For the photographers: Robert Capa

Last night I got to see a 2003 documentary about the famous photographer Robert Capa, titled Robert Capa: In Love and War. It's a very good exploration of the life of this formidable man, that I knew next to nothing about prior to this. Maybe a bit partial, but then you can't cover a whole life in 90 minutes, least of all such a complex life as Capa's.

The documentary was shown at the Peña Fotográfica Rosarina, and I learned of it through a friend of Marisa's who's a photographer. It was free of charge and anybody could attend, but I felt a bit out of place as I entered the building on Urquiza St. The folks at the Peña are mostly pros or trying to be, and generally they're on the traditional film or the newer digital reflex camp, so they don't commonly mix with us lowly non-reflex users. (I have a bridge camera now, and a couple of my own fellow Rosarigasinos have DSLRs, but still there's an invisible line between us and the Peña's guys.)

Anyway, the environment was friendly enough, and the movie was very nicely done. If you can get it somehow, do yourself a favour and watch it.

Cold, dark winter

I'm quickly running out of interesting things to do here at home. But I just can't go outside. Not unless I have to. It's raining, it's windy, and it feels very, very cold. I'm just back from a common cold and I don't want to catch another one, common or worse. And sometimes the feeling is painfully cold. I'm a skinny guy — I don't have a thick layer of subcutaneous fat to insulate myself. And I don't have a bar of strong drinks at home, at my disposal. Why can't I be a fat drunk, happily oblivious to the polar wave?

I've moved Vista Rosario, as I announced, and I've been working a lot on it. I've had a lot of time. I've been checking pictures from last year, and discovered a few gems among them, such as several historical buildings whose pictures I took, at the time, because "they looked so cool" (I guess). Most of the pictures are "burned" on one side, or too dark because I didn't care about the lack of sunlight, or simply not well composed, but some are just fine. Add some Gimp-powered tampering, and voilà.

(By the way, do check out Vista Rosario, link to it, mark it as a favorite Technorati blog, StumbleUpon it, etc. It helps. If I don't promote myself, who will? Exactly.)

I've also been reading Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is a very fine book, except you need to take it in small doses or your brains will be splattered on the walls. It's about self-reference in fields such as mathematics and logic, though also in other places, such as Johann Sebastian Bach's fugues. A fugue is a piece of music composed of a basic theme repeated over itself in different scales, speeds, and even directions, and Bach was a master at them. I don't dislike math or logic, and I'm just an amateur at music, but it's actually far more entertaining for me to read about Bach's incredible skills than about Gödel's Theorem.

I did not go to see the Simpsons movie, and I think I won't. I'm a huge fan of The Simpsons; I grew up with them and I can pull out Homer's quotes about all sorts of situations in a second... in the Latin American Spanish version, of course. I didn't like how they changed the voices because the Mexican dubbers were asking for a salary raise, but I could live with it. But I couldn't stand by the series when Matt Groening left and it degraded into badly executed fake intellectual comedy. Homer was a nice fool, now he's just stupid, incoherent, and nasty; the kids simply have no character anymore, and the newer episodes usually don't manage to make me laugh — something the old series achieved every ten seconds during whole episodes.

So keeping the good things for the movie while we, the loyal TV followers, are left with the trash, is not OK with me. From what I've heard, the movie is just an overproduced long episode. I'm not going to pay for that. (Maybe when I'm old and President of the Supreme Court, I will allow myself to watch it.)

In short, I think no movies and no strong drinks will make Pablo go crazy. I should go back to my old pictures...

Babel バベル בָּבֶל Βαβέλ

After a failed attempt that led me to another movie and a couple of weeks, I went to see Babel yesterday.

Babel, written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, has a multinational cast and is, of course, spoken in several languages. It's made of three interweaving stories: one in and around the border between the United States and Mexico; the other in Morocco; and the other in Japan (I think I saw the Tokyo Tower and I saw a sign that read Shinjuku, but that was the only indication). The English-speaking audience will immediately recognize Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt; the Latin American audience will probably be familiar with Gael García Bernal (the one who played Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries).

The common theme, as suggested by the title, is lack of communication within society and between different societies, but that wasn't the only detail. The U.S.–Mexico border scenes were full of music and dust; the ones in Morocco were full of dust and solitude; the ones in Japan were full of people that are physically close to each other yet unable to communicate. The common thread seems to be the desert, the desperation of people who don't know how to get out of places they don't wish to be.

There's also a clear message about xenophobia, in the literal etymological sense of fear and rejection of the Different Other, be they paranoid American tourists in an Arab town, Mexican citizens treated like criminals by the U.S. border patrol, or deaf-mute Japanese girls freaking out stupid boys in a disco.

The people in Babel, for different reasons ranging from alienation to distraction to irrational fear, make incredibly stupid mistakes, just because they don't imagine what the other might do, or because they don't see the other. In a world full of communication devices, people fail to communicate and thus solve their problems; people belonging to the same culture or to wildly different ones, face to face or by long-distance phone or through sign language, speaking as friends or relatives or representatives of whole nations, cannot reach each other, for reasons only beginning with language. Babel is not devoid of hope, though; in the middle of this nightmare, flashes of pure understanding and acceptance cast some light on the otherwise gloomy landscape of our fractured world.

Babel is not going to rock your world. Some parts of the stories could be better told; the Japanese section, though very well done in itself, is somehow disconnected from the rest; the acting skills of the cast are a bit overshadowed by the plot itself. But the high points are in the majority. The colours and the music, the whole ambience given to each scenario, is wonderful. And it's not common that a movie spoken in four languages, with subtitles, is appreciated by European critics and also nominated for the Academy Awards. We'll see how it does in a few weeks.