Merry Christmas

Laughing Through Tears: Night Eating Syndrome

The Rat

‘Honey, have we got a rat?’ is the last thing I want my lover to ask me in the morning. But as I observe a careless arrangement of gutted silver chocolate wraps all over the carpet, a curious collection of caramel mini pools in the bed and mysterious nut dust clouds in the air, I realize the ‘rat’ reference is neither a question nor a joke. I realize, with alarming clarity, that I had to endure the waxing (in 6 places!) in vain because the ‘rat’ reference is a metaphor for none other than the puff eyed, suddenly moonfaced creature in the mirror with waffle crumbles stuck to the blushing, no-longer-chewing cheek and pink hives of guilt rising up the throat.

The rat is me.

The Roots

Ever since I could remember myself I got up to eat at night. I would get up grumpy and ashamed in the morning, hands shaking, heart jumping, a pool of acid in my mouth, the thought of food making me sick until high noon. I would get hungrier as the evening approached and hit rock bottom when with my eyes closed, my PJs stuck to my body from the most recent nightmare, of which I had many, I ravaged the place for anything edible at 3 or 4 in the morning.

By 1997, when I was fifteen, I routinely got up at 3 a.m., heated up a bowl of chicken soup in the microwave, opening my eyes only when absolutely necessary, consume it, my eyes closed, then gulp down a large dish of beef casserole, and finish up with a nice plate of vanilla ice cream. Oh and there was orange juice, lots of orange juice; in the morning my face looked like it was fished out of an aquarium, my eyes buried under the viral-looking lids. I would go hungry all day, constant nausea and light-headedness as a result.

I thought I had anorexia. The good type. The one in which I didn’t die.

The Unofficial Diagnosis

No one could tell me what it was in 1997 because Night Eating Syndrome emerged as a semi-recognized eating disorder only in 1999, despite the fact that it allegedly affects 6 million Americans and God knows how many people of other nationalities, because, to tell the truth, NO ONE REALLY KNOWS.

I thought many times about all those people who knew about my condition, how it annoyed/entertained the hell out of them, bringing grown men to tears and engendering suicidal panic in them, and yet never asked the question: ‘What the hell is wrong with you? Do you need help?’

3 letter words: N.E.S, S.E.X., S.O.S.

The only sexual partner NES is compatible with is the pot head who sticks his head into the fridge 5 times a night on average, can eat a bucket of borsch in one gulp, and that’s just the entrée.

Another NES-tolerant type is the artsy nerd that has no food in the house except salted vegetable juice (his idea of vitamin intake), dines out at posh places three times a day, complaining profusely and never tipping anyone, and waits for the cleaning lady to take out the salted vegetable juice boxes, piling up in the kitchen and robbing the table of the only practical function it serves (clue: it’s not food preparation).

When I grew out of potheads and nerds, I realized I had a problem.

I had a pillow thrown at me after the salad ‘my neighbors cooked for me all day’ vanished without a trace come busy work morning after a busy ‘work’ night. (FYI: The neighbors were mommy and daddy. It was doomed).

I had angry accusations hurled at me ‘Do you come here for the food?’ after I managed to destroy all the soft cheese pancakes the landlady prepared for one busy guy, one busy foreigner guy with a fancy education and bright future, because only educated foreigners have their land ladies bring soft cheese pancakes to them. 

Trying to explain that I didn’t even like pancakes at all was useless when I was caught in the act, 6 a.m., in my slightly sugar dusted birthday suit, munching away at my dignity and the fucking pancakes, right next to the person I had certain hopes for. And no, my closed eyes did not suffice as an efficient alibi.

I had to present two anorexic slices of cake to a man I had baked for the whole day previously swearing ALL THE WAY I would not as much as touch the opulent creation, all chocolate and sweet sour cream. Two puny slices (that I had snatched out of the insatiable gut of wicked NES), surrounded by the sticky shadows of their chocolaty siblings, smothered on a gigantic dish of shame.

I had to sleep in the other room, because the constant hopping in and out of bed (to eat and drink, then pee, and after that eat and drink – cuz, let’s face it, I was already up, duh! – and then pee again, of course, after a terrible nightmare) turned the cuddle craver into Hannibal Lector.

Yes, it’s sad. The normally promising phrase ‘Get your ass in here and I will eat you’ is more 28 Days Later than 9 ½ Weeks in my world (and people wonder why I am in to zombies).

The consequence is the same: men seek professional help, their shrinks seek professional help; together they live happily ever after. Without me.

The Scary Stuff

When it stops being funny, it gets a little scary. Because I know that if I don’t have cookies I will eat bread, and if I don’t have bread, I will eat bread crumbs off the plastic bag, together with the bag, I don’t have any edible food in the house. Did I just say that? Edible food? As a consequence, I catch myself looking for food in packs of tea – because all the rest are either dry (pasta and legumes) or frozen (meat and fish) but my mind screams I have to eat SOMETHING even as it knows there is NOTHING TO EAT.

By day I am a perfect paragon of healthy eating, all spinach and salad, sun flower seeds on top. At night I will eat anything I wouldn’t normally eat during the day, which gets really bad if I am visiting or if someone is visiting (and they haven’t received the EDIBLE PRESENTS FORBIDDEN rider).

One time in a friend’s house I went to the kitchen to get a snack at night and when my host got up to pee at the same moment, 4 in the morning, I ran back into the room (with an apple, yey!), my steps a little too loud on the wooden floor. I simply shrugged my shoulders when she voiced her concern about a ‘person running in the yard last night’… I didn’t even crack when she went shopping for a fence the next aftrernoon. I know. Less than human.  

The Boring Stuff

I go to the store two to three times a day. If there is anything left to eat for breakfast (yeah, I will eat baby food, kid’s vitamins and cough drops) I have breakfast. I know the system works as long as I don’t have to put up with another (grown up, opinionated, hairy) individual under the same roof. It works in the city only, with the shops open around the clock. I have seriously considered locks and a confidante to safeguard the key. I don’t know how long before the band aid begins to stick away.

The Way

It gets kinda lonely at times. The only advice I ever got from professional therapists who are ‘specialists in addiction’ was ‘drink water instead’ or ‘say a prayer’. Maybe no one cares about NES folk because we don’t notoriously die out like the anorexics or the bulimics. After all, they don’t call it abuse unless you have bruises all over your face.

Does it really have to go that far?

I hope not: I have a brand new Night Eating Syndrome blog and the NES Facebook page – because I am tired of being alone. Because the first step to dealing with a problem is recognizing it. 

Short Moments of Freedom

Cartoon coma

Symptoms: shoulders relaxed, head slightly tilted backwards, breathing slowed down, winking non-existent

Duration: depending on the state of the J-O-B, from 20 min to 10 hours

Coming out line: ‘I gotta pee!’

Commercial break coma

Symptoms: dropped jaw; involuntary hand gestures; involuntary repetition of line ‘I want this, I want this, I want this’; involuntary hopping on and off the sofa

Duration: 3 min

Coming out line: ‘Santa is gonna give me all this for my birthday’

Ice cream coma

Symptoms: eyes flickering left and right for signs of alien invaders stealing ice cream cones from innocent children minding their own business; rapid movements of the tongue (see symptom one); blueberry-flavored burps

Duration: not enough if mama is shopping for new jeans, too long if mama needs to enter the glistening shop with the ‘no ice cream’ sign

Coming out line: ‘Look at my tongue – it’s blue!’

Goofy mama coma

Symptoms: uncontrollable giggling and fake pleas to ‘stop it’; profuse sweating; violent hiccups

Duration: depending on mama’s current medication

Coming out line: ‘Is that why Daddy doesn’t live with us anymore?’

P.S. No children were harmed during the writing of this post but the author of this post holds no responsibility for the possibility of an identified amount of brain cells that could have been harmed by reading this piece. Peace.

The Three Musketeers (2011): Not Too Proud for Predation

Article first published as Movie Review: The Three Musketeers (2011): Not Too Proud for Predation on Blogcritics.

After more than 20 adaptations of the famous swashbuckling novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas here comes another one, a postmodern rereading by Paul W. S. Anderson, steampunk-styled and slowmotion-shot, boasting German-French-British co-production, and the biggest budget ever. Oh yes, it is the first one in 3D.

Fidelity in adaptation disputes seem inane in 2011, especially in this case, where the plot doesn’t divert too dramatically from the original (with the exception of the flying battleships built according to Leonardo Da Vinci plans). The story is well known: Young D'Artagnan (Logan Lerman) is headed for Paris to become a Musketeer and manages to meet the entire cast of the main characters on the same fateful day: the nefarious one-eyed Rochefort (Mads Mikkelsen) and scintillating Milady de Winter (Milla Jovovich, gorgeous), the leader of the once legendary trio Athos (Matthew Macfadyen), the soulful former priest Aramis (Luke Evans) and muscular Porthos (Ray Stevenson), all of whom D'Artagnan impresses with his brazen cockiness and rustic charm. While young King Louis XIII (Freddie Fox), bipolar, bad at chess and bored with big politics, is preoccupied with the latest fashions in coiffure and dress and a very cute crush on his fresh-faced wife Queen Anne (Juno Temple), Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz) is the one playing with the country’s fate (metaphorically and otherwise – there are adorable ‘toy’ ships on the floor of his ‘office’). The three somewhat embittered Musketeers joined by the ideallistic D'Artagnan have to battle Duke of Buckingham (Orlando Bloom, strangely styled) to save France and the honour of the Queen. Thank God there is Barbie-faced Constance (Gabriella Wilde) for a peachy kiss before the credits roll.

Alex Litvak (Predators) and Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice 1995) are the writers here and it is no wonder that The Three Musketeers are a steampunk comic one minute and candy-coloured costume adventure the next. Anderson plays with intertextuality here and there (some critics call it stealing), alluding to Pirates of the Caribbean (and hoping against hope for a franchise: games, toys, keep dreaming), The Princess Bride and The Empire Strikes Back, Pulp Fiction, as well as referencing Bond, Indiana Jones and Batman movies, comic strip and cartoon clichés more generically. Two supporting actors – Christopher Waltz as Cardinal Richelieu and Til Schweiger as Cagliostr – will be instant reminders, to some viewers at least, of another movie that took liberty with famous historical events, the delightful Inglourious Basterds, which doesn’t elevate The Three Musketeers’s B-movie status but rather encourages unwelcome comparisons.

Anderson may not be as good as Tarantino at rewriting history but he definitely loves beauty, be it the falling-apart face of a raging zombie, or the breathtaking set pieces of fake 17th century France (the movie was shot in Germany). But Anderson loves beauty even if it doesn’t signify anything: pure form without substance. In cinematic terms, he is willing to shoot a scene for its mere eye candy value, regardless of how nonsensical or unnecessary it is in terms of plot/characterization/message (elements the director is not really bothered about either). He likes to shoot the amazing stuntwork in slow motion – in case the viewer misses something. He loves long, menacing corridors stuffed with traps – blades, wires, bullets, explosives; corridors in zombie-ridden underworld virus-stripped of people or corridors in an immaculate 17th century palace leading to the Da Vinci’s vault – who really cares? Anderson loves throwing lethal weapons at his beautiful wife (and the viewer, thanks to 3D) so she has to twist and bend her body in ways that would demand a very unpleasant session at the chiropractor for most normal folk. Anderson is not going to deny himself that pleasure in The Three Musketeers, even if Dumas turns in his grave (like many of the Minsk viewers commented on leaving the theater) and even if the said vault with its invaluable contents lies in ruins (gorgeous ruins).

There are plenty of beautiful shots here: the scuba diver, mask of fluid black gold, emerging from the canals of Venice; the improbable sky battle between the two enemy legions; Milady balancing in her corset and tights on top of a sculpture, in turn perched atop of a building; the wonderful siege of the Tower of London; the climactic cathedral roof battle between D'Artagnan and Rochefort. The colors pop: neon blues on the king’s guards’ uniforms; Richelieu’s raspberry cloak; black ominous clouds; luscious Kelly green of the gardens. Above all, Milla Jovovich has only grown lovelier: her porcelain skin, slightly pouted lip, glistening locks, cornflower blue eyes, and pale bosom, struggling to get free from the restraints of a tight corset are as fun to watch as the exquisite chandeliers and candelabras, glistening with opulence all around her, silk lace accentuating her long neck, feathers trembling in her hat, halos of diaphanous hoods around her face catching the light in sun-drenched rooms and illuminating her rosy cheeks – all as airy as the The Three Musketeers itself. But enough of that.

Even if plot-wise Anderson has decided to stay clear of blasphemy, the tone of the movie is decidedly ‘now’. Acting, characterization and dialogue are purely mechanical: breasts are breasts, flying cannonballs are flying cannonballs, actors are actors, not necessarily the characters they are supposed to be playing. Logan Lerman is a tad too young for the role of D'Artagnan, but when the light hits his face right, there is a hint of a very subdued Cillian Murphy in his presence, which doesn’t save his performance. Ray Stevenson as Porthos looks like an overweight Brad Pitt when a magnanimous lady friend gropes his manly waist. The rest of the actors, happy with their checks, are merely there to pronounce their lines. Even Venice, Paris and London look like retro Lego villages. In 3D.

The humor part is sad. Besides the red carpet reference and all that ‘manly’ talk about clothes so indicative of the current Project Runway era, there is little to laugh about. Excrement jokes are never funny, and Planchet (James Corden), the supposedly comic-relief vehicle, is simply painful.

Many a critic has called the movie soulless, empty, stupid, an epitome of ‘corporate filmmaking’. Maybe these critics like to eat Foie gras with mustard seeds and green onions in duck jus every day. Maybe they are so perfect they never sink as low as pizza or peanut sandwiches. I don’t think it helps to approach this movie with Almodóvar or Scorsese expectations. If someone is looking for an equivalent of exquisite French cuisine on a Saturday night at the movies choosing a director who shot Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Alien vs. Predator and Death Race isn’t such a good idea. This is a pizza, everyone. And as that, it’s fully satisfying. Burp.

On the plus side, the movie is never boring like the unforgettably tedious The Man in the Iron Mask. And even though the viewer knows the outcome of each sequence, it is impossible to take one’s eyes off the screen. There is no real ending but there is a very optimistic/opportunistic hint at a sequel. The movie is PG-13 but I have to admit my four-and-a-half-year old was much more interested in The Three Musketeers than the age-appropriate (and lovely) Dolphin Tale, which only proves this steampunk action adventure blockbuster is aimed at (and will satisfy most) a younger audience. This completely innocuous remix of a classic provides brainless escapist entertainment. But will the youth equate The Three Musketeers 3D with Dumas’ veneration of chivalry, loyalty and camaraderie? Now there’s a scary thought.

Apricots and Black Currents

When I pick it up, it’s a big deal. It’s a hole in my pocket: wind swishes through it, giving me a little thrill. It’s an event. Every time I put it on, I remember everything I had to overcome to be standing in front of the most expensive shop in the city.

When he picks it up, it’s a box to check. It’s a nuisance, nearly no time left before the departure. It’s cheaper than a penny. Every time I put it on I feel a link in a chain that is never ending; a link easily replaced with a shinier, newer one.

Every time I smell of kumquat, apricot and black currant I feel the power that no one can take away from me but me.

It’s my world. He is just living in it.

28 Days Later

(Screenplay: Alex Garland; director: Danny Boyle; 2003)

By Sviatlana Piatakova

October 29, 2009

28 days later (2003) is not your run-of-the-mill horror flick. Nor is it sci-fi/zombie apocalypse as we know it. The movie plays genre as a dizzying balance of pseudo-realistic horror, classic drama, post-apocalyptic dystopia, a tragic romance, for good measure. Its pace and mood are breathtakingly meandering: in the midst of rushing, rasping and running for your life (with blood pumping in your veins) the movie has time to stop and reflect on the beauty of naked and mute London and the ugliness of a human being, stripped of normality and hope. Dopy tranquillity, nightmarish speed (a blur of eyes, feet and frothy mouths), total defamiliraziation and oh-so-familiar dread are mixed into a whirlwind of shuddery cinematic pleasures. You will check your door locks, you will draw the curtains. You will have the main theme (In the House a Heartbeat) and the rest of the paranoid John Murphy soundtrack pump in your temples for days later. Because this movie goes unpleasant places and reminds us of the ultimate isolation, the beast inside and other horrors writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle touched upon in The Beach (2000) but failed to deliver convincingly. In 28 Days Later the tandem works magic and the result is an instant horror classic.

Jim (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from his lucky coma to find he had missed one hell of an event – the end of the world, or Britain, to be exact. After a group of eco-terrorists break into a Cambridge lab and free the apes infected with man-made Rage virus society collapses under the unforeseen pressures of a zombie pandemic. Jim wanders around the empty echoing London, picking up cans of soda and the pieces of the horror tale he missed together – an evacuation special of The Evening Standard, ‘missing persons’ flyers, photos of lost loved ones, and later, a suicide note from his own parents. The first infected he meets is a starving and emaciated but still-on-both-two bloody-eyed reverend – a vision so terrifying it fills you with dead-end horror to the brim. From there the chase is on. Only a band of survivors, the indomitable Selena (Naomie Harris) and dorky Mark (Noah Huntley) secure Jim’s life and all-too-knowingly fill him in on the events of the last twenty eight days.

The movie goes many places, in terms of genre, pace, character development, setting and mood, places you’d never expect horror to go. 28 Days Later wrecks your nerves and messes with your head. It’s all of those things: sombrely slow and adrenaline druggy, trashy cheap and picture-perfect cool, funky fresh and predictably derivative, drawing on zombie and postapocaliptic film classics.  The intertextual halo around the film takes nothing away from its edgy freshness. This is simultaneously a comeback and an update of the zombie genre. The zombies here are strangely new on many levels, the DV cam completely disorienting (a bad download? a pirate copy? a joke?) and, there is very little literal gore for a horror movie, but plenty of the blood-clotting fear of classic 20^th century dystopian tales. No wonder Danny Boyle referred to this movie as a drama in a sci-fi horror setting. This isn’t for gore addicts exactly; it’s for anyone in love with strange and disturbing cinema.

The genius of Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography is salient in the already classic London scenes without which this wouldn’t be the masterpiece it is. The sequence from the time Jim flaps his sunshine-lit eyelashes in the hospital room to his entrance into the darkness of the holy place is pure perfection. The DV knocks you out and leaves you with sand in your eyes, and images you fail to scratch away, something out of a recurring nightmare. It’s disorienting and paradoxical: sometimes film grain, sometimes pixelated mosaic, sometimes ocean ripple, sometimes Gaussian blur. If anything Mr. Mantle is filming light here, light shining through things, light reflected onto things, light reflecting things. This is an impressionist moving painting that has both Monet’s blurred softness and Seurat’s pointillist exactness. The edge of one object becomes the beginning of another as if light were fluid. In that interim space light particles stumble into each other, twirl, swim, dance, become one. All things will melt into each other, the fluids of the infected with the fluids of the healthy, and with a little struggle, something new will be born. In 28 Days Later the boundaries to objects material as we know them are gone, and the claustrophobia this engenders is simply terrifying.

The prevailing colours in this tour de force sequence are yellow (the rising sun and its multiple reflections onto objects), green (Jim’s robe and vegetation) and brown (Jims hair, the overturned furniture, the buildings and monuments). In the shot from the hospital window onto the parking of abandoned ambulances that failed to save anyone, you see the leaves on trees moving with the wind, and the pixels making up these leaves moving within them. London Bridge, yellow in the rising sun, is reflected in the quietly simmering waters. Between the orange Houses of Parliament and the immobile London Eye the light swims pink and pretty. Big Ben is grey, Jim’s robe robustly green. The Lion is peachy soft. The double-decker is a welcome splash of red – more of that color to be unwelcomingly embraced later.

The only soundtrack to the dizzying picture that prompts you to wonder if you are losing sight altogether, are Jim’s idiotic helloes and later the droning, schizophrenic John Murphy’s score, crescendoing when the alarm on the deserted car makes you jump out of your skin – every time you watch the goddamn scene. The girl on the billboard bleach-smiles at the non-existent humanity, the Statue of Liberty has no one left to set free. Jim, as the (supposedly) last human being is ticking off the boxes: science (hospital) – useless, Westminster  (government) – useless, the Wheel (entertainment) – useless, the Lion (art) – useless. Transport (double-decker), communication (hanging down receivers), commerce (bleached billboard smiles), democracy (Statue of Liberty), mass media (The Evening Standard) and memory (Shaftsebury Memorial) are all rendered meaningless in the face of this ultimate Armageddon. But Jim has one last sanctuary to flee to, one last chance, fragile and dim, to take. And with a sack of clinking pop soda in his hand he enters the church (Danny Boyle aspired to become a priest in his youth). After that moment Mr. Mante’s dizzy, simmering light, literally and metaphorically, goes out of the movie. 

And out of the darkness the zombies arrive. These are strange in many ways. Boyle’s monsters will never compare to lifeless, apathetic and pitiable creatures of Romero’s franchise. Boyle’s ghouls are superhumanly fast, strong, agile and leapy, murderous in a wink of an eye. Their frantic, slashing movements are a cross between spastic semian recklessness and blood-drooling butchery of a hyena on an inductive diet. They don’t eat and savour the flesh, meticulous at every chew and rip, they puke, bite, run and puke some more, all in a matter of seconds. They seem to evaporate into clouds of bloody bodily liquids as fast as they appear out of nowhere, and you feel like wiping the smears away from the totally innocent screen. A mere flash, you barely get a glimpse of them, yet they fill the viewer with a terror that is to linger long after the titles have rolled.

The nausea here is stronger than in Romero classics or the gorier Day’s own sequel 28 Weeks Later. Boyle doesn’t need zombies tearing flesh off human bone to get his message across. He doesn’t poke at your guts with inordinate portions of spectacular and unnecessary gore. He works at your brain like a Chinese water torture, drop by drop unwillingly bringing you to conclusions fit to drive you insane:

Civilization is a dreamed up construct, artificial, non-existent. All order evaporates in the face of disaster. The government is a joke. Science – a spastic spaniel playing with its own tail. Religion wants to eat you. This is the end.

Romero’s movies were critical of a certain very precise sin of humanity: Dawn was anti-consumerism, Night – anti-racist, Day – anti-militarist, Land – anti-capitalist and Diary – anti-sensationalist. Boyle is simply anti-everything. No meta-narrative comes out unbitten and virus-free, that’s why it’s one of the darkest of zombie horror observations so far. Besides the totally inappropriate finale, Boyle gives humans no hope. And unlike Romero, he is unable to squeeze any humour out of the inglorious, ugly occasion. Rage just happens. No purpose, no meaning, no justification. Humans kill humans. Not for food but for kicks. The virus is just there. It doesn’t make sense. And it shouldn’t. Because the world is absurd, existence meaningless and chaos is the only order we deserve.

The movie has a very distinct anti-war ring to it (picked up later in Weeks but substituting the generic anti-military with the trite anti-American ring to it). The vision of the dead outside the car window is clearly the (subconscious) memory of the Holocaust. How was that different? Wasn’t that the textbook definition of meaningless rage? Boyle sees the military as a bunch of sex-crazed half-wits obsessed with looking serious, putting on their hero-out-of-a-myth faces and guided by a crackpot who is all-man, all-hero and all-saviour.

It’s also important to remember that the so-called zombies here aren’t zombies at all. They are people infected with a virus, whose meaningless rage was begotten from human behaviour at its extreme. And humans here are scary all right. The moment when Selena is offering Hanna a drug to sedate her in the face of a sexual onslaught is queasy with unspeakable terror. And somehow the movie almost has a feminist aftertaste. Strictly speaking, this has little to do with the zombie genre, except for the homage it pays to Romero’s Dawn and Night. This is an intelligent drama speaking the language of zombie metaphor.

What rage does to humans is no pretty site. In the beginning Jim is a big-eyed apish figure, fragile, anorexic, stooping, echoing stupid and futile helloes into the empty air, clinging to religion, family, community. He bets on the church, insists on checking with his family, he encourages Selena to take Hannah and Frank on. The light goes off, however, and the transformation begins. He is forced to murder a child. Frank is killed, the girls are threatened with sexual slavery and Jim himself nearly escapes execution. By the end of the movie you have muscles of steel, inhuman speed, vicious cunning, split-second decision-making and murderous survival instinct. Jim’s eyes are bloody, his mouth frothy, sweat rolls down his torso and drool slides down his chin – rage, of a different kind, has gotten to him as well. Cyllian Murphey is brilliant here, as well as the beautiful and heartbreaking Naomi Harris. Brendan Gleeson is a joy as always, a faint ray of light in the midst of stifling dystopian hopelessness that this movie offers. For the existence of people like Frank, whom Gleeson eloquently portrays, humanity could almost be forgiven.

The bright red and green ending is a Hollywood burp, I’m afraid. It’s nice, it’s comforting, and it offers a sense of false respite after the nauseating terror preceding it. But as you turn off the lights and close your eyes, everything will come back, the grainy images, the frothy mouths, the screeching sounds.

The world will die of a virus. But when it happens, there won’t be quietly buzzing planes in the blue-blue sky.

Running Time: 112 minutes.

Rated R.

Lessons In Stupidity

One lovely morning (very early morning, around two) I went on to save another chapter of the nonfiction I was writing. A folder popped up, and funny enough it was empty. ‘That’s odd’, I thought. I quickly opened my Writing folder which had other subfolders in it (Short Stories, Warwick, Nonfiction, Reviews, Songs, Novel, etc.) and gasped. There was nothing in it. Except for the document I had saved five seconds previously, it was empty. Everything I had written since 2007 was gone.

Let me backtrack a bit and tell you at which point in my life I was when this happened.

It was (and still is) a few months before I would cross the invisible line, climb that steep mountain, become officially grown up by Western standards and irreversibly old and desperate by Belarusian standards, etcetera, etcetera – I was turning thirty come November. So I was very full of myself and my great accomplishments at such a tender age. I was thinking how I would be justified to argue with rude taxi drivers having turned all big and mighty. I replayed Beyonce’s I Was Here around the clock, bathing in all the glory and drama of the upcoming event. I had thought of how I always had this wisdom in me but only by turning a certain age society permitted me to demonstrate it – and the time was near! I daydreamed of how I would use real creams that actually did something. I thought how I would no longer be stuck in this limbo of still being in my 20s but feeling like the fun wore off a long time ago. And so on down the list. You know me. Drama Queen.

I was going to celebrate on my blog with a little speech full of pathos and then present a list of dry statistics of what I had done in my thirty years on the planet. I was going to count everything I had written and let the numbers do the talking: how many stories, plays, novels, poems, songs, essays, reviews and copywriting pieces I had written, how many pedis and manis I had (1:1), how many men I had slept with, how many serious relationships I had been in (easy one: zero), and so on. All I can be proud of is that I do remember the number of men I had slept with, which is commendable in this day and age. Everything else, at this point, is a mystery.

I remember reading an interview with Leslie Marmon Silko were she talked of the Western obsession with written word and the Native American reliance on the spoken word. The story that lived on had to be strong and potent; it had to evolve as it moved from person to person, from generation to generation. If stories died out, if tribes died out, there were no regrets. They weren’t strong enough. They didn’t deserve to be. (I know there is a correlating theory by a famous bearded man from the West, according to which my strongest work had indeed survived, but because I was born in the Soviet Union and have a general distrust of men and bearded men in particular, I would like to stick with Leslie’s beautiful stand on things.)

Maybe a personal apocalypse (from Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis; "lifting of the veil" or "revelation") is what I deserved in my elevated state of mind. The panic, fear, shock and disappointment that came as an aftermath brought me down to earth. Thanks to supporters from LinkedIn I did get computer genius help and had most of my old files recovered, but not the 50000-word nonfiction I had been writing for the last year, the most important achievement of all. At first I felt liberated and light, almost lifted off the ground, knowing it was very emotional in places, very raw, and knowing I had been given a chance to write it from scratch as a consistent piece of work. As reality sunk in and I began to realize that all the sweat, blood and tears that went into it, the sleepless nights, the hungry days, the research, the horrors of it, the honesty of it, would have to be repeated, with the same intensity, I felt tired and dumb.

I know it is my test, and I intend to pass it.

My tirade against journalists and immediate writing sits on my blog and laughs at me. Because I had kept things to myself for so long, thinking ‘It’s not good enough’ or ‘It’s not the right time’, all I have left now is the stuff I had shared with friends and colleagues, stuff I had printed out for my portfolio (creative and copywriting), or posted on my blogs. I don’t know why but in my head the Universe is a beautiful ghetto girl with a cool do and lots of bracelets as loud as her mouth and she keeps waving her hands at me yelling ‘U think u fly butchu aint all that, bitch!’ I know, I know, I got a little carried away, like a girlie in a new dress staring at her own reflection for too long and walking straight into a lamp pole. I gotta admit – it hurts.

I still think the best thing I had ever written is an essay/review on 28 Days Later. And the Universe seems to agree, because it had survived. So I’m not gonna wait for anything to happen to justify its right to be. I am posting it here and now. Because the lesson is learned.

Photo session with the great Evgeni Attsetski

Photograph: Evgeni Attsetski

 

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

The adaptation of the adaptation of the adaptation is what we get for a summer blockbuster in a world where culture was proclaimed exhausted a while ago. Planète des singes was a sci fi dystopia written by Pierre Boulle in 1963 which was adapted into a 1968 classic Planet of the Apes directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, which subsequently spawned a totality of seven films, a TV series and a few comic books. 

The story is now revisited by Rupert Wyatt in a 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a reboot of the film that started it all. Many directors are interested in the question of what defines humanity: George Romero dived into the subject headfirst with the still nauseating Night Of The Living Dead and an array of money-makers masking greed behind bogus postapocalyptic agenda (Carriers or Resident Evil: Afterlife) have tapped into that uncomfortable territory as well. All in good fun, of course.

The premise of curing a disease while releasing apocalyptic danger into the air is not new. Here the cure for Alzheimer's Disease which Charles (John Lithgow) suffers from is in the making. Will Rodman (James Franco), Charles’ son and a promising scientist, discovers a virus that helps the condition but proves threatening to humanity because thousands of apes become ‘infected’ with intelligence spread by the first guinea ape Caesar (motion-capture performed by Andy Serkis). If only this virus could be disseminated in the schools and universities around the world, I am thinking, yours truly could sleep more peacefully. Alas, the side effects of being smart are not just having no date for the prom (can anyone believe the winner of ANTM’s Cycle 13 Nicole Fox was never asked?) but it’s also the possibility of the total annihilation of humanity. As Will and his pretty girlfriend Caroline (Freida Pinto) grow more and more attached to the chimp, the monkey begins to display a few signs of teenage angst and wants to know who he is. There are moments of true joy in the film when Will’s father Charles gets a temporary respite from the disease enjoying the clarity of his days with the people he has missed in the daze of Alzheimer’s. There is poetry in nature shots and childhood events of Caesar’s life. This is a film not afraid to show emotion.

The trailer eloquently portrays what to expect from the movie, but it’s not one of those teasers where the best parts of the film are stuffed together and there is nothing to look forward to during the main course. The best of the film is the film itself. As part of the Planet Of The Apes franchise it stands its own ground and has a proud and distinct voice.

The movie starts with the cruelty of humans and ends with the cruelly of apes. Caesar, the plucky chimp warrior, is neither the first nor the other, and the inner conflict tears him apart. Besides the well choreographed actions sequences, the viewer may look forward to a colourful home-jungle sequence mirroring the bliss of Caesar’s childhood, a utopian sequoia forest full of sounds and surprises as well as the occasional pop of colour and elegance here and there (the leaves falling off the trees like snowflakes from the violent movement of the branches).

Some of the chimp education sequences reminded me of Romero’s terrifying Day Of The Dead and his most ‘civilized’ zombie Bub. Who indeed are humans and what makes them different from the rest of the animal kingdom? The gradual built up of threats from different directions (the apes are getting angrier while the people are getting sicker) creates credible tension and there is a touch of old school horror to the film which is a great thing in an era where too many thrills depend on stupid outbursts of action as opposed to skilful levelling of suspense (but there will be a few unintentional laughs too).

Below the surface of the perfect summer blockbuster one can unearth uncomfortable topics such as the omnipotent maternal instinct (one angry mommy is having a really bad day when her baby seems to be in peril), the identity crises adopted children are inevitably faced with, the problem of isolation of the Other, the futility of prison sentences and the dangerous castigation of ‘evil’, the psychology behind any dictatorship and so on. But that’s if one squints really hard.

There are references to the original 1968 film. There are the clichés: the greedy corporation sharks, the sadists that happen to work with animals day in day out, the cool guy next door and his flawless girl. The pacing is good, with every subplot getting satisfactory resolutions at a rhythm that keeps things interesting without rushing it or piling plot twists on top of each other. The ending is a bit of a downer. Maybe the real problem is that after the first ending, there is actually the real ending, but by that time half of the audience is out the door (the poor ticket lady trying to scream over the heads of early leavers). You have been warned.

Do not leave viruses lying around in the fridge. Who knows what can happen. For some pure fun, thrills and a few frowns, go see Rise of the Planet of the Apes, in theatres August 5.

The stupid assumptions

The role of a parent is not a given.

It has to be earned. 

It can be taken away.

Moment of Silence

There are only two types of people: the writer and the journalist.

The writer gets pregnant with an idea. The journalist vomits out words.

The job of a writer is to digest the world. The job of the journalist is to point at the world. The car bombing; the death of a pop star; the assassination attempt. The journalist hurries to bring the latest fact to the reader in that beaming beak, hard as stone. The writer goes on a two week drinking rampage or cuts off locks of unruly hair with paper scissors because all words under the sun are the wrong words.

The journalist is fascinated with the Kennedys and the Hiltons. The writer is fascinated only with what the Kennedys and the Hiltons represent.

The journalist is interested in the now, the fleeting, the current. The writer is interested in the deep, the hidden, the evasive. The journalist skims. The writer dives.

The job of the journalist is hard. The journalist is forever sweating with only one hour for the breaking story and only one chance to get it first.

The job of the writer is hard. The writer wants to write about beautiful flowers and three hour orgasms. The writer is forever stuck with books that won’t go away.

 

The journalist works with the formula: time of death, major achievements, media scrutiny, funeral arrangements. Every article is the same article because it has been written by the journalist.

The writer is only interested in the unique. The writer is the unique.

We will always have journalists. We will always have writers. We need both.

Now is the time of the journalist. Everybody wants the latest news. Everything written has to have a poignant relevancy to the now and the today. The forever means nothing. There is no perspective.

I am a writer. Words, sentences, songs have to live inside me, earn their write to exist, blend into my DNA and come out without a sound, like a breath.

My best obituary is my silence.

Beyonce male dancers Run The World video

Now it's clear why there are two male dancers in Beyonce Run the World video - because none of the bad ass American dancers could do that African dance effortlessly right. Watch her amazing documentary including the Run The World male dancers below. Peace!

The puzzle

Some events you never welcome. Some events look like they may be the end of you. But if you step out of your body, leap up and take a look at the shit below from a bird's-eye view, you will see the last pieces of the puzzle take their places. The picture is complete. You can do anything.

Book Review: Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, illustrated by Ricardo Cortés

Article first published as Book Review: Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, Illustrated by Ricardo Cortés on Blogcritics.

Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, illustrated by Ricardo Cortés, is a gem for guilt-ridden parents, tired out of their wits, hopelessly hysterical, shamelessly controlled by small people with loud voices, hoping against hope they can crawl to their beds and (die) stare at the TV screen unseeingly, dipping their hands into the bowl of pop corn in listless zombie-like motions, smear anti-cellulite cream over their baby fat bellies and sink into the all-forgiving oblivion of sleep…

Not so fast! Because if you don’t get those cookies over to your offspring, and that milk, and that water, if you don’t read another book, or tuck their blankets right, or get rid of the monster in the closet, you are risking a minor seizure, or a major fit, with a tiresomely repetitive outcome: the child peacefully asleep in their fluffy bed, angelic expression and cutely parted lips in place, and you nursing your migraine with vodka, curling a lock of greasy hair around your (middle) finger wondering how indeed to go the fuck to sleep when you have been set tick-tock-ticking before you ka-boom right into your own face.

‘Go the f**k to sleep’ is what you breathe out in anger when you can take it no longer, this is the song you secretly wish to sing to your beloved child, the words that come out at the lowest of volumes when you really want to scream them at the top of your lungs. The book is fresh and invigorating because of its belligerent realism: in case no one noticed parenting is one of the hardest jobs around but plenty of chicken-heads out there will shame you out of complaining about it once in a while. The honesty of Go the F**k to Sleep may be over the top for some readers but I am not here to discuss their issues (God help that shrink). The book is genius, period; and it will send you laughing so hard you will not feel your abs (who needs those crunches?).

The juxtaposition of falsely soothing repetition and the deceptively cute drawings by Ricardo Cortés against the oh-so-adult vulgarisms is sinfully tasty and hopefully the violent bursts of laughter will not wake that angel (yep, I said angel). All the usual suspect characters and the setting clichés are here: the cute tiger cubs and the starry moon-lit skies; pyjama sporting toddlers and the bright green grass; woolly lambs and majestically soaring mountains. So the fun obscenities are grossly out of tune for a brutal satirical effect:

The cats nestle close to their kittens

The lambs have laid down with the sheep

You're cozy and warm in your bed, my dear

Please go the fuck to sleep

If you know what it’s like to cry and laugh at the same time, not because you intend to but because you no longer know which action represents which emotion; if you wonder how many miles you make around the house simply putting idiotic objects back where they belong; if your house smells, sounds and looks like a zoo; if you find yourself so exhausted at night you hang on to walls to crawl into bed only to lay there with your eyes wide open because the racing thoughts in your head won’t stop racing; if your hands tremble and your lips twitch uncontrollably at the sound of a completely innocent word –‘water’; if you are looking for tastefully delicious profanity in the name of uncontrollable giggles with no guilt strings attached, Go the F**k to Sleep is the book for you. Enjoy and keep away from those nosy children. Yep, that means you have to put it on that one and only L-A-S-T shelf in the house they can’t reach. Damn, I have to get a patent on that under-ceiling storage unit. If only it stayed up… (Rubbing her black and blue forehead).

Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach, illustrated by Ricardo Cortés, is the perfect pick-up for Father's Day.