Artemis-9
Joined Oct 2000
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Have you seen Oliver Stone's "JFK" (1991)? No? But you should.
I ask you this, because I saw John Fitzgerald Kennedy being shot on TV - not live TV, but in the special news even in Portugal's b&w channel 1 and only in 1962. The young boy I was dropped a tear for the man I viewed as a liberal catholic democratic who had twisted History away from the nuclear holocaust in the Cuba crisis. With Portuguese press under official censorship, I read it all about the one lonely assassin, and how the assassin was shot by another lonely assassin when in police custody, and how everybody in the States were United in believing that truth. The day before yesterday, I finished reading "JFK - The Documented Screenplay" that collects the screenplay and all the debate the 1991 movie caused in America. It makes for great reading: the collusion between people in government, secret services, the reference media (TV, newspapers, magazines) to condition us - the public, the audience, who can not be citizens, because to be a citizen one must be educated and informed (as opposite to indoctrinated and misinformed).
The 9/11 attacks on NYC and the Pentagon I saw live on colour TV, in a crowded restaurant during lunch break. I returned to the office to tell my superior that I was going home because I was no longer fit to work, and told him. He turned on his TV set (he was the boss) and let me go. I watched attentively 12 consecutive hours of news, alternating channels - American, UK, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese... ah the beauty of satellite TV in a free country! Subsequently, I felt odd as there were no comments on loose ends at some of the reports I'd seen. It was French information analyst Thierry Meyssan who made clear the black holes I had spotted, in his book "L'Effroyable Imposture" (2002) now translated in many languages.
So, yesterday, when I was prepared to go to bed because all the channels (mainly the news) are the same, I gave a chance to this new (to me) "Official Secrets" (2019) based on the title alone. The pre-credits were enough to grab my full attention. You see, it was just before the so called Iraq War. The movie, such as "JFK" edits a personal drama of a young information analyst at a secret service with scenes excerpted from news media. It's not all there, but all important lies about Saddam Hussein's owing "weapons of mass destruction" and the need for a "pre-emptive war" without a decision from the UNO. The accomplices in the Portuguese government for a meeting in Azores is missing, but the movie is about a young British woman and therefore concentrates attention on the American and the British government who were lying to us - the passive world audience - to get cover to their destruction and conquer of Iraq. Just like in 1962, a collusion of people in government, secret services, and the media.
Please do watch this movie, and do not turn off at the happy end. Read on, the cards that sum up the costs in lives and wounded soldiers. The cards do not estimate the cost of civilian lives, the reduction of an economic viable country with a stable government to what it is now, or the historic artifacts taken from the Baghdad Museum in the first hours of the invasion...
There is still the liberty to produce movies like "JFK" and "Official Secrets", as long as they talk about things that happened before you were born, and they look like "infotainment" that totally took the space of news and public debate on television. How degraded our "democracy" is!
I ask you this, because I saw John Fitzgerald Kennedy being shot on TV - not live TV, but in the special news even in Portugal's b&w channel 1 and only in 1962. The young boy I was dropped a tear for the man I viewed as a liberal catholic democratic who had twisted History away from the nuclear holocaust in the Cuba crisis. With Portuguese press under official censorship, I read it all about the one lonely assassin, and how the assassin was shot by another lonely assassin when in police custody, and how everybody in the States were United in believing that truth. The day before yesterday, I finished reading "JFK - The Documented Screenplay" that collects the screenplay and all the debate the 1991 movie caused in America. It makes for great reading: the collusion between people in government, secret services, the reference media (TV, newspapers, magazines) to condition us - the public, the audience, who can not be citizens, because to be a citizen one must be educated and informed (as opposite to indoctrinated and misinformed).
The 9/11 attacks on NYC and the Pentagon I saw live on colour TV, in a crowded restaurant during lunch break. I returned to the office to tell my superior that I was going home because I was no longer fit to work, and told him. He turned on his TV set (he was the boss) and let me go. I watched attentively 12 consecutive hours of news, alternating channels - American, UK, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese... ah the beauty of satellite TV in a free country! Subsequently, I felt odd as there were no comments on loose ends at some of the reports I'd seen. It was French information analyst Thierry Meyssan who made clear the black holes I had spotted, in his book "L'Effroyable Imposture" (2002) now translated in many languages.
So, yesterday, when I was prepared to go to bed because all the channels (mainly the news) are the same, I gave a chance to this new (to me) "Official Secrets" (2019) based on the title alone. The pre-credits were enough to grab my full attention. You see, it was just before the so called Iraq War. The movie, such as "JFK" edits a personal drama of a young information analyst at a secret service with scenes excerpted from news media. It's not all there, but all important lies about Saddam Hussein's owing "weapons of mass destruction" and the need for a "pre-emptive war" without a decision from the UNO. The accomplices in the Portuguese government for a meeting in Azores is missing, but the movie is about a young British woman and therefore concentrates attention on the American and the British government who were lying to us - the passive world audience - to get cover to their destruction and conquer of Iraq. Just like in 1962, a collusion of people in government, secret services, and the media.
Please do watch this movie, and do not turn off at the happy end. Read on, the cards that sum up the costs in lives and wounded soldiers. The cards do not estimate the cost of civilian lives, the reduction of an economic viable country with a stable government to what it is now, or the historic artifacts taken from the Baghdad Museum in the first hours of the invasion...
There is still the liberty to produce movies like "JFK" and "Official Secrets", as long as they talk about things that happened before you were born, and they look like "infotainment" that totally took the space of news and public debate on television. How degraded our "democracy" is!
The reviewr of The New York Times, Manohla Dargis, wrote the movie is "a meditation on movies, myths and memory". This may have been the beginning of the myth some people built around a film that according to its co-directors in various interviews, said (1) that the documentary thing was in an early script presented to obtain some funding; (2) that on location it was evident that the few child memories of one of them (the only one that lived some years in Macau) had vanished; that the opening singing act was an afterthought. A Portuguese spectator encapsulated the whole thing thus: It is not a movie, it's a thing. It seems that when the team went to Macau, they did not know what they were going to do. Well, it shows...
The movie synopsis lies blatantly, suggesting that the movie confronts memories of the 1970s Macau with the 2010s reality: the memories are reduced to a couple of sentences about landscape preserved by the Portuguese and Chinese authorities, and has nothing to do with the gloomy side of borderline towns, Asian or European alike. The authors have said that some scenes had been shot in Lisbon and Almada, Portugal.
A docudrama it is not! One of the co-directors, Guerra da Mata, actually lived his formative years in Macau, up to the 1970s; he opens the movie as the Narrator, by saying «Thirty years later I am on my way to Macau, where I had not been since childhood. I received an email in Lisbon, from Candy, of whom I had not heard for years. She told me that she had been with the wrong men again, and asked me to go to Macau, where strange and frightening things were happening. Tired, after a long flight, I arrive at Macao on the boat that will take me back to the happiest period of my life." Several film reviews take from here - and the fact that there is no fiction drama, or story - to categorize this as documentarist. It is not. The film could have been turned anywhere where there are somber streets, some litter on the pavement, dead rats, and stray cats and dogs. A few (very few) shots of casinos' neon ensigns, a Venetian gondolier that is a casino attraction, and a few (very few) photographs of Chinese banquets, are not enough. Later, when girls in uniform are leaving the Santa Rosa de Lima College, Guerra da Mata seems to regret that there are no boys now at the college he attended, missing the fact that the college had been a religious institution for girls since its foundation, had had major changes (even in the buildings it occupies), and that during Portuguese administration, separation of genders in school was the norm, with few exceptions.
Candy is no candy! The film opens with a transvestite in a shiny low-cut dress showing enhanced breasts, singing in playback. As the Narrator is attracted to Macau by a Candy, some viewers admit that Candy is that person, but no, that is Cindy Scrach who worked with these directors in Morrer como um homem.
Candy is actually named once, later in the movie, as Candida - a Portuguese name, and it's English abbreviation was deemed more appealing for the international film festivals and the world of casino's entertainment where the alleged drama takes place. Candy is presented as a McGuffin, as fake as the carved inscription in a bamboo trunk - that in closer inspection is a plank of wood shot in front of some bamboos. The end credits name Candy as an actor, and we know from interviews that it was the real name of Guerra da Mata's pet kitty - dead, and thus appearing in stock footage.
Halfway into the film the narrator comments how, after 400 years of Portuguese rule, there was no one able to speak Portuguese in Macau. Was it any different when he attended college, and lived there? His depictions of local life in Macau are stereotypical, vague, and sometimes inaccurate. I was put off by the fact that the copy of the movie shown at a special session had no subtitles for the Cantonese dialogue - adding to my rejection of the vagrant succession of images with no sense at all; but one person who speaks the language has commented that the Cantonese dialogues are unnatural and seem to be an automatic translation of English phrases. For the Portuguese dialogue, I can say that it pretends to be mysterious and suspenseful, but it never gets up from dispassionate emptiness. Old photos shown and commented out of context are part of the same emotionless and flat.
The long paintball sequence between adults, in the beginning of the film, seems so unrelated to the story as the singing act by Cindy Stein. The bird cage with a cloth covering is not a McGuffin, it's co-director João Pedro adding his life interest to be an ornithologist and bird watcher - which he should have been, instead of going to a film school.
I loved the tiger images because they are so pretty, even when they are shown torn, and abandoned, filmed after the feast ends. But not even that is there with a narrative purpose, it happens the film was shot during the Gold Tiger year (Feb 14, 2010 - Feb 2, 2011). By the way, and totally off topic, according to the Asian horoscope under this sign the males are indecisive, stubborn, and feminized.
The movie synopsis lies blatantly, suggesting that the movie confronts memories of the 1970s Macau with the 2010s reality: the memories are reduced to a couple of sentences about landscape preserved by the Portuguese and Chinese authorities, and has nothing to do with the gloomy side of borderline towns, Asian or European alike. The authors have said that some scenes had been shot in Lisbon and Almada, Portugal.
A docudrama it is not! One of the co-directors, Guerra da Mata, actually lived his formative years in Macau, up to the 1970s; he opens the movie as the Narrator, by saying «Thirty years later I am on my way to Macau, where I had not been since childhood. I received an email in Lisbon, from Candy, of whom I had not heard for years. She told me that she had been with the wrong men again, and asked me to go to Macau, where strange and frightening things were happening. Tired, after a long flight, I arrive at Macao on the boat that will take me back to the happiest period of my life." Several film reviews take from here - and the fact that there is no fiction drama, or story - to categorize this as documentarist. It is not. The film could have been turned anywhere where there are somber streets, some litter on the pavement, dead rats, and stray cats and dogs. A few (very few) shots of casinos' neon ensigns, a Venetian gondolier that is a casino attraction, and a few (very few) photographs of Chinese banquets, are not enough. Later, when girls in uniform are leaving the Santa Rosa de Lima College, Guerra da Mata seems to regret that there are no boys now at the college he attended, missing the fact that the college had been a religious institution for girls since its foundation, had had major changes (even in the buildings it occupies), and that during Portuguese administration, separation of genders in school was the norm, with few exceptions.
Candy is no candy! The film opens with a transvestite in a shiny low-cut dress showing enhanced breasts, singing in playback. As the Narrator is attracted to Macau by a Candy, some viewers admit that Candy is that person, but no, that is Cindy Scrach who worked with these directors in Morrer como um homem.
Candy is actually named once, later in the movie, as Candida - a Portuguese name, and it's English abbreviation was deemed more appealing for the international film festivals and the world of casino's entertainment where the alleged drama takes place. Candy is presented as a McGuffin, as fake as the carved inscription in a bamboo trunk - that in closer inspection is a plank of wood shot in front of some bamboos. The end credits name Candy as an actor, and we know from interviews that it was the real name of Guerra da Mata's pet kitty - dead, and thus appearing in stock footage.
Halfway into the film the narrator comments how, after 400 years of Portuguese rule, there was no one able to speak Portuguese in Macau. Was it any different when he attended college, and lived there? His depictions of local life in Macau are stereotypical, vague, and sometimes inaccurate. I was put off by the fact that the copy of the movie shown at a special session had no subtitles for the Cantonese dialogue - adding to my rejection of the vagrant succession of images with no sense at all; but one person who speaks the language has commented that the Cantonese dialogues are unnatural and seem to be an automatic translation of English phrases. For the Portuguese dialogue, I can say that it pretends to be mysterious and suspenseful, but it never gets up from dispassionate emptiness. Old photos shown and commented out of context are part of the same emotionless and flat.
The long paintball sequence between adults, in the beginning of the film, seems so unrelated to the story as the singing act by Cindy Stein. The bird cage with a cloth covering is not a McGuffin, it's co-director João Pedro adding his life interest to be an ornithologist and bird watcher - which he should have been, instead of going to a film school.
I loved the tiger images because they are so pretty, even when they are shown torn, and abandoned, filmed after the feast ends. But not even that is there with a narrative purpose, it happens the film was shot during the Gold Tiger year (Feb 14, 2010 - Feb 2, 2011). By the way, and totally off topic, according to the Asian horoscope under this sign the males are indecisive, stubborn, and feminized.
