Watching Potter

T for Terrible acting. (5/10)

His world has grown, so have his fans. A review of the latest movie and the latest hype.

I haven’t been to an opening day of a movie in such a long time. In a decision I now regret, I brought a ticket to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, just because I can. I went to the theatre like a hour early, and was still like the 30th person in line waiting. Not so bad, you might think, but read on…

Before me in the queue were this bunch of kids–from whose age I can ascertain that they were in their mother’s wombs when the first book came out in 1997. Such popularity of HP books is astounding, but I digress. The thing was that these kids were from some sort of school and their friends kept coming and coming, and taking position in the line (which is less of a line than a melee) before me and the others who were there before. To add insult to injury, their parents were there, and not only did they not say anything to their kids’ disruptive queuing behavior but they themselves skipped the line and took the position beside their kids. That was just distasteful.

Then, the doors opened and my anger cooled off for a few minutes … until the trailers came up. I hated most of them; I kinda enjoyed Hitchcock allusion in Steve Carrell’s Despicable Me but that is it. The biggest claps and cheers from the audience went to the trailer of Twilight sequel and some asinine movie about a man going atop Empire State Building into a fantasy world or something.

Truthfully speaking, the film didn’t really disappoint me. It was a visual experience–something the last five movies (which possible exception of the Philosopher’s Stone) weren’t. Every scene is so meticulously constructed, and so perfectly lit that it is as if I was in an actual theatre. Visual effects have come a long way since the first movie too–Half-Blood Prince was part Gotterdammerung, part L.A. Confidential visually.

Acting, on the other hand, sucked. The greatest of the British theatrical corps cannot compensate the shortcomings of the young cast, who were given silly lines and silly parts. Unnecessary romantic subplot ran through the movie, which did away with far more important storylines. Malfoy was given too much screen time as a malicious lingering creep, but his fixing the vanishing cabinet apparently involves putting one thing after another in it. Inclusion of Aragog pleasantly amazed me, but the entire background of Lord Voldemort’s family and his loveless birth was left out. Bill and Fleur de la Cour were absent, and Fenrir Greyback is reduced to almost a caricature. The detailed information on Horcruxes were also withheld, which means that the last two movies will have a lot of things to explain.

Jim Broadbent was not Horace Slughorn I imagined but his acting was superb. Helena Bonham Carter steals the show as she always does, and the abandoned Great Hall scene reminds me of the Lord of Rings (perhaps another reason to recruit Ian McKellan as Aberfoth Dumbledore). However, the ending was anticlimactic–entirely devoid of emotion. It failed to implant a sense of anticipation or anxiety in me. Half-Blood Prince has no future.

If you haven’t read the books, don’t go to see it. You can get  Stendhal’s syndrome from the visuals, but as a movie adaptation of a book, it sucked. And as a movie? Both the acting and dialogue were hollow, cheesy and irreverent. Despite a stellar supporting cast, grand cinematography and splendid visual offering, it can only get 5/10 from me.

Divorce and Conquer

Morally, legally, politically, and religiously we view marriage as a sacred institution. The right to divorce should equally be celebrated if not cherished. A look inside the failing marriage system.

Time magazine’s recent article extolling marriage as really gnawing me. It gave some insight into the benefits of two-parent ‘ideal’ families over broken homes (but avoiding pressing questions I will outline later) but it began quite charmingly with an anecdote. So here I am, and I am going to open this blog post with an anecdote too.

My grandparents were happily married for nearly 70 years. It was a marriage of love — it was not a marriage with passions, nor one of demands, but rather a marriage of understanding. How did they manage it? Distance. My grandfather spent most of his life at work; firstly a civil servant, then an elected official, and eventually a busy businessman, he was never there to question my grandmother’s judgment or interfere with her decisions. For the last fifty years of their marriage, they slept in different rooms–grandpa toiling until the very morning hours and grandma looking after their every-increasing family. They enjoyed their time together, but they enjoyed their privacy even more. They longed for each other in their time away from each other, and that cemented and kindled their love again and again.

It was an ideal marriage… and how all marriages suppose to be. In our superficial and self-centered world, we quickly ran out of love–even from our closest ones–because we demand it as a panacea for everything. In the age when a mouseclick can satisfy many of our needs, we became a demanding generation. In our selfishness, we forget to pay attention or respect to our partners and more importantly still we oft fail to concede our failures. We remedy our failing marriages with other pleasures, or discretions. We fail to see exit signs or signals that precede them.

Some say divorce is an easy way out. No, in fact, it is the right way out, and the only way out. We lingered around too long after our loves have exhausted. Our failures to see why our marriages have fallen apart is one reason, but the other reason comes from our environment and its mores. Why is every recession coupled with a spike in divorce rates for middle-class and upper-middle class families? Because a bust means they have less joint ownerships to divide; they have less income and less taxes to pay. Marriage has become our haven away from government interference in our lives rather than a testament to our loves.

Thus we became a society unnaturally limited and even motivated by marriage. Every social issue or moral outrage of the age–genealogy and lineage, virility and heterosexuality, financial security, premarital sex and abortion, ad nauseum–was tied to marriage. Currently, the Defense of Marriage Act, legalization of gay marriage, adoption rights, and even taxation are invariably linked to so-called ’sanctity of marriage’.

So let’s review. Marriage as an institution was a relic of hunter-gatherer society. The Greeks and the Romans required no law for marriage or divorce (except between different castes, where it was forbidden). Until the late Middle Ages, marriage, divorce and even adultery were deemed private affairs. ‘Courtly love’, sans marriage, was a guiding literary and poetic adventure. Then along came the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. In 1545 the Council of Trent declared that a Roman Catholic marriage would be recognized only if the marriage ceremony was officiated by a priest with two witnesses. The days of marriage as an adventure were numbered after that.

Marriage and its far-reaching consequences are ridiculous. The idea that you gave away your freedom (to pursue other love interests, other partners, or just other recreation in general) for a measly signature of a piece of document just because it looks ‘official’ directly contradicts the principles of freedom and right to self-determination we espoused for three centuries. That a priest officiated our marriage should not mean a thing in the eye of law either; he is supposed to be sanctioned by God to perform marriage, so let God–not the state–judge us for our broken promises and broken marriages. If our marriages are ‘legal’ thanks to our religions, why do our divorces need to be affirmed by the state? If holding a man against his will is called ‘kidnapping’ or ‘enslavement’, doesn’t refusal to divorce also counts as such? Aren’t pre-nups just common sense and shouldn’t they be part of common law? And what assumptions are made in deeming two parents bound together in a luckless marriage is better for a child than a single parent?

No one actually answer these questions. They divert the attention away from the flaws of marriage itself to the flaws of divorce. Divorce courts, alimony, paternity suits, broken families etc. are not the results of divorce, but of the failure of marriage. Critics point out that more marriages are failing now because of our failing values. I don’t know about that. Our values, if anything, are shifting; birth control, feminism movement and parenthood outside of marriage–all of which contributed to marriage’s fall from grace–are not what I call ‘failing values’. We have reached a point where we no longer need to tie ourselves to a stronger, more capable person. We evolved thus far from Cro-Magnon hunters-gatherers.

Then how about our children? We were trained by centuries of folklore, literature and motion pictures to think that a stranger cannot be a good parent. From Hansel and Gretel to Parent Trap, we are exposed to this idea without any statistical proof. We came to live by it, but not it is time to grow out of it. Time magazine ended its article by saying that through our failing marriages we are sending a wrong example to our kids, which “is the generation who will be taking care of us when we are old”. Probably that same demanding, self-centered mentality is why some marriages just don’t work.

“To have and to hold” read the Common Prayer. Sometimes, we just need to let it slip.

Boom or Bust in Iran

Iran’s Ahmadinejad once called for a baby boom to double the country’s population to 120 million and ‘defeat’ the west. In the end, baby boom may just be a weapon to topple Iran’s theocracy.

I am not a subscriber to Carlyle’s Great Man theory. Socioeconomic factors–which coincidentally produced these great men–form and shape the great events. And sometimes we don’t even need a great men to helm the birth of a great event.

It is under this light that I view the ongoing struggle in Iran. It is not a battle amongst Khomeni or Moussavi or Ahmadinajed. It is a battle of ideas and concepts greater than these men. It is a battle between theocracy and its oppressed masses. It is a battle catalysted not by the Western media (as they alleged) but by an Iranian baby boom. Yes, you read it here first, a baby boom is going to topple the Iranian theocracy.

Baby Boom. It is a dangerous concept. A boomer is not born political but it usually matures into a highly political one. Consider the United States’ baby boom from the late 1940s to the early 60s. It led not only to social unrest of the 60s and the 70s but also to the stagflation and other economic problems of the 80s.

The youth are dreamers and idealizers. It was only logical that they were at the forefront of Woodstock and anti-Vietnam movements. When they reached an older age, an economy that couldn’t provide enough jobs for them went into a recession. This shockwave left by the post-WWII babyboom was not only felt in the United States but also reflected in the socioeconomic woes of many Western nations from the 60s to the 80s. The ‘68 Student Revolts in Paris and labor unrests in England leading to Thatcher years were a few example of this babyboom.

But Iran today do not mirror post-WWII Europe and America. Its boom is similar to the Romanian one that happened artificially in 1960s. Always known from repressing women, Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceausescu implemented harsh antiabortion measures in 1967. After this infamous decree, the total number of births doubled immediately. From 1966 to 1976, Rumania produced nearly 40% more babies than might otherwise have been expected. In 1972, there were twice as many children in kindergarten as the year before. In 1989, twice as many 22-year-olds were flooding into the labor force. As Ceausescu was unable to create jobs in the late 1980s as rapidly as mothers created babies in the late 1960s, a disenchanted demographic was born. In a communist country where jobs were everything, this spelled the doom for Ceausescu’s regime.

The Islamic Revolution and its misogynist stance in Iran brought forth a similar pattern. The country’s population grew from 35 million in 1979 to 65 million. Population growth peaked at 3.2% in 1986. Now, in a nation where the legal marriage age is nine, and where Islamic doctrine calls for more babies, at least 45% of the population is under 20 and 60% under 30.  (Prophet Mohammed said two things opposing birth control: that he was proud of those who had a large number of children and that he hoped that the number of Muslims would outnumber all other faiths by Doomsday).

Some birth control measures were implemented in the late 80s and 90s, but very little was done to provide education and employment to these boomers. Now, it is too late. The boomers have arrived; in 2007, unemployment was nearly 12%; now it is 20%–a steep rise considering Iran’s economy was free from much ramblings in the financial sector last fall.

In a study conducted in 2000 by a reformist mullah called Mohammad Ali Zam noted that 73% of Iranians (86% of students) did not say their daily prayers. It was a surprising secular turn for a country which had embraced a religious revolt only a generation ago. With these numbers and this modernism in mind, it is not surprising that the most news of the Iranian revolt arrived to us through Twitter and Facebook.

Iran’s theocracy may be able to survive this wave of unrest, but it will not outlive the babyboomers. This is always had to govern a nation this frustrated–especially if the disenchanted are the impressionable youth. But as we anxiously await and observe this dramatic denouement in Iran, we must also gear up for further climaxes in the region.

Approximately 70 percent of Saudis, Iraqis and Afghans are under 30. The Middle East witnessed an enormous babyboom as the oil prices peaked in the 70s. Whereas the mullahs in Iran had succeeded in reining the population growth by the 90s, other countries failed. They now need lebensraum, education, employment and energy resources. As these commodities become scarcer, we face a daunting challenge. We must help them or would risk losing these youth population to radicalism. Hamas, and Hezbollah both won democratic elections thanks to their populist approach directed towards the youth. Should we prevent such outbursts of vox populi? Do we have moral imperative to soften their tone?

By the sheer force of its numbers, the boomers remodel societies as they passed through them. Their effects are unpredictable. In hoping for change, the boomers usually meet their self-fulfilled prophecies. We must hope so in Iran and we must ensure that their hopes and dreams are for the society’s remodeling rather than its shattering.

Present Future in Iran

As punditry flares up and revolution falters in Iran, we look back to look into not forward.

If there is one thing that political scientists and analysts fear, it is unpredictability. It is like a Himalayan mountaineer fearing a blizzard—merely a job hazard. However, since we had tried so hard to present our field as a branch of science (with all these professional looking charts, pies and equilibrium diagrams), we try to predict obstinately in the face of political vicissitudes.

To ‘predict’ the unpredictable, we usually set up tree diagrams and probability charts to see the likelihood and ramifications of an event. We just don’t want to get off-guard. Last weeks’ events in Iran were interpreted thus—with analysts from left, right and centre unfolding the future of the Iranian people and pulling off that old phrase ‘domino effect’ from the dusty shelves.

The scene was highly reminiscent of the collapse of the Soviet Empire twenty years ago. The cataclysmic event was so unexpected that the political scientists had to resort to analyzing predictions of a Russian filmmaker. In the film, released in 1989, Gorbachev was overthrown in 1992. The Russian heartland is ruled by an ultra-nationalist military dictatorship, the Baltic republics by Catholic radicals, and Central Asia by fundamentalist emirates. Tanks patrol the streets of Moscow, and throughout the country a fearful, starving populace wreaks revenge on former Communist Party members, Jews and intellectuals. The film also predicted ethnic anarchy between 15 newly independent republics.

The implosion of the Soviet Union finally arrived, but the most dramatic of predictions didn’t materialize. Ethnic anarchy and fanatical nationalism never solidified. Although regional tyrants did seize power in Central Asian republics, religious radicalism also turned out to be a false prediction. The names of former Communist Party members were protected, once again showing the triumphant of common sense over wild imaginary predictions.

In the 1960s and the 1970s, the United States fought in Vietnam under the shadow of this ‘domino effect’. Analysts feared dominoes from Indonesia and the Philippines to Bangladesh and Burma would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence if the United States were to falter in Vietnam. And eventually falter it did, but dominoes did not fall. True, Laos and Cambodia were lost to the communists but interpreting Communism as a monolith, we didn’t see the killing fields of Pol Pot nor Chinese wars in Indochina in our crystal balls.

That is why last week’s predictions by neocons and liberals alike of Iran’s future may or may not hold. Neocons are gleeful that their bête noir, President Ahmedinajed is still there. Liberals want the cracks in the system to become chasms that could potentially become the regime’s doom. But are we missing the point? Are we missing any other possibilities?

That is why we need to take Iran’s new revolution at its face value. It is as big as the revolution that brought the ayatollahs to power and is a clarion call not only to the West but also to the ayatollahs and other regional leaders. Apart from that there is very little we can predict for the future. The action is now when it comes to Iran.

A window has opened briefly in Iran and in waiting for a better opportunity, we might be missing our chance. After all, future unfolds in mysterious ways. We could either be spectators in the future or the leaders and guides of the current situation. But in the world where mass hysteria sometimes trumps rational predictions, we should be acting now. Now more than ever.