hilariously segues from The Edge demonstrating his echo and chorus effects to Jack White ranting about the technological crutches players rely on these days as a substitute for ability. Likewise, The Edge speaks of his punk and post-punk influences, speaking admirably of groups like The Jam ending the reign of 15-minute instrumental wanks, meandering jams made popular in part because of Led Zeppelin's (frankly unbearable) showcases on distended live versions of "Dazed and Confused," "Moby Dick" and the like. And though he never says it, you can't help but wonder if Page doesn't reciprocate, viewing those late-'70s upstarts as responsible for killing the good times.

However, the film is most entertaining when the three start chatting and noodling and the similarities between them come to the fore. If The Edge included Led Zeppelin among those bloated dinosaurs he enjoyed watching the Ramones and The Clash slay, he doesn't show it when he and White stare at Page starting the riff to "Whole Lotta Love" as wide-eyed teenagers gawking at their hero. White speaks so reverently and analytically of the Delta bluesmen who influenced him that Page has a look in his eye that he'd quite like to adopt this wonderful young man. When they pick up their guitars and jam, the three find incredible harmonies. White, accustomed to his punk-blues style, and The Edge, inspired by the first wave of punks, nearly leap out of their skins in glee when Page displays a feral grit unheard in the jazz-folk-blues of Zeppelin's key recordings. And who could have ever expected The Edge to groove so deliciously when everyone breaks out a slide and Zeppelin's epic "In My Time of Dying" fills the ears?

Unfortunately, Guggenheim still wanted this to be a more holistic view of the guitar, and he does not commit to the far better film that's contained in these sessions. The backgrounds of each artist offer emotional explanations of what drives them, but the director follows so much of their careers that he starts to include redundancies and trivialities, taking time away from the scenes of the guitarists speaking to each other and the beautiful moments where they communicate in the only way they know how. Fascinating as these guys are, they're even more arresting when put together, when their personal philosophies come out even as they mesh seamlessly with those of the other two. Page views playing as something mystical, an arcane magic passed down into the modern age. The Edge uses his reverb effects to create layers of notes, forcing him to keep track not only of the notes he's playing but the ones that spring forth from space as if his playing attracts music floating around in the ether to filter through his pickups. Then there's White, who keeps dented, bent and tuneless guitars so that he might wrestle them back into something beautiful as if adopting abused animals and nursing them back to health. These attitudes are visible and affecting when brought out in the group, and the individual explanations of these approaches are redundant and take away some of the personal connection that forms not only between the three guitarists but with the audience.

Then again, each and every moment with Jack White is a blessing. He's certainly humbled to be in a room with Jimmy Page, and he realizes quickly that a player like The Edge is not so far removed from his style, but he still brings his eccentricities to the documentary. For whatever reason, White got a child actor to play the 9-year-old version of himself so that he might "teach himself" to play the guitar as if literalizing the entire conceit of the documentary. White and "Little Jack," dressed identically in black suits with blood-red ties, look like a wacky version of Daniel and H.W. Plainview, a madman looking to put an innocent (and sane) face on his passion. White comes off as the Quentin Tarantino of the blues, capable of recalling the most obscure track and every minute detail of the life of the artist who recorded it, then flooding all of those influences into something as plagiaristic as it is utterly original. He speaks of listening to Son House records with the hushed emotion of a man recounting a religious experience, and perhaps it was for this apostle of raw, searing blues.

Still, I would have liked to see a better balance in the styles of the musicians. White may be something of the midway point between Page's study of the blues and The Edge's minimalist punk ethos, but he clearly falls into Page's camp. Were the film the first in a series of oral histories that would track the guitar across all the genres it's touched, I would not focus so intently on this imbalance. As it is, the film feels incomplete. Guggenheim could have included a classical or metal guitarist with no less discipline and love for the instrument. Ooh, what about a jazzbo. Who wouldn't want to see John McLaughlin or Pat Metheny expounding on the astonishing areas they've taken their playing? (If you answered, "Me," you need to take a long, hard look at yourself.) Combined with the padding of individual background, It Might Get Loud doesn't quite reach the heights it continuously hints at each and every scene. When it clicks, however, the film is inspired: I can think of no purer treatise on the equalizing effect rock has on the collective soul than watching Jimmy Page put on Link Wray's pioneering "Rumble" and giddily playing along with an air guitar as if a teenager rocking out to, well, Jimmy Page.

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson

Appropriate to its subject, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson begins not with the various accolades expected of a puff piece doc but with snatches of various talking heads speaking of his final years and frankly assessing that he'd lost his touch. Rather than play into conspiratorial fantasies surrounding Thompson's death -- something that would likely amuse Thompson were he still around -- Gibney and his interview subjects make clear without coming out and directly saying it that the writer knew he was past his prime and that the suicidal thoughts that plagued him his whole life finally won out, motivated partially by political angst but chiefly through the demons that tormented him for so long.

It's an unorthodox way to introduce a film about one of the more notable voices of the 20th century counterculture, but then Hunter was anything but orthodox. Gonzo charts the writer's life from his first success with his book on the Hell's Angels in 1966 through his suicide in 2005. His was a life of alcoholism, drug addiction, an enthusiasm for guns that would put even NRA members on edge and extreme mental disability that would have existed without his vices but was certainly enhanced by them. Through it all, he was funny, intelligent, piercing and capable of inserting himself in places that were determined to keep him out, as if even those aware of him simply did not know how to handle his zeal.

One of the main reasons Thompson and his legend attract me is the uncertainty with which I view him: was he a serious, if addled, journalist on the hunt for social answers, searching for the crater that marked the cosmic death of the American Dream? Or was he a prankster to shame Andy Kaufman, a committed freak who dedicated his entire life to pulling a grand joke on the Establishment he so hated? The answer, as far as I can tell, combines the two possibilities, and the great joy of reading his mad scribblings is sorting out what of his writing is incisive fact-finding and what is utter, hallucinated imagination. Frank Mankiewicz, George McGovern's campaign manager, speaking of Hunter regarding his coverage the 1972 presidential campaign, offered an assessment that covers Thompson's entire career: "Of all the correspondents, he was the least factual, but the most accurate."

Gibney is a keen political documentarian, maker of Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, two of the sharpest documentaries of the last 10 years. But those films, as they concern issues and events, require a marshaling of facts, and this is a profile of an artist, and an artist who wrote and said what came to mind exactly as it came to mind. Unfortunately, Gibney uses the same approach to profile a man as he does to profile a situation, and Gonzo essentially plays out as a visual biography of a man who already left himself in his work.

It's amusing, certainly, to see the archival footage of the gonzo journalist running for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado by appealing to Aspen's surprising hotbed of freaks and dropouts, crafting a campaign that made Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra's run for mayor of San Francisco a decade later seem purely straight-faced. Even funnier is the sight of Thompson shaving his head completely bald, simply so he could refer to his Republican opponent, an ex-Army man with a disciplined crew cut, as "my long-haired opponent." But this is all contained in his short story about his run.

More unique are the contributions of people like Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone; Ralph Steadman, the sketch artist who adorned Thompson's writings with his horrifying caricatures; George McGovern, who reveals that Thompson's admiration for him was matched by his own appreciation of the writer; and Laila Nabulsi, HST's former girlfriend and the producer of the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas film. Thompson's writings were always from a first-person perspective, but it's necessary to have the clearer views of those sucked into his whirlpool to offer guidance.

At two hours, however, Gonzo suffers from padding, and too much of the film simply recounts his glory years in the form of mentioning books and essays. Even something as significant as the journalist's effect on swaying popular opinion for Jimmy Carter in '76 receives no in-depth analysis, only a cursory mention that, yes, Hunter wrote about Carter approvingly, or that he admired the outlaw spirit in the Hell's Angels when his book on the subject expounds upon that admiration to poetic length.

The timeline is loose as well. The driving arc of the film does not seem to go further than Thompson's '70s output, not even touching upon his writings on the Bush administration and only vaguely mentioning that he lost his touch without even providing a timeframe for that claim. Granted, I happen to agree that Thompson grew too much to embrace his persona instead of using it as a sly tool for getting across good, if broadly unethical, journalism, but his descent is spoken of only in abstract terms, never pointing to any articles as proof of slipping wit or any events in his life as significant of his downturn. The last 25-30 years of Thompson's life are shoved into the final 20 minutes of the film, and the portrait of a tragic artist I'd hoped to see to get a better understanding of HST's backslide into faded celebrity felt perfunctory and hollow.

What I did enjoy about the eulogy for Hunter was the talking head of his first wife, Sondi Wright, speaking of the perception of Thompson's suicide as the last noble act of a rebel, then shredding that horseshit into tatters. Though her bitterness over the failed marriage appears to have cooled, her anger toward the reception of her ex-husband's death is righteous and right-on: she undercuts the paranoid whispers that someone took Thompson out because he was at the top of his game and threatening to expose Bush by pointing out that he was over a decade past his prime. She conveys my own feelings on the matter perfectly when she says that, instead of admit defeat and create a faux-poetic death to eradicate the weakness of his final years, Hunter should have gotten his act together and gone after Bush with the same zeal with which he pursued Nixon. Why, just look at Pat Buchanan, brought in so one of Thompson's enemies can defend himself, and that smug, jackal grin on his face, the half-smile of an asshole who knows that Hunter was better than him but still lost in the end anyway. We needed a voice like Thompson's in the wake of the Bush/Kerry election, and while I know that Hunter wanted my generation to find its own calling, he left us to clean up this mess without any guidance just like everyone else did. But goddamn is this world a hell of a lot less interesting without him.

alberto aquilani liverpool

Black Narcissus

What is it about classical British directors and their upfront focus on sensuality? Chaplin may not have let his ephebophilic predilections spill over into his films, but he couldn't disguise his taste for nubile beauties. Hitchcock, well, I'm not even going to bother wasting the words talking about eroticism in Hitch's works. But there is a difference between eroticism and sensuality, and Michael Powell catered to the latter. Eroticism is naked, brazen, firing every nerve in every erogenous zone all at once. Sensuality has the same endpoint -- sexual overload -- but it goes about reaching this goal through subtler means. The word itself appeals to the senses, to light touches, faint whiffs, half-glimpses, aftertastes and tantalizing whispers. That is how Michael Powell makes his films: unhinged but refined, teasing every part of you until your barriers shut down and you achieve a purity of mental and spiritual orgasm.


None of this may be relevant to Black Narcissus, however, which Powell himself later called his "most erotic film." I contested that point several times during my viewing of Criterion's gorgeously restored Blu-Ray of the film, having just watched their print of The Red Shoes and finding the build-up of subjective artistic expression the most satisfying cinematic experience I can name, as I did the first time I watched that movie. Then I realized I'd forgotten my own annoyance with those who lump eroticism and sensuality together: The Red Shoes beckons and teases until you'll do anything for it, then it brutally denies you because it never gave itself the choice of pleasing an audience. But Black Narcissus has such a sexual primacy to it that every nude scene, hell, every visualized romantic moment, feels empty in comparison.

Made the same year that Britain gave India its independence, Black Narcissus partially demonstrates why British occupancy failed in the first place, but its approach is far from political. In fact, the central conflict of the film only tangentially concerns the indigenous population. The eroticism of the film plays on the exoticism of the environment, a beautiful area in the Indian Himalayas where a group of Anglican nuns come to establish a convent to teach local children and to set up a hospital.

Powell immediately emphasizes the tantalizing nature of the area. The nunnery, perched 9,000 feet up at the edge of a sheer cliff face, is constantly buffeted by gale-force winds that billow through the open windows. The wind casts everything not nailed down into disarray, but it also creates a sort of song as it howls through the corridors, a combination of forceful eroticism of its physical impact with the sensuality of its musical nature. Masters of color, Powell and cinematographer Jack Cardiff (who won the Oscar for his work here because it would simply be too much of an outrage if he hadn't), constantly contrast the brilliantly dyed clothes of the peasants with the off-white robes of the nuns' habits, colored as they are in pasty oatmeal hues. One of the biggest indicators of the underlying effect of the environment's sharp distinction from the plain nuns, and the funniest, is the casually mentioned line that the empty palace where the nuns make their home used to be the king's harem. Faded paintings of Karma Sutra positions dot the walls, not immediately noticeable but always there, a fitting recurring gag on the sexual confusion of these cloistered women.

For the point of Black Narcissus is not simply to emphasize the exotic qualities of a foreign locale but to demonstrate the perils of attempting to remake reality to fit an image. The nuns come to civilize the savages, but they find a generally happy, if superstitious, people who don't carry nearly the sexual baggage that the prim ladies do. Consider the difference between the two prominent males of the film: Dean (Jack Farrar), a government agent who embodies the British imperial attitude of pompous arrogance, often drunk, always clad in revealing shorts and condescending toward the locals. Then there's the young Indian general who arrives at the nunnery in respectable dress, innocently asking to be admitted to their school for girls. The nuns try to explain why it wouldn't do to have a striking young man in their midst, and he amusingly makes a case that they're being sexist by not allowing him to learn. Of the two, the simple Indian is far more gentlemanly and devoted to higher learning.

Yet his presence, and especially Dean's, put the nuns on edge, and we soon see that many may have come to escape their own sexuality. This is certainly true of Clodagh, the young sister superior played by Deborah Kerr, who routinely daydreams of a past lover in Scotland before she took her vows, and it's easy to see why one scene was cut for the American release to appease Catholics. Despite the lack of overt sexual content, it's impossible not to see erotic energy crackling off the screen as Kerr relaxes in a lake, casting a fishing rod as the crystal-clear water reflects the sunlight all around her as if the entire environment matched her post-coital glow. Whatever went wrong with that relationship, however, drives Clodagh to take to her new role with authoritative tasking. The other women also carry their latent desires, such as Sister Philippa, who becomes so intoxicated with the surroundings and the feelings they unlock in her that she inadvertently plants flowers in the vegetable garden, denying the convent much-needed food.

The people of India may be a great deal more formal than the nuns would have guessed, but they, along with their environment, surround the Brides of Christ with pure, vibrant expressions of dormant sensuality, and the Westernization does not tame them so much as infect everything British with the same passion. The children learn English words by looking at a tapestry with drawings of various Western weaponry, which takes on an even greater phallic significance when each killing device is said aloud by kids with no concept of their destructive power. Even the film's construction mashes up British sensibilities with these unfiltered emotions: not one frame of the film was shot in India, a fact Martin Scorsese relates in the DVD commentary with the breathless excitement of a teenager who wants to show his friends something cool he just found instead of the analytical mind of a man who's dissected this film for 40 years and filled his own work with references to it. But it's not hard to understand the director's enthusiasm, as Powell's film feels too alive to be the product of matte paintings, miniatures and studio sets. Yet the truth makes more sense, as the totality of the film's construction allows Powell to maintain total control of color and lighting, able to always create a shot that will yield maximum sumptuousness. Even the casting of Jean Simmons as the tawdry dancing girl works from this viewpoint; I do not mean to excuse the racism of the casting, but Simmons, painted bronze with a nose ring and flowers in her hair, becomes a vision of the ultimate effect of Powell's manufactured Himalayas on those who seek to remake it: the environment absorbs the British, not the other way around. Thus, Simmons' role as seductress takes on a deeper meaning that exacerbates her pull, and when she spontaneously bursts into an erotic dance while cleaning the convent, you wonder why she hadn't already. Even the general, so eager for a Western education, contributes to this effect, purchasing the titular Black Narcissus, a cheap, pungent perfume from England that smells foreign to the nuns by virtue of him wearing it.

Surprisingly, it is Sister Ruth, not Sister Clodagh, who ultimately cracks under the strain of all this thick tension. Where Clodagh came to India to escape memories of tragic romance, Ruth's past is murkier. Her behavior suggests sexual confusion, and perhaps she wished to escape her feelings of insecurity, only to be met by Clodagh. Why she should be so jealous, however, is a bit of a mystery, as she is played by Kathleen Byron and thus, in this writer's opinion, unnecessarily uncomfortable with her looks. (It's an opinion almost certainly shared by the director, whose dalliance with the actress led to her divorce.) But her madness is evident even in the film's early moments, such as the odd look of delight when she interrupts Dean and Clodagh's first meeting with red all over robes gushing over seeing the patient whose blood smears her habit. When Clodagh notices Ruth's desire for Dean, she attempts to calm the nun, only for Byron to leap in a flash and accuse her of wooing the man.

Byron would later attribute much of her performance to the film's lighting, which certainly ranks among the most memorable use of darkness in classic film; there is a clarity to shots with just enough lighting for outlines that it's as hard to believe that 1940s film stock could capture images at such low levels as it is to think that three-strip Technicolor could result in such a bountiful array of colors. But Byron's quote is little more than English modesty: encouraged by Powell to let loose and leave subtlety to some other film, she turns into a silent film monster to rival Max Shreck's Nosferatu, wild-eyed and flashing teeth like knives. Her performance, as with the direction, is passionate but excessively formal above all, modulated through the deliberate pacing of tension until, when Powell frames Byron in close-up as she applies blood-red lipstick, the distinction between Powell's driving direction and Byron's performance vanish, and the combined moment signals that Ruth has forsaken her vows and gone off the deep end before her true freak-out.

To beat a dead horse further, just look at the color in this film. This is not even my first experience with Black Narcissus, and yet I am still as overwhelmed by it. Cleaned up by Criterion and ITV, the new Blu-Ray erases the blurring and fading that marred the original DVD and restores the color to its fullest glory. Watch Clodagh as she prays in a drab room in the palace, only to look up and see the most beautiful blue sky you've ever seen in a high window, with just a hint of sparkling green foliage snaking across the bottom corner; the glimpse sparks one of her romantic memories, but the astonishing contrast of the white walls with the close-up of the window will spark flighty thoughts in the audience as well. More than anyone else, even more than Nicholas Ray -- who serves as a far more accurate comparison to the director than Hitch because the only link between the latter is their nationality -- Michael Powell understood the power of color, and Black Narcissus is the greatest film I've ever seen to deal with the subject of desire. The film's detractors, sparse as they are, criticize the film for caring more for color than plot, something they evidently do not know the director freely admitted. But it is precisely his use of color that drives the story: extroverted as Byron's acting may be, the film draws its tension from the gradual shift in lighting and hue as more and more color seeps into the film even as it grows darker and darker. Films of wounded faith and confused sexuality tend to be somber (think Bergman), but Powell turns serious themes into an emotional roller coaster solely through his disciplined formal progression. It is impossible to tell at the beginning of the film that it will end as a horror-opera, and the fact that you never notice the shift proves that the cinematography layered the film where the straightforward script wouldn't.

For those with minimal knowledge of the Archers, it may not mean much when I say that Black Narcissus makes their previous efforts look incomplete. But Powell & Pressburger already had a number of masterpieces under their belt, and even in 1947 were just halfway through a four-year period that produced as many classics. But the climactic sequence, which choreographs Ruth's murderous stalk through the convent and her final confrontation with Clodagh to the score, shows the director preparing for upcoming musical forays such as The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann, in which he would fully parlay his cinematic sensuality into its purest form: dance and music. There's even a nod to the past in a POV shot of Ruth, incensed by Dean's rejection of her, literally seeing red before blacking out, recalling the "blinking" shot of a man being anesthetized in A Matter of Life and Death. I know I haven't helped matters, but this film is about more than its aesthetic beauty, even though its looks inform everything about it. Like Georges Méliès before him, Powell was a magician, not literally like the Frenchman but certainly artistically, and Black Narcissus is his greatest enchantment. The Red Shoes is the greater experience, removing the latent politics of this film -- though Powell was a lifelong Tory and probably not too invested in seeing India win its freedom -- and reconstituting the sensuality around its purest expression, art, but Black Narcissus is likely the most beautiful film I've ever seen, one that makes me sit back in appreciative wonder during repeat viewings just as Martin Scorsese marvels over the Archers' achievement. I can only hope my own love of the film lasts as long as his.

Time for deadbeat donors to pay up!

In the months after Haiti's earthquake pledges of aid came from all over the world – totalling more than $5 billion USD. However 6 months on, only 10% of this aid has actually been delivered to Haiti – compromising the country's ability to rebuild and prepare for the upcoming hurricane season. President Bill Clinton, UN special envoy to Haiti, has vowed to chase the countries with outstanding pledges, and we'd like to show him the world supports his efforts. I just signed a petition asking world leaders to deliver the aid they pledged to Haiti as soon as possible. Please join me by signing the petition here: http://one.org/international/actnow/haitiaid/index.html?rc=haitiaidconfemail Together as ONE we can make a difference! Thanks!

The ONE Campaign Team

Sent from my BlackBerry® device from Digicel

arjen robben

Le Gai Savoir

Portions of Godard's Le gai savoir were filmed before he jetted off to London to muck about with the Rolling Stones, but the final product definitely has a post-May '68 feel to it. In context, Godard's minimalist movie serves to flesh out some of the vague ideas behind Sympathy for the Devil, and it takes the unfinished conception behind the splintered rockumentary to an extreme: with this film, the director wanted nothing less than to shatter the make-up of cinema, proof that Week End's final title card was not a declaration of fact but a statement of intent.

Made just before Godard entered into the often-contested (and even-more-often ignored entirely) Dziga Vertov Group, Le gai savoir represents the artist's attempt to "return to zero," to compensate for the lack of home video by making a film that essentially rewinds his other films. Using his two favorite revolutionary actors, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto, Godard roots the film's (in)action in a dark studio, pitch-black but for the gentle stage light that illuminates the two actors. They introduce each other as the descendants of Rousseau (Léaud) and Lumumba (Berto) and immediately launch into polemical discussions that reconstitute politics around art in Godard's usual fashion. Then they splinter off, agreeing to monitor the relationship between sight and sound in three phases for three years, first simply observing, then critiquing and finally acting upon their theories. Only now do the intellectual touches of the director's previous works seem tame: at least they came in the form of aesthetically beautiful and narratively spry movies.

By far his most confounding and layered work to that point, Le gai savoir exists in a fractured state, jumping between the two actors in the studio to jarringly bright still photographs and bustling, candid shots of people on the streets. Sounds overlap. Images are drawn on, recolored, juxtaposed and then folded into the audio. The only prop in the studio with the actors is a clear, plastic umbrella that they intermittently wave about while they speak in a manner that breaks up every sentence between the two of them.

All of this reflects Godard's deconstructionist attitude, even the umbrella, reduced to a basic, transparent outline. A critic, of course, breaks down a film into its various elements and discusses each and how they relate to the film as a whole. As such, there may be no better example in Godard's canon to illustrate his contention that the best way to criticize a film was to make another. Le gai savoir takes this idea past the point of film and into society: early on, he displays still photographs with letters written on them as if teaching the alphabet, albeit one whose examples are relevant and political (i.e. Vietnam for V); he echoes this later when Léaud's Emile rants about the illustrated words in a child's dictionary might display terms like "soap" for 'S' but neither "sex" nor "syndicate." The O's in words scribbled onto the screen are emphasized through underlining or capitalization, stressing how much they look like zeroes. Even the back-and-forth between the actors played over these photos and illustrations takes on a quality similar to those instructional cassettes used in languages classes for reading comprehension.

So, is Le gai savoir a lecture? Well, yes, but compared to the didacticism of Sympathy for the Devil, Godard returns to his playful self. The mood of the film is, despite the headiness of its objective, appropriately childish. Godard even brings in a kid to play a free association word game as Berto and Léaud lob words from off-screen for the boy to respond to. It's unclear whether the actors are actually speaking to the boy, unlikely, even, considering he somehow knows to say the word "October" in connection with "Revolution" despite being no older than 10 (he also links "Chinese" with "Earth," playing into Godard's Maoist fascination by implying that the nation's people are attuned with the planet). Then the director and actors do the same with an old, half-deaf man, and the nature of the game equalizes the old man's experience with the young boy's innocence by limiting the players to simply saying what first comes to mind.

The dominant force behind the film is, naturally, Godard's gift for montage, here reverted to its foundations in Russian political cinema. I cannot hope to have picked up anything but a fraction of the various juxtapositions of images, sounds and writing, but the overall effect of the constant cutting is a surprising cheekiness that showcases the director's wit in the midst of his polemics. A picture of a nude woman in a magazine pops on the screen, with the word "Freud" written by her head and "Marx" written, well, a little further south, inverting the popular perceptions of the aims of the two thinkers and hilariously positioning Marx as the man of "action," as it were. Lyndon Johnson and Charles De Gaulle are routinely paired with Hitler and Stalin through images and dialogue, making them all into false prophets who abused the public trust, the only difference separating them is that the people can actually rise up against Johnson and De Gaulle where the others brutally crushed dissent. The most brilliant moment involves Berto, clad in a period dress, reading nonsense in front of a backdrop of comic book characters as Léaud, wearing contemporary clothes, reads aloud coherently. Seemingly random, this one scene contains numerous dialectics, between classical and pop art, lingual meaning and gibberish, and the old (the dress) versus the new (Léaud's modern garb).

"Theoretically, these two sounds have nothing to do with one another," Berto says of some noises Godard assembles, and Léaud completes the thought by adding "But they could eventually have a connection." That idea propels Le gai savoir, which uses its minimalistic foundation not to completely destroy the cinema (though it ultimately ends in blackness with only a whispered narration to suggest that the film is still playing) but to stage a film of infinite possibilities. Berto and Léaud are often obscured in shadow because they are merely symbolic, Berto of theory, Léaud of revolutionary action. But the people on the street, the comic books, the war photographs? Those are all crisp and beautiful, even when horrific, and the director's editing of them makes the movie come alive even when you're tearing out your hair to pinpoint it.

"This film is not the film that needs to be made," Godard confides in us in his closing whisper, already chastising himself for his shortcomings in trying to capture the world, his political zeal and a buried optimism in a spare 92 minutes. What he wants of Le gai savoir instead is for the film to show him the path back to the beginning, to the vantage point where he can see all the trails cinema forged for itself. Only then, only by following the paths back and studying them along the way, can he make a new one. There it is in a nutshell: Le gai savoir is a half-meta, half-literal visualization of Jean-Luc Godard as the ultimate cinematic trailblazer.

Sympathy for the Devil (a.k.a. One Plus One)

[Note, in the wake of Jean-Luc Godard's final work of his "classic" period, Week End, I will continue to review works by the director, but I cannot promise that I can find all of his films, even with the benefit of torrents. I will watch what I can when I can get my hands on it, but forgive me if this series suddenly stretches out even further than it already has.]

Whenever an artist loses control of his or her work, one naturally sides with the wronged party, raging at the profit-driven system that relegates those who actually make the art to the sidelines to satisfy those who use art as a tax write-off. Sympathy for the Devil, originally titled One Plus One, may be the one film where, appropriately, we actually do sympathize with the enemy. If this is the final product, what on Earth were the producers working with, and could Jean-Luc Godard have made a more complete movie if he'd retained control?

As with his subsequent, Le Gai Savoir, Sympathy for the Devil was made in a time of tremendous sociopolitical upheaval around the world: during the course of recording the titular song, the band had to amend a mention of the Kennedy assassination to the plural in the way of Robert's death in June of 1968. May '68 had unleashed the pent-up sexual tension of French youth, and riots broke out across America for various reasons. In Vietnam, growing resentment, fear and hostility toward the Tet Offensive early in the year led to the My Lai Massacre (though the revelation of this event would not be revealed to the American people for another year). Everything was going to hell, and a fully radicalized Godard needed something to crystallize his revolutionary thoughts.

As youth spurred the protests in America and France, Godard decided that rock 'n' roll bad-boys the Rolling Stones would be the perfect catalyst to spread his Maoist message. At the time, this must have seemed a keen decision: if sexual frustration was openly fueling one social cataclysm and at least partially influenced some of the riots on the other side of the pond, who better to kick-off sexual freedom than the most nakedly sexual rock band on the scene?

By the 10-minute mark, however, I was already checking my watch. It is difficult to write about Sympathy for the Devil without lapsing either into a list of outrages or a strained grasp at straws to forgive some of its numerous issues. When I first started this long retrospective in an attempt to get a handle on Godard, I had an image of the artist in my head of a pretentious intellectual who valued his ideas over how he used them. Very quickly I realized I was mistaken, that even at his headiest, the director could combine the intellectual with the sensual; who else could make an essay film like 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her into such an affecting portrait when most of its shots are plainly symbolic shots of industrial production? Even the brazenly radical La Chinoise had a wry twist that kept matters from becoming too serious. Sympathy for the Devil is the first film to conform entirely to that initial, reductive vision of Godard, a mash-up of intellectual images without a bedrock of emotion. Granted, this is the producer's edit, but most of the vignettes are themselves lifeless and not even Godard's editing genius could save all of them no matter what tricks he pulled.

For Godard is not content to sit in the studio with the Stones and watch them compose the titular track. Instead, he intersperses his footage of the band with various sketches demonstrating his radical stances, albeit in the vaguest terms possible. A voiceover reads what sounds like erotic fiction with political conviction. A bookstore sells comics, pin-up magazines and radical pamphlets where paying customers must give the proprietor the Nazi salute and slap two bound Maoists. Various vandals spray-paint messages onto walls and windows, and Black Panthers read militant texts while handing out rifles as if preparing for a race war.

Each of these vignettes certainly has a purpose when stacked against the slow progression of the Stones' greatest track from its beginnings as a loose acoustic outline. Just as the band is composing its most sinister, relevant song, so too are the battles lines being drawn around the UK and, by extension, the Western world. Those spray-painted messages are rarely completed before Godard cuts away and, even though the film came out after the tumultuous events of the year, the director sought to make a film about preparing for revolution.

Yet the fact that, despite the continuation of social unrest for years, the movie was dated upon release severely undermines its impact. It's interesting to see some of the crosswords the vandals make of their graffiti, such as writing "HILTON" and then using the 't' to draw "STALIN" vertically, insinuating that companies can be as dictatorial and ruthless as political tyrants. I also couldn't help but look upon the scenes with the Black Panthers, situated in a junkyard sitting among derelict cars, and not think of Detroit and the upcoming post-industrial fallout, even though the scene, as with everything else is filmed in the UK.

Such moments are fleeting, however, and Sympathy for the Devil quickly morphs into a mess. The Panthers bring in white women as one of the group reads from the texts of Eldridge Cleaver, specifically his rapacious ideas concerning white women. By the end of the film, several of the ladies have been shot and one hangs from a movie crane. Godard's second wife, Anne Wiazemsky, appears in a scene as "Eve Democracy," a woman who walks around as a film crew follows and responds to increasingly complex sociopolitical questions solely in the affirmative or negative. Godard links the pornographic bookstore with fascism, but wasn't the whole point of hitching his wagon to the Stones that they represented sexual anarchy?

Speaking of ideas that don't gel with what the Stones were about, the threatened violence of Godard's revolutionary skits is completely at odds with the titular song, a composition about the temptations and downfalls of evil behavior. The murderous Panthers do not even take their armed revolution to the streets, settling only for killing a few white women (thus conforming more to an alarmingly racist vision of militant blacks than a depiction of oppressed people finally fighting back). As I watched Godard abandon the dialectical method that allowed him to counterbalance his radicalism with more measured study, I thought of that aforementioned line from the Stones' magnum opus: "I shouted out, /'Who killed the Kennedys?'/When after all/It was you and me." I also considered just how terribly the band would blanch at violence just a year down the road when their free concert at Altamont would erupt into fighting and murder.

I don't know who this film could thoroughly please. Not Godard, certainly, forced to contend with the producer's take on his vision and also confronted with a band that clearly failed to meet the philosophical importance he'd placed on them -- it cannot be coincidence that the band are never actually interviewed or shown doing anything but rehearsing the tune. Not the Stones, who, as previously mentioned, do not do anything on-screen other than work out a single song and work as a group solely because of their roots-rock simplicity and suffer from the intellectual attention. Fans of either camps also have nothing to latch onto, from the Godard lovers who won't understand why the director is wasting his time with one of the thicker bands on the scene and not the Stones fans who have to put up with the director's meandering nonsense.

Godard objected to the use of the full song over the end credits, and it's easy to see why. Made during social upheaval, he wanted to make a movie about preparing for the coming revolution he perhaps thought inevitable. Pay attention to the beautiful tracking shots with which Godard captures the Stones in the studio: they get more complex each time, reflecting how the song comes together from an initial acoustic sketch through a more complex arrangement as keyboards and increasingly layered percussion stack on top of the sound in each session. The spray-painted messages are never fully completed before Godard cuts away. Clearly, the director wishes to visualize how revolutions start, as gestating ideas that must bud and bear fruit before the time is ripe for an uprising. Unfortunately, what the unfinished thoughts of Sympathy for the Devil primarily illustrate is that, for the first time in his career, Jean-Luc Godard went off half-cocked.

andres iniesta 2010 football worldcup

AC Milan

Cristiano Ronaldo Rocking

Best Football Palyers

Thierry Henry

Thierry Henry

Thierry Henry

Profile:

• Date of Birth: 17 August 1977
• Height: 188 cm
• Shirt number: 12
• Position: Forward
• Current club: Barcelona (ESP)
• International Caps: 123
• International Goals: 51
• First international: France - South Africa
  (11 October 1997) 

Club History

• Arsenal (ENG): From 1999 to 2007
• Juventus (ITA): From 1999 to 1999
• AS Monaco (FRA): From 1994 to 1999

A veritable colossus of French football, Thierry Henry’s achievements read like an extract from the Guinness Book of Records. World champion, European champion and France’s all-time leading goalscorer – and those are just a few of the high-profile Frenchman’s exploits.
Long before being crowned the unofficial King of France, Henry was no different from any other child his age, except perhaps for his seemingly innate eye for goal. While playing for his local youth team near Paris, he was spotted by a Monaco scout, amazed at having witnessed six goals being scored by a player whose team-mates were already referring to him as ‘Titi’. Sent to the renowned Clairefontaine academy, it was there he first encountered Arsene Wenger, who persuaded him to sign for Monaco in 1993.
Aware of the rough diamond that had begun to shine at their club, the Monaco players took the new recruit under their wing, especially the Brazilian Sonny Anderson, who regularly passed on valuable advice. By the age of just 17, Henry was already playing in French football’s top tier. His first season saw him make eight appearances and score three goals, figures that would gradually increase over time, particularly in Europe, where he notched up seven goals in nine matches in the UEFA Champions League in season 1997/98. All things considered, that was an exceptional season for Henry; he also managed to break into the national set-up alongside his team-mate David Trezeguet, with whom he would lift the FIFA World Cup™ later that summer.
The world champions’ top goalscorer at that tournament with 3 goals, Henry signed for Juventus a few months later. Rarely and poorly utilised, mainly on the left wing, he would only go on to make 20 appearances for the Turin side, and escaped to Arsenal seven months after his move to Italy. Criticised for being incapable of establishing himself at a major club, it would not take him long to silence the doubters. He was unaware of it at the time, but his transfer to London would see him change position, and become a legend.
Moved into a central striking role by his former mentor Arsene Wenger, Henry quickly began to rack up the goals that would eventually deliver numerous titles, the team captaincy, the adoration of the Arsenal fans and, finally, hero status at Highbury. He would also break many records, leaving the great Ian Wright in his wake to become the club’s leading goalscorer of all time. In Gunners colours, very few honours escaped him, as he snapped up two league titles, three FA Cups and a Champions League final appearance. And whenever he was unable to finish the season as the Premier League’s top scorer, as he did in 2002, 2004, 2005 and 2006, he contented himself with having provided the highest number of assists in the league, as he did in 2001 and 2003. During this period, he also became France’s first-choice attacking option, experiencing the highs (UEFA Euro 2000) and lows (2002 FIFA World Cup) of international football.
His only disappointment during his time in London was failing to bring the prestigious Champions League trophy back to Highbury, although he came close in 2006, falling at the final hurdle against Barcelona. This gap in his footballing CV would eventually be filled playing for the very same team that destroyed Arsenal’s dreams in that final. In the summer of 2007, Henry signed for the Catalan giants, a move that proved hard to swallow for the Arsenal fans who had voted the skilful Frenchman as the best player in the history of their club.
But move he did, and joined Lionel Messi and Samuel Eto’o in an attacking triumvirate that terrified defences in Spain and across Europe, as Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona side collected an unheard-of six trophies in 2009. Just when it appeared that Henry’s career was nearing a fitting conclusion, 2010 turned into something of a nightmare for him. Henry's fourth appearance at a FIFA World Cup could see the great man turn out for Les Bleus for the last time at a major tournament. That should give him added motivation, as if he needed it, to write an exciting new page in the history of French football, and pen a final chapter in his own footballing masterpiece.

 

Lenworth Dixon's Cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitan Cocktail recipe
by Lenworth Dixon - Bars2Go

Scale ingredients to servings
1 1/2 oz vodka
1 oz cranberry juice
1 oz orange juice
1/2 oz triple sec

Shake vodka, triple sec, orange and cranberry juice vigorously in a shaker with ice. Strain into a martini glass, garnish with a lime wedge on the rim, and serve.

Elano

Elano

Elano

Elano

Diego Forlan

Diego Forlan

Diego Forlan

Diego Forlan

PAJ, MAJ Meet with Commissioner of Police

COMMISSIONER OF Police Owen Ellington says next month he will publish rules of engagement for members of the Jamaica Constabulary Force and journalists at crime scenes.

He made the commitment during a meeting on Tuesday (July 20) with a delegation from the Press Association of Jamaica (PAJ), and Media Association Jamaica Limited (MAJ). The meeting was held on the request of the PAJ following the harassment by a policeman of CVM Television’s videographer, Kirk Hall while covering a crime scene in St Ann several weeks ago.

The meeting agreed that all parties, including members of the Jamaica Defence Force, would consult on producing the final draft of police/media rules of engagement already developed by the JCF. The rules will reflect, where appropriate, the PAJ/MAJ Code of Practice for Journalists. On completion of the consultation, Commissioner Ellington said he would publish the protocols in the Force Orders on Friday, August 13, 2010.

The Commissioner reported that the investigation into the harassment of the CVM videographer was ongoing, following the initial removal of the policeman from frontline duty. He reiterated that the JCF would take appropriate disciplinary action against any member who obstructed media practitioners in the execution of their lawful duties at crime scenes.

Media representatives also raised with the Police High Command the issue of access to high security operations. Commissioner Ellington acknowledged the importance of the media gaining access in such situations, and stated that the police was willing to permit this, subject to safety considerations for the security forces and journalists. However, the Commissioner pointed out that where the law prohibited access to the media, the police had to conform.


Contact: Byron Buckley, President - 440 8393

Good news for Jamaica

Jean-Lowrie Chin | Jamaica Observer | Monday, July 19, 2010

WHEN we heard that the Chinese firm Complant was purchasing government's remaining sugar assets, someone quipped, "Well, this will give them a little sugar to put in the Blue Mountain Coffee they also bought!" It is good news and Aubyn Hill and his team should be congratulated for pulling this off.

With the sale of Air Jamaica and now this, we should be deeply relieved that our taxes are not shoring up inefficient entities, and that these restructured organisations still have good employment prospects for Jamaicans.

It counts that a superpower like China thinks that Jamaica is worth the investment. Theirs is a thriving economy and we can benefit greatly from their culture of diligence and high productivity. If only more Jamaicans would be as convinced as China that Jamaica is a good bet. I heard a cynical quip from a listener to Mutty Perkins' radio talk show recently: "Adam and Eve must be Jamaican. Imagine, God put them in the Garden of Eden where they could get everything they want and they still go wrap up with a serpent!"

The ingenious lengths to which Jamaicans go to operate outside the law make us wonder at the mindset that would put some of our most talented people on the wrong side of the law. Research by Professor Claudette Crawford Brown and Dr Herbert Gayle shows that many of our criminals are from troubled communities.

To make our investors happy with their decision, to make our fellow Jamaicans employable and new entrepreneurs themselves, government should be putting close and relentless focus on these communities.

We sympathise with the Jamaica Tourist Board that there has been a downturn in tourism. But how in heaven's name can we fix it by ploughing US$10 million into advertising and promotion? Those funds — J$890 million — can go a far way to improve the product, focusing on at-risk communities.

It would be great to see more activity from the JTB in social media. This is a low-cost, efficient way of engaging an international audience. As a Facebook fan of Usain Bolt, I am learning that he is approaching two million fans. He is also on Twitter.

Time to start saving!

Not enough people know that since 2005, our government has given Jamaicans a real break in the form of tax relief on savings of up to 20 per cent of their salary. If you have not yet opened a retirement savings account you need to do that today, not tomorrow! Actuary Cathy Lyn told us that pensioners may go back as far as five years to claim tax refunds on those savings.

We have been alerted by Professor Sir Kenneth Hall that we should be planning to fund 30 non-working years after retirement. Speaking at the launch of the BPM Personal Pension, he recalled that there used to be "another retirement package called children", but the very children to whom parents were looking for support are now "returning to the nest".

Sir Kenneth says young people do not think about retirement, though the 20s is the best time to start saving. He proposed that we appeal to them by showing them that they could be independently wealthy by age 55. He said personal savings will lift the economy, referring to the Chinese habit of saving 50 per cent of one's salary — "Jamaicans save only an average of 16 per cent of their salary."

Inflation is the enemy of the pensioner and so it was good news when BOJ Governor Brian Wynter told us at a Caribbean Community of Retired Persons (CCRP) Seminar last week that inflation was trending down. He believes that there should be "a societal consensus on inflation" as low inflation will help pensioners to maintain their purchasing power.

Financial analyst Sushil Jain urged expenditure control, and suggested that retirees find ways to continue earning as well as look beyond traditional saving plans. He said investments should be diversified and recommended insurance as "a necessary expense". Jain said it was important to utilise investment advisers as "discussions and understanding are important and it is better to have a second opinion". Please sign up for those free investment seminars being offered by various financial organisations — internationally approved and regulated options offer great opportunities even for modest investors.

COMMENTS (12)

howie J
7/19/2010
We don’t need to do research to tell us that many of our criminals are from troubled communities. We use our senses to see, smell, feel, hear and taste problems.
What we need to know from these social scientists is what methods were used to create conditions which have resulted in these troubled communities.

D H
7/19/2010
What is(was) the government's ownership interest in the sugar industry. Was it 100% or a much lesser amount. I hope it's the latter because sugar is such a crucial product. We rely on sugar for energy for our bodies(glucose) and as well sugar is suitable for use in creating fuel that powers machinery.
The Chinese appear to be investing in themselves with Jamaica gaining incidental benefit.
Keep giving away our energy and we'll be immobilized!
Carlos Bryson
7/19/2010
People hold off on the ethnocentricity bordering on racism. Granted, we run the risk of re-colonozation but nobody complained when others (Americans, Canadians and Brits) and now Spanish owned most of our industrial base. Why such vitriol against the Chinese? These people have been part of Jamaica for years and have contributed positively. Look at the people that look like you and how they have been screwing us royaly for ages. Hold their feet to the fire. Dont forget the motto.
Carlos Bryson
7/19/2010
Ja Cynic; it is not cynical to suggest our schools start teaching other languages. Seriously, my daughter had to choose a second language when she entered school at age 5. She chose spanish and now, after graduating college is very much attractive to Uncle Sam foreign service and the international employer base.
Jamaica being the beach-head to the Caribbean must diversify and learning many languages makes us more attractive. Learning Chinese with our knowledge of the West? That's added value.
Rovert Sirrah
7/19/2010
Are jumping up and clapping because Jamaica is being colonised by a communist country ? Can you imagine if this was happening under a PNP administration ? Sugar , bauxite , coffee , aiport , port , building roads , stadiums , convention centres . Whats next ? Come on people this is not progress.
Wharf Dawg
7/19/2010
Only the uninformed can view anything that that the Chinese do in Jamaica as good news.
One need only to look at other places where their 'good news' investments were made in the past to understand that this is the death knell of what remains of the Jamaican manufacturing industry. I can give you one example and that is the textile industry of Sub-Saharan Africa..

Winston Jones
7/19/2010
Very in formative piece Ms. Lowrie Chin. People must invest but should invest wisely. Saving is not necessarily a bad thing but if inflation keeps increasing then the value of your savings will take a big hit. As for the Chinese investors. We should never give up ownsrship of our natural resources to any foreign investors or companies. It is o.k. to lease out an industry if we are in capable of running the thing ourselves but selling off our riches for term gains is a no no.
Winston G
7/19/2010
What is wrong with this writer. Why has she moved away from Manatt to speak about "good news" to disturb persons like JA Cynic and Meat Head. Come on Ms. Lowrie Chin, get off the positive and let us keep focusing on what is wrong with Jamaica so that those who comment here can remain happy.
avid equin
7/19/2010
The deeper question is; in a global market where thousands of value chains are swirling around us, what is Jamaica's place? what role do we play? where is sustainable wealth to be harvested? Are we positioned to seriously participate as a worthy player in global value chains? Is our participation condemmed to be at the low value end or do we have the resource and capability to leverage hi value wealth harvesting? After all the proceeds of sales are consumed, are our people globally competitive?
Brain Allen
7/19/2010
Meat Head, what concern me is what we don't know about the deal. I would not be surprise to see the Chinese population increase in Jamaica and they start to vote. The only thing remaining before Chinese start to migrate in great numbers to Jamaica is for the government to grant China a television station in Jamaica. This is a betrayal of the Jamaican people (Africans) by Bruce Golding and the regime.
JA Cynic
7/19/2010
Soon we will all have to learn mandarin.The way things are going we should make it mandatory in primary schools and even have courses for those in the key ministries. Later, we may even have to update the electoral office.
Hope their will be an influx of reginal chinese cuisine. Jamaicans love chinese food.
JA Cynic
Meat Head
7/19/2010
I don't view the Chinese purchase with the same level of elation. China is not viewing their investment as charity -- they intend to repatriate the profits to further develop their country. These profits could have remained here, if only we had the management capacity. This is in spite of the financial rewards we give to managers and government. Going forward, I suppose we will continue to do what we do best -- give our labour cheaply for the benefit of others.

Xavi

Xavi