Soccer Roundup
Anyway as the Premiership table stands today, ManU are a neat 6 points ahead of Chelsea. I will not attribute this lead solely to abilities of the Red Devils. Chelsea have lost the hunger to win that was evident in the last two seasons. Only Drogba and Essien, and when fit Terry seem to retain that self-belief. Whether it is due to Ballack and Shevchenko coming in or the boardroom chess game that Mourinho, Arnesen, Kenyon and Abrahmovich seem to be playing or the injuries to key players (Cole, Terry) is inconsequential. The results on the pitch are of consequence and Chelsea seem to be faltering there. Teams face Chelsea and believe that they can win. They now play their best games against Chelsea and not ManU. And yes, all this has helped ManU. But it could have helped Liverpool or Arsenal also.
Liverpool apart from a envious troika in the midfield, are IMHO a bloated squad of average performers. It is difficult to pick out one world class player in a position other than the midfield. Though they probably have a home record as good as Chelsea and ManU, this has hit them hard in the away matches. Arsenal is completely different story. Firstly, they are a squad in transition much like ManU a couple of years earlier. Coupled with Wenger’s stubborn refusal to buy, the entire squad with the exception of Henry and few other veterans is composed entirely of tyros. And each of them is not a new Cesc Fabregas. Another reason, for their below par season would the shift to the new stadium with a pitch considerably larger than at Highbury. Arsenal’s passing game requires a great understanding of the playing space and this was clearly lacking in the early season. I am counting Arsenal to be back in the reckoning next year at the earliest and the next to next at the latest.
Coming to ManU, all pieces have fallen into place at the right time. Scholes is back; almost as good as he was at the turn of the century. Ronaldo is in the form of his life, which greatly compensates for Rooney’s insipid form this season. Ferdinand and Vidic have formed a partnership that is now being compared with the legendary duo of Gary Pallister and Steve Bruce. And finally Carrick is in, forming with Scholes a central midfield partnership that is as good as any in the Premiership. And finally, apart from Giggs, Scholes and Neville the first eleven at Old Trafford has hardly won anything. The hunger is clearly there to be seen (lately though, ManU have squandered a few golden opportunities to make their lead at the top of the table unassailable). Even though, ManU is still short of one more quality midfielder (Owen Hargreaves/Scott Parker) and a decent backup left winger, the squad does have the rest of the positions covered with Larsson on loan and Solskjaer back to full fitness. The season however is far from complete and many things can still happen with United still to play Chelsea and Liverpool away. But what the heck, Rooney is still to fire all cylinders.
Elsewhere, Spanish Liga is taking very interesting shape with the top spot hosting three teams. Barcelona have been hit hard by the injuries to Eto and Messi. Combined with Ronaldinho’s dip of form (notwithstanding the rediscovery of Saviola), suddenly the all conquering machine does not look that menancing though they continue to lead the charts. Real Madrid are a far cry from the strutting kings they were a few years before. The squad now resembles a racing car made out of junkyard parts. However they managed to sign three of the most promising South American youngsters and the next year might mark a turning point for them. But, right now they are so wracked by internal troubles that non one remembers that they are at the top three in the table with a very realistic chance of winning the league. The surprise package however are Sevilla who have played the most consistently and have amongst them some of players that bigger clubs all around Europe are itching to sign on. Even if Sevilla wins the Liga, will it be enough to prevent the great sale. Only time will tell. And finally 6 points adrift of the league leaders are Valencia, who have been terribly unlucky with injuries and Atletico Madrid, who seem to finally coming out of their under performing shells.
Calcio has been a one horse race with Juve going down to Serie B and Milan starting with a heavy deficit and a creaking squad. Roma and Palermo just do not have the financial muscle of Inter to build a team capable of challenging for the Scudetto. So 2006 has been Inter’s year, though many had given up the hope of any semblance of competition even before the season began.
Finally, the Champions League. No major upsets, with all the usual suspects in the knock-out stages. It is here that the fun really begins but for that we would have to wait for a few weeks more.
If You Are Afraid of Heights - Raj Kamal Jha
“Look at the picture on the cover, there’s a child, a girl in red dress; there’s a bird, a crow in a blue white sky. And then there are a few things you cannot see“
Thus starts Raj Kamal Jha’s second novel that deals with things one misses in the monotone of day-to-day existence. For how many of us really look at the cover of a book carefully; seeing it as the first page and not merely an appendage. By tempting the reader to go back to the cover Jha sets the tone for the rest of the book; motifs and themes are repeated and three disjointed narratives intertwine at critical junctures. The dog with a stump for a tail, a building that seems to be crying, a building named Paradise Park that reaches to the sky, a crow-rider, the crying of a girl all appear and reappear in the various stories. And the reader might have to go back to see how they connect. If they do at all.
If You Are Afraid of Heights (IYaAoH) is three stories told from three different PoVs. In the first Amir meets with a accident and is nursed back to health by Rima, who just happens to be at the scene. Amir dreams of a girl and her mother drowning and Rima disappears mysteriously without a trace, after having gone to investigate the sound of a girl crying. The second story describes Mala’s investigation of the death of a girl in a remote village. She meets with the doctors, police officers, the mother and neighbors of the girl without any real progress but resuscitating memories of her past. The third is the story of a girl who is afraid that her parents will fall prey to the spate of suicides happening in their neighborhood and her conversation with a crow-rider who has been following her parents the entire day.
Jha’s narratives inhabit the world between the real and imaginary, the waking and the dreaming; he describes the world in a sort of hallucinatory haze induced by dope. It describes a state of just broken sleep and with eyes yet to open. The recurring motifs in a apparently random fashion and the temporal dissonance in the narrative, lends credence to the fact that Jha is probably stringing together three dream worlds and asking the reader to deduce the reality using Jungian techniques. Equally probable though is the fact that any or all of the three are real. In my opinion, the obfuscation is intentional allowing each reader to get his own version of the story. IYaAoH is not realism by any stretch of imagination but it is also not magic realism, for the unusual is not dealt with a straightforward manner, but is rather not spoken of. We know something is being swept under the carpet and yet the realization of it seems to just elude our grasps. Jha obliquely hints at incest, insanity, schizophrenia and domestic violence but never brings these themes out in the open. The novels limits itself to describing the contentious rationalism we shroud our daily experiences in, to explain things more “simply”. Jha’s training as a journalist is put to good use here. The gift of describing settings in an eloquent and poetic manner adds to the dream like quality of the narrative while the first person narratives of Amir, Mala and the child add to the immediacy. For it is through their actions in response to the external that the characters are primarily developed.
IYaAoH, for the impatient can be a frustrating novel. Its denouement does not lead to any tangible answers. There are gaps that need to be filled up and the anticipation built up is not always in consonance with the coming revelation. And the writing style might not be that original for the readers of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. But for all its flaws it is a work of great ambition and imagination. It attempts to delve into the psyche of an individual and give voice to the deepest and the darkest of the human states. And this allows the work to transcend cultural and linguistic barriers and appeal to everyone, not just Indians.
The Best Films of 2006 - Part I
The first part of this list is foreign movies (Hollywood et all) and some really good ones miss out (Blood Diamond, Apocalypto, The Illusionist, The Prestige, The Departed, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Fountain) but for what it is worth, these are for me the top of 2006.
El Laberinto del Fauno - Guillermo del Toro’s surreal modern day fairy tale, peeks into the deep abyss that is human psyche to understand the root of our fears and desires, and our notions of good and evil. The first time I saw this movie, I was tempted to describe it Magic Realism on film. Ofelia, an eleven year old girl travels to the countryside with her pregnant mother so that the son her step-father, a maniacal army general fighting the rebels, expects can be born in his presence. Here she discovers (creates??) an alternate world where she is the long lost princess Moanna. She has to complete three tasks in order to return to her kingdom and true self. The narrative seamlessly alternates between the brutality of the ongoing Civil War and the horrors faced by Ofelia in her tasks. The viewer soon begins to wonder, what is that which is real, fully knowing which is which and yet wishing that it was the other way around. The shot where Ofelia tells a story to her yet unborn brother takes us smoothly from the real world to the realm of dreams and without any apparent effort brings us back, encapsulates the basic themes of the movie. Set in the post civil war era in General Franco’s Spain, this movie can be read at once a trenchant indictment of Fascism as well as the beauty that lies in Innocence that is often forgotten in the dark days of humanity. Spellbinding story, beautiful images and unobtrusive special effects that add to rather than overshadow the story make this a brilliant piece of cinema and by far the best movie of the year.
Children of Men - There is something about Mexican directors this year. Alfonso Cuaron’s last directed movie was Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. This one could not have been more different. The movie starts with the news of the youngest person on earth being killed and that it was more than 18 years since the last person was born on this planet. The entire human race had suddenly turned infertile. Scarcely, has the importance of this piece of information sunk in that the viewer is taken head-on into a dystopian Britain of the future, where all immigrants are being evacuated (the scenes reminded me of Schindler’s List, though this time in colour) and a group of “terrorists” are fighting the oppressive regime. Clive Owen plays a disenchanted government servant, and is entrusted the task of escorting Kee, the first pregnant woman in nearly two decades safely to Human Project, so that secrets of procreation might be known again to humanity. The yet unborn baby, however, is being viewed as massive propanganda tool for the terrorists and they have managed to convince the mother that the government will never accept that the first baby in so many years was colored. There is, on the other hand, a mother’s love and her concern for the safety of her child where the cause of the government or the terrorists are of no concern. Completely different in treatment from El Laberinto del Fauno, another movie that delves deeply into what it means to be human in the first place.
Volver - Pedro Almodovar returns with this sweeping epic drama across generations to his first love, Women and the colour Red. It is in filming the stories of women, their joys, fears, trials and conquests, that Almodovar truely finds his forte (Talk to Her, Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown, All About my Mother). Volver is story of Raimunda, her mother Maura and her daughter Paula. Each generation of women cannot escape the actions of the other, forcing Maura to come back from afterlife to tie the loose ends up. Deaths happen, corpses are hidden and parties thrown as if they were merely just another ritual in the daily monotone of the female protagonists. Penelope Cruz as Maura and the entire cast do a brilliant job of infusing life into the script. With the theme, Almodovar also returns to his standard pallete, brilliantly filming the reds and the browns of the dresses, landscapes and the spilt blood, almost making colour as a separate voice in the film. This is not a film with a twist. Or a message. It is merely a superbly beautiful rendition of a story on film by a master.
V For Vendetta - The Wachowski brothers return to the silver screen with their rendition of Alan Moore’s classic graphic novel. Directed by James McTeigue, this movie has all ingredients to become a cult movie. Chock full of quotable quotes (V’s memorable introduction comes to mind) and cross referencing works across ages and genres, V for Vendetta presents an almost savage rebuttal of the fascist state, that preaches a return to chaos and anarchy rather than tolerating repressive order and rule of law. While, the politics of movie would clearly the unpalatable to those inclined otherwise, it is almost impossible for anyone, having a pretense of concern for the affairs of the world today, not to be affected by it. Topped with Natalie Portman’s brilliant acting (and British accent) and the almost comical madness of Hugo Weaving as V, V for Vendetta is at the very least a very intense film.
Babel - The final installment of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s trilogy on death, Babel was probably the most awaited movie of the year for me. The narrative structure of Babel is similar to both Amores Perros and 21 Grams which preceded it. However, while in the first two movies the separate storylines transpire in a limited space (same city) but are widely varying in their temporal occurence, Babel’s story spans across four countries and no less than six families, but a very limited time span. The denouement with the revelation of all the connecting threads leaves something to be desired. It does not really shock the viewer as it did in the earlier two movies, with the threads appearing tenuous at best in some cases. That the director was able to hold together such an ambitious script finally leading to a conclusion, is a feat in itself. Babel primarily deals with fear; the fear of an individual in an alien land, neither trusting nor trusted, with an overarching scepter of death looming in the horizon. While the previous two movies kept away from socio-political messages, a clear message is sent out in this movie in terms of trying to understand those who are not the same as us, rather than immediately stereotyping them. While this does not add to the cinematic quality of the movie as such, it does provide a clue to the gradual progress of Inarritu’s work.
Technorati Tags: top 2006, movies
Ape and Essence - Aldous Huxley
Just finished reading, what I would now categorize as one of Aldous Huxley’s forgotten masterpieces, Ape and Essence. Describing a dystopian future resembling 1984 of Orwell and We of Zamyatin more than the other Huxley classic Brave New World, Ape and Essence is an attempt to study the causes and effects of human desires. Describing a world in the aftermath of the nuclear havoc wrecked by a Third World War, Huxley’s main theme here is the rationing of happiness in all forms but primarily sexual; for the primary world view now is that, being happy is to submit to the wishes of the Devil who is all set to take over.
Ape and Essence is a film script written by the enigmatic Mr. William Tallis, rejected by the studios of Hollywood and that by sheer luck falls into the hands of a day dreaming film executive. With his friend, he tracks down Mr. Tallis to his residence only to learn that he had died without knowing the fate of his script. The rest of the book is after that, an honest reproduction of Mr. Tallis’s script. This script moves back and forth across time to the period just preceding the third world war and a time many years later, after the world has been destroyed by nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Using baboons as a metaphor for the state that human race has descended to in the first period, Tallis describes the blindness and hedonism that seem to be the order of the day. As prisoners and playthings, these baboons have famous scientists, all tied and chained up, who though unwilling do the bidding of their primate masters destroying all humanity. Simultaneously, it tracks a group of New Zealander scientists (whose country escaped the fate of the rest of the world since it was inconsequential) who alight on the shores of California only to encounter a civilization, that now worships the Devil and considers women as unholy vessels since due to the after effects of radiation, the babies they give birth to are deformed. One of the scientific party, Dr. Poole, is captured by the local people and it is through his eyes that the reader experiences the horrific rituals that humanity has fallen back on to ensure its survival in this toughest of times. The book ends with Dr. Poole escaping from the settlement and trying to find a way to the north where supposedly humanity thrives in environs that are more rational. He however is not alone; with him, he takes Loola, and the knowledge that this rule of Devil can only be undone by the rule of love.
While the basic plot and theme of Ape and Essence have the potential of placing it in the pantheon of the great dystopian novels, Huxley’s narrative choices greatly undermine this potential. The point of view for the reader continuously shifts from the initial executive to Mr. Tallis to the director of the movie to finally Dr. Poole. Thereafter also, it does not remain static; Huxley takes care to switch the narrative continuously from Dr. Poole to the camera, always making the reader aware that he is not experiencing a reality but rather a motion picture being shot. The power of a dystopian description lies greatly in the immediacy that the reader feels while experiencing the text. The structure of both Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 is such that the reader feels himself/herself looking directly into an orb to see the future or an alternate reality. This induces a sense of a very real fear and alarm in the reader that is lost here with the filtering of content through numerous narrative lenses before reaching the reader.
Many of the dystopian descriptions are primarily the descriptions existing worlds, as they exists – Huxley though tries in Brave New World to bridge the gap between the real and the fictional. Ape and Essence on the other hand is not a study of dystopia, as much it is of the reasons for its emergence in the first place. Its foci are not the machinations of the State or any controlling entity but the individuals that inhabit this collective. Huxley’s contention clearly is that it is humanity itself that is responsible for the state of the world, whether it is the presented dystopia or the utopia governed by love that Dr. Poole imagines. Huxley, I do not think was entirely comfortable with the notion that all responsibility lies equally on the shoulders of all individuals rather than primarily on those who control and run the numerous institutions that humanity has built and nurtured over the ages. It is this conflict, that probably lead him to dilute his message with the introduction of the numerous and varying POVs.
Regardless, of Huxley’s comfort levels with this idea, the underlying treatment of the core theme of Ape and Essence, that of the role of human desires in our destiny, laid the groundwork for 1984 and other such groundbreaking works. However, an incisive treatment of the basic theme remains unexplored in the realms of literature as far as I know and one should read this brilliant piece only for this reason.
[Credits: To Satvik for buying the book in the first place. And then convincing me to read it, saying this is better than Brave New World and lending the book without any compunctions.]
