Porcupine Tree "Fear Of A Blank Planet"

Excellent song, also representative of the band - but they did not play it last night...

KMFDM- A Drug Against War

Brute-illustrated video - awesome animation - and a good sample of what 99% of their music is like. Hmm.. more like 100%.

KMFDM & Porcupine Tree

Last night I saw Porcupine Tree in concert at the Ram’s Head Live in Baltimore, and two days before, I saw KMFDM at the 9:30 Club in Washington, DC.  Both are bands I’ve never seen before – and which are VERY different even from each other.

 KMFDM.  This is a German techno band led by Sascha Konietzko.  The name stands for KEIN MITLEID FUR DIE MEHRHEIT, German for “no pity for the majority”.  They’ve been around since 1984, adding in heavy guitar to make it somewhat heavy metal with the album UAIOE, continuing to the latest album, Blitz, which came out this year.  They seem to prefer 5-letter album titles, e.g. Money, Angst, [Symbols], WWIII, etc.  The current lineup consists of Konietzko on vocals & electronics, Lucia Cifarelli (more vocals & electronics) (pretty damn hot!), Jules Hodgson on lead guitar, Andy Selway on drums (yes, a LIVE drummer, unlike Sisters of Mercy), and Steve White on rhythm guitar.  Most of the songs are in English, some are in German, and one, “Davai”, is in Russian.  The lyrics vary from tongue-in-cheek (“KMFDM sucks!”) to political or cynical, but it’s all high octane and fun.  Like Iron Maiden with Derek Riggs, KMFDM have an illustrator, “Brute”, who does their album artwork and some of their videos, of which “Drug Against War” sticks in my mind the most. 

            Sascha and Lucia have their “podiums” set up center stage, with Jules outboard on Sascha’s side, Steve outboard on Lucia’s side, and the drummer center back stage.  I say “podiums” because the small platforms from which each of them sing and control their electronic boxes look exactly like that, and with two of them it’s like they’re involved in some techno trance metal debate – though they do leave the podium quite often.  I recognized about half the material, including my favorites, “Light” and “Drug Against War”.  The whole thing has more of a party atmosphere than anything overly serious.  The crowd was 2/3 ordinary concert fans and 1/3 goth scene people (aka “Food Court Druids”).  I had a great time.

 Porcupine Tree.  PT could best be described as “Opeth WITHOUT Cookie Monster Vocals”.  It’s heavy prog music, but Steve Wilson sings normally.  It’s more overtly Floyd-like than Opeth, though.  The Dream Theater resemblance is also there.  What “prog” tends to mean these days is some parts very heavy, some parts very light, lots of keyboards and spacey stuff, and overall somewhat pretentious.  The lineup is Steve Wilson (guitars & vocals), Richard Barbieri (keyboards), Colin Edwin (bass), and Gavin Harrison (drums).  They started off with “The Incident”, the 55 minute title track from the new album which takes up an entire CD, then took a 10 minute break, and came back for more, playing roughly 2 hours.

            Like Tool, they have a large viewscreen which they use to stunning effect, partly abstract, psychedelic imagery and partly various images – similar to the imagery Opeth use.  I got the impression of being in the midst of a prog hurricane of influences: Opeth, Tool, Pink Floyd, but varying in strength, never too much of one before slipping into another.  It’s certainly an “experience”, up there with Tool.  Both bands give you far more than simply “Ok, we came here and we’ll play our songs and go”.  You get pulled into it, surrounded by it, embraced by it – it’s almost too much.  Almost, but not quite.  I’ll delve into their earlier material to pick up on the songs I didn’t know, as I only have the new album and the one before it, Fear of a Blank Planet.  They have been around since 1987.

If I Were King...

…I would proclaim the following:

 1.  Henceforth, the soda and its parent company formerly known as Dr. Pepper, shall be known as Sgt. Pepper.  Various songs from that album and elements thereof shall be made part of any commercial or promotion associated therewith, and no royalties to be paid to Michael Jackson – they all go to Yoko Ono, Ringo Starr, the Harrison estate, and (Sir) Paul McCartney.

 2.  Supermarket checkout lines, express lanes.  If you exceed the limit, your excess purchases will be charged double, starting with the most expensive item and working back to the limit.  You have been warned.  This transaction is NOT voidable by the cashier or manager.  And 20 units of the same item counts as 20 units, not 1.  Learn to count, people!

 3.  Capital punishment for ANYONE on “The Price is Right” who bids ONE dollar more than the last person.  Drew Carey himself will “come on down” with a gun and shoot you on the spot.  Spaying or neutering the offender might be the more appropriate penalty, but this one dollar bullshit just shows the contestant has already lost his/her testicles or ovaries.

 4.  School names.  Enough with this boring idiocy of naming schools after repetitively dull historical figures or equally dull local community figures no one really knows about or cares about – except for the corrupt assholes who picked the names, clearly hoping that one day THEY will have schools named after themselves.  It’s time we picked some names which reflect individuals who truly had a major impact on our society in different ways.  Yes, it’s time for….Albert Hoffman High School; Timothy Leary High School; James Hendrix High School; James Morrison High School; Stevie Ray Vaughn High School; Leo Fender High School; etc.  Or we can pick politically incorrect historical figures, such as Attilla the Hun, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Benedict Arnold.  You get the point.  I don’t think they name schools in England after people, preferring localities, so we’ll take some English and use them – Lennon, McCartney, Jagger, Richards, Gilmour, Waters, etc. 

 5.  If you are Adam Lambert, or have his hairstyle, you will be immediately accosted and have your head shaved like the collaborating women in WWII.  And this “bald & goatee” thing is OVER!  Enough!  Hear me Andy Powell and Rob Halford?   Unless you can trace ancestry to a Germanic tribe fighting the Romans, give it a rest. 

 In a related topic, If had more money than I knew what to do with (but wasn’t necessarily king), I would:

 1.         Turn the Turtledove Timeline series (How Few Remains, Great War, American Empire, and Settling Account) into movies, with big name stars, without any concern for turning a profit.  Morgan Freeman as Scipio?  Sure.  Nicole Kidman as Anne Colleton?  Why not?  Tom Berenger as Roger Kimball?  You bet.  Denzel Washington as Cincinnatus?  Good idea.  Maybe even Ed Harris as Irving Morrell, and Robin Williams as Theodore Roosevelt (see the Night at the Museum films).  I’m thinking of Edward Norton as Jake Featherston. 

Minimal changes on the screenplay – even if that means “nigger” is spit out liberally in every movie.  Chill out people, and watch it to the very end.  You’ll love it.

 2.         Buy up every clapped out, rusted 3^rd Gen. Firebird or Camaro and renovate them with V8s, etc.  I’d buy so many I could set up a factory to do this, and buy up crate 350s in bulk with a volume discount.  Then I’d sell them for modest amounts, with no regard to profit. 

 3.         I’d buy up a small town, and collect all the homeless people from across the country.  I’d have social workers figure out which are the (A) crazy but harmless people turned out of asylums because they’re no threat to society, but who still can’t support themselves, the (B) normal people who simply became homeless due to rotten luck, but who could be self-sufficient if someone believed in them and found a decent job for them, (C) drug addicts, and (D) truly criminally insane.  My understanding is that shelters don’t work because predators abuse the homeless therein, such that they’re actually safer on the streets.  Apparently these shelters have poor security.  Hopefully, by relocating the homeless to a remote area, this problem can be eliminated.  At the very least, they will have someplace safe to stay, a roof over their head, food, health care, etc.  I’d try to set it up like a real town, not a mental institution.  No, it’s NOT “The Island.” 

Toys

Every August (Shelby), September (Ian), October (Zoe), and February (Beatrice) I go shopping for gifts for my nephew and three nieces.  I make an effort to get gifts they’ll enjoy, though it’s easier for Ian as I’m a guy, than it is for the girls.  Recall that Seinfeld episode where Jerry dates the woman with an eccentric collection of 70s-era toys, and he and George drug her with wine and turkey so they can play with her toys while she sleeps.  Elaine is horrified…until George mentions the Easy-Bake Oven.  But shopping for toys brings me back to the age when I used to play with them myself.

 It would be insane to try to list every toy I played with from birth to the present, but some trends are worth noting.

 Big Wheel & Green Machine.  Years ago at University of Maryland, my suitemate Chris and I were in the North Gym on our way to work out, and we noticed a very familiar kid’s plastic tricycle in a dumpster.  I smiled at him and asked, “do you know what THAT is?” and he smiled and said, “a BIG WHEEL!”  Before we could ride bicycles, even with training wheels, this was the Porsche of kids transportation.  We had another vehicle, something circular with two large wheels which were parallel to each other but perpendicular to the base (here I feel I’m some archeologist or anthropologist); and the Green Machine.  The Green Machine is like those reclining stationary bicycles or the sit-down ones the uber-dorks ride around on – but much cooler because it was green and bad-ass.

 GI Joe.  As boys we played with these – and these were the tall, 9” (or so) anatomically incorrect figures you could dress in cloth uniforms, not the more recent completely plastic figurines brought to life in the movie.  No sign of “Cobra” or other fictitious bad guys.  In the process of collecting the “outfits”, I got a fair amount of WWII uniforms: German infantry, British, American, Russian, plus German Afrika Korps and Fallschirmjager.  Too bad there were no WWI uniforms, though I suppose the French Foreign Legion uniform was similar – with white pants instead of red.  The uniforms had pants, jacket, boots, helmet, belt, and weapon, and were very well done.

 Britains.  These were small plastic figurines, about an inch high, with green metal bases, which we picked up at Harrod’s in London.  Of course I was getting the German WWII soldiers with a Kubelwagen, a mortar team (see above) and my brother got the Americans, including a Jeep with a .50 cal MG and a recoilless rifle.  I remember playing with these on the window sill of my bedroom of our apartment in Neuilly.  Although our focus was WWII, I know there were Civil War figures (Union vs. CSA) and more modern British soldiers – I suppose for Falklands or Northern Ireland simulations.

 Models.  I seem to recall having built – unsuccessfully – a P40 Flying Tigers fighter in the US, I must have been less than 9 years old. In Europe I got much better, and even got an airbrush which I learned how to use fairly well.  I got a few Monogram models – which often had these great Shepard Paine diorama features, though his were so well done they were more discouraging than inspirational (no WAY were we going to top him!) - but soon discovered I liked Tamiya the most.  Italerei and Testors were OK, but often they had the bad habit of making the soldiers’ feet separate, so you could never quite glue them to stand up on their own.  I never cared for planes, as you could never decide whether to make the model with the landing gear up or down, although we did make a B-17, a B-24, and a B-29.  I never did make a diorama, but I did subscribe to Military Modeler for several years.  Mostly I was painting German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS soldiers, and a few tanks: Panzer III, IV, and Panther; and an 88.  I never did make any model cars, but I have the Monogram ’92 Formula and Revell ’68 Firebird I may eventually tackle one of these days.  When we started playing role playing games, the skills I learned painting German soldiers came in handy painting various orcs, elves, sorcerors, skeletons, and adventurers.

 Micronauts.  These we played with in the US before going to France.  They were various different robots and figures, some of which were detachable with magnets.  I never learned any of the backstory on this, but I do recall that they were very popular with most of my male friends.

 Legos.  I found Legos to be fairly fun and stimulating.  Eventually we got the Expert set, and I made all sorts of armored cars with “machine guns”.  First you’d follow the instructions to build the castle or whatever, but eventually you let your imagination take you places and came up with all sorts of different things.

 Play-Doh.  It had a distinctive smell to it.  This is something we played with as very young kids, but not too young for me to remember.  Like Legos, it was a “toy” you could be extremely creative and imaginative with, so I think these types of toys are important for developing our little minds.

 Star Wars.  When the first movie came out, we went nuts, collecting all the figures, the X-Wing, the Death Star, and the Tie Fighter.  By the time “The Empire Strikes Back” came out, we were past the age of playing with these, and in Europe, so the focus was on models, Britains and GI Joes.

Hot Wheels & Matchbox.  These are the little cars of various models.  Hot Wheels are more exotic and fun, whereas Matchbox has a more utilitarian and pedestrian (!) collection.  Ideally you play with them on a little track.  I still like them, so every now and then I pick up a few ‘60s muscle car ones at Toys R Us or Giant if something catches my eye.

 Smash ‘Em Up Derby.   I loved these, but they’re long gone.  The cars – Nomad and Ford – would have fenders and parts that bashed up and could be replaced. They had ramps, and you’d slide the T strip through and then quickly pull it out to set the car going.

 Unique Imports.  Later called The Collector’s Armory, and originally located in Alexandria, on Slater’s Lane right off the GW Parkway.  They specialized in very realistic replicas of various guns, of which we got the MP-40 Schmeisser (mine) and CAR-15 (my brother) – which we still have today.  Fortunately no one shot us as we played at the compound with these things.  Much, much later, when I had a Beretta 92FS (9mm) and an AR-15 (.223), out of curiosity I re-examined the guns with real ammo, and found that the rounds would not even enter the chamber or the magazine.   On the other hand, in some toy store in Belgium we picked up fake plastic Thompson (with box magazine) and FN-FAL – probably about 1/3 scale – which actually fired small plastic bullets, but at such a low velocity you’d barely know you were hit, much less injured. 

 In the US we typically bought toys at Toys R Us.  My dad had a running joke that as we passed the one on Rockville Pike, he’d claim, “didn’t you hear? There was a huge fire, it burned down”.  There was a toy store, Jeremiah’s, in the Village Mall – and several Kay-Bee toy stores scattered at malls.  When in NYC we’d check out FAO Schwartz, but that was a bit too upscale: an entire fort?  Downsized Mercedes?  Think of where super rich and royal families go to buy toys for their spoiled princes and princesses, and the rest of us peons simply wish and hope for our parents to win the lottery.

 In Europe, we’d go to Fantou (Neuilly), the Four Seasons at SHAPE, but Galeries Lafayette and Harrod’s had knockout toy section – and of course there’s Hamley’s, an entire toy department store in London.  Now it’s back to the old favorite, Toys R Us, for our needs.

Brazilian Cinema

By now I’ve seen a fair amount of Brazilian films, which are mostly entertaining.  Some are violent and cynical, others are lighthearted and enjoyable.  They tend to fall into three categories.

 Rio de Janeiro.  Brazil’s capital until Brasilia took over in 1960, Rio is still arguably Brazil’s most important city, notwithstanding São Paulo’s larger population and wealth.  Its beaches, its Carnival, and its mountains all give it a unique beauty and provide an excellent setting for various films.

Blame It On Rio.  Not sure if this qualifies as a “Brazilian” film, even if it is set in Rio.  The major players are Michael Caine, Valerie Harper, and a very young, pre-boob-job Demi Moore.  Caine and his best friend take their teenage daughters to Rio for vacation; Caine’s wife (Harper) curiously declines to accompany them, for reasons which will become apparent later.  The best friend’s daughter (Michelle Johnson) turns out to have a huge crush on Caine, and is too deliciously sexy to resist – and the saucy heat and sensuality of the city and its erotic beaches conspire to destroy whatever scruples he may have had about sleeping with a girl he considers his de facto niece (thus “blame it on Rio”).  The best friend, of course, finds out that his daughter has a lover, and vows to murder the poor fool, whoever he is, much to Caine’s dismay and concern.  How things turn out is equally amusing and entertaining.

 The Girl From Rio (old).  Part James Bond, part Barbarella, minus Jane Fonda or Sean Connery, this bizarre spy story takes place in Rio circa 1968.  I found it alluring but kind of stupid, mostly feminine eye candy (some, but not much, nudity) and a view of Rio at that time.

 The Girl from Rio (new).  A completely different movie, featuring Hugh Laurie, the doctor from “House”.  He’s a hapless, bored banker in London whose wife is having an affair with his boss.  He dreams of leaving foggy, dull London in favor of sunny, hot Rio de Janeiro and its luscious Carnival festivities – and has one particular dancer in mind.  Having been dicked over by his wife and boss, and finding himself entrusted with the bank’s ample cash supply and no supervision over the Christmas holiday, he zips off to Rio, paying for a first class ticket (one way) in cash.  He even manages to find the woman, and all sorts of crazy misadventures ensue.  Excellent views of contemporary Rio de Janeiro and an equally engaging plot.

            I recall Eddie Murphy joking about Elvis’ movies: he couldn’t act, but the moviemakers thought, “hey, he’s Elvis.  Just let him sing the parts, and he’ll be OK.”  Similarly, the temptation is to bootstrap films set in Rio by featuring lots of dazzling footage of beaches, women, mountains…beaches again…etc. and not really bother with anything resembling a coherent or intelligent plot.  At least in this case, the story is pretty good – and Laurie makes a very sympathetic character.

 Bossa Nova.  Most of the actors and actresses in this film are Brazilian veterans of TV Globo’s novellas, with the exception of Amy Irving (Steven Spielberg’s ex-wife) who plays an American ex-flight attendant widow – her husband was a pilot who drowned one day.  She teaches English (yes, Brazilians go out of their way to learn English, unlike the amigos who live in our own country).  A corporate lawyer, Pedro Paulo (Antonio Fagundes), takes a liking to her, and they start a romance, despite her misgivings (having given up on romance and men for so many years after her husband’s death).  One of her students is a highly paid Flamengo player, Acacio (typical Brazilian football players with only one name) who is angling to be signed by an English Premier League team – he’s taking lessons to learn how to trash talk his English opponents.  He ends up in a romance with Pedro Paulo’s cute intern (Giovanna Antonelli).  Another of her students is a young Brazilian girl with an Internet boyfriend Gary.  Of course, it’s the movies, so NO ONE is how they claim to be.  Somewhat funny and endearing.

 The Man Who Copied.  This takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, source of Mrs Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, far, far south, almost in Argentina.  A humble “copy machine operator” (Lazaro Ramos, also in "Cidade de Deus" and "Man of the Year"), Andre, who lives with his mom and has an extremely modest income, falls in love with Silvia, a pretty white girl who lives across the street from him, and whose window he peeps into every night with binoculars.  Very much aware of how “little money” + “lame ass job” = NO woman, he tries to find a way to purchase a robe for his mother, from Silvia’s clothing store, and impress her that he isn’t completely worthless.  Along the way he forges counterfeit reais (Brazilian currency) using the sophisticated new color copier at his workplace, and finally conspires to rob the armored truck which services the bank across the street, only to find, to his horror, that the girl’s father is the security guard for the bank and recognizes him from the heist. It’s not really violent or funny, more like modestly charming.  And it turns out that people from Porto Alegre have an inferiority complex with regard to Rio de Janeiro, and want to move up there.  We’ll see about that (there IS a Rio de Janeiro ingredient to the story…).

 Traficantes/Crime.  Somewhere along the line, Brazilian filmmakers got the impression that foreigners associated Brazil with RIO DE JANEIRO and scantily clad women in dental floss bikinis, and Carnival.  But what about the plight of Rio’s poor, in the slums (favelas)?  What about the crime, drugs, and despair?  Aren’t we, as Brazilian filmmakers, doing the favelados cariocas a grave injustice by not showing their problems to the world?  Shouldn’t we be making violent, bloody, depressing films, something like what Quentin Tarantino would make if he was Brazilian?  So they came out with these films:

 Cidade de Deus (City of God).  This was so well esteemed it competed at our Oscars in four categories – none of which involved foreign films.  Alas, it won none of them.  But for a movie in Portuguese, that’s remarkable in itself.  The film follows two young black boys as they grow up in the slum called City of God, which had been set up in the 1960s to pull the poor people away from the city and give them a new place to live.  Eventually this new city devolved into slums anyway, and two separate gangs competed for dominance.  Even small children were drawn into, and recruited, by the drug lords.  One of the kids takes a liking to photography and manages to avoid taking sides – and earns the trust of both gangs.  The other one is ruthless and violent, and kills his way to the top of his gang. The film is VERY violent.

 Elite Squad.  This features Rio’s elite anti-drug squad, essentially a heavily armed SWAT team of “untouchables”.  Wagner Moura stars as one of the main SWAT team members. The regular police are grossly underpaid and undertrained, so they tend to be brutal and corrupt.  The story follows several characters and covers some students and drug dealers.  The most horrible part – barely watchable – is when the drug dealers kill an NGO (social worker) who had unwittingly invited a cop into the gangster’s inner circle: they stack him up in tires and douse him with gasoline, burning him alive. 

 Manda Bala (Send a Bullet).  This is a documentary on corruption and crime in Brazil, focusing on a network of illicit frog farms in the north of the country and an egregiously corrupt governor; and the scourge of kidnapping in São Paulo.  The kidnappers cut off their victims’ fingers and ears and send them to the families to encourage ransom.  Flush with their ill-gotten ransom cash, they frequently “share the wealth” with their fellow favelados, modern-day Robin Hoods stealing from the rich and giving to the poor.  There’s not much actual violence, but the segments about reconstructive surgery, to “rebuild” an ear for a rich girl who had hers cut off completely by a kidnapper, are somewhat gruesome.  It’s not a pretty story.

 Bus 174.  This is a documentary in Portuguese with English subtitles, regarding an incident which took place in Rio de Janeiro in June 2000, just two weeks before I arrived there on my first trip.  A homeless man, Sandro de Nascimento, hijacked a bus along the main street which goes past the Jardin Botanico.  All 7-8 passengers on the bus were women.  He held them hostage for several hours.  The bus was quickly surrounded not only by police and SWAT teams, but also TV news media.  They interview the women on the bus, Sandro’s aunt, his adopted mother, various street kids who knew him, various journalists, a drug dealer, and some cops. 

            Eventually Sandro got off the bus with one of the women, and a cop charged him, shooting at point blank range.  Not only did he miss Sandro, he HIT the hostage!  D’oh!  (Chief Wiggums in SWAT gear).  For his part, Sandro shot the woman 3 times, so she died practically on the spot.  Then the crowd, a mob, was about to lynch Sandro himself (no one was impressed that the police didn’t take him out with a sniper, as they had plenty of chances) so the police threw him into a van, and then strangled him in the back of the van.  A full, 100%, complete goatfuck by the police.  For their part, the police argued that they couldn’t take a shot at him, even with a sniper, because he was on TV and no one wanted the responsibility of killing the man on live TV.  And many of the commentators observed that the media made the situation much worse by giving Sandro an outlet and putting the police on the spot. 

            For his part, Sandro had been 8 years old when his mother was brutally murdered right in front of him.  He was homeless since then, a street kid who did cocaine and glue sniffing, and had been in and out of Rio’s corrupt and brutal jail system several times.  A few social workers commented on his particular case.  The bottom line is that blame appears to be spread equally to everyone.

            Remarkably, for a documentary on such a nasty and depressing topic, like “Elite Squad” and “Manda Bala”, this has lots of fantastic overhead helicopter footage of Rio de Janeiro, which makes the city look much nicer than it is on the streets.  I suppose they wanted to juxtapose Rio’s beauty with the hard reality of street kids and a fucked up criminal justice system.

 The Man of the Year.  No, not the Robin Williams film.  It takes place in Rio de Janeiro, but part of the city I’ve never seen and don’t recognize. Wagner Moura – AGAIN!  Man, this guy is in every film.  Some actor, Murilo Benicio – who looks like a cross between Ron “Office Space” Livingston and Colin Farrell – plays Maiquel, who recently dyed his hair blond and hooked up with the girl who took care of it.  He kills Suel (Moura), a local hoodlum, simply due to a disagreement: Suel accused him of being “viado” (queer) due to the blondness.  Then something strange happens: instead of getting in trouble, he’s a celebrity.  The cops not only don’t arrest him, they thank him.  The guy’s teenage jailbait chick moves in with him.  The local dentist fixes his teeth for free – and gives him more assignments.  He winds up in a corrupt “security agency” which is more like a fancy protection racket.  As always happens when the hero gets everything he wants but is somehow unhappy, it all falls apart.  His associate Marcão (played by Lazaro Ramos, from “Cidade de Deus” and “The Man Who Copied”) gets caught with a kilo of coke – too much for even the corrupt cop Santana to fix.  Eventually he has to solve things: and he does.

 Out in Nowhere.  Set aside from the RIO RIO RIO movies, and the BANG BANG movies, are a third genre which are more low-key, philosophical, sometimes a little racy, and set in far off, remote parts of Brazil.

 Bye Bye Brasil.  This is an older film, from the 70s, taking place in various parts of Rio: the Amazon jungle, Salvador, Recife, Belem (mouth of the Amazon), and Brasilia.  Jose Wilker and Fabio Junior star in this.  Wilker is a cynical, jaded, circus performer, calling himself Gypsy Lord (in goatee and guyliner) who tours small towns in the northeast of Brazil, including Recife and Salvador, as the “Caravana Holidei”, which includes his mistress Salome and a mute black giant, Swallow.  FJ and his pregnant wife Dasdo manage to hop onboard in Salvador and follow them to Recife and Belem.  Unfortunately they have to compete with the “fishbones” (TV antennas), though each town only has ONE TV and everyone watches it together in the town square instead of paying attention to Wilker and his troupe.  After unsuccessfully pimping out his wife – FJ ends up in bed with Salome, and Wilker (Gypsy Lord) with Dasdo – he decides to take Dasdo to Brasilia, parting ways, at least temporarily, with the Caravana Holidei. 

 Cidade Baixa.  More of an erotic low-key adventure film.  Two friends, white (Wagner Moura..again) and black, in Salvador, Bahia, are enthralled by the same girl, a blonde named Karina, and their friendship is warped and challenged by their competition for her affections.  This has a modest degree of violence and a better helping of nudity and sex.

 Station Central.  A more recent film, which starts off in Rio de Janeiro.  A young boy, living with his mother, sees her killed by a bus in front of him.  An older woman reluctantly takes care of him, only vaguely aware that the boy’s father lived up in the northeast.  Despite her cynicism, she takes pity over him and hitches rides up the coast to the dry deserts of Pernambuco and other such states (which remind me of Arizona).  Many of the small towns along the way resemble the ones in Bye Bye Brasil.  Eventually the boy does find his family – a very sad and rewarding scene. 

 Behind the Sun.  Same area (northeast desert) but back in 1910.  A family, the Breves, has a sugar cane farm – and a vendetta with a competing family, Ferreiras.  Their eldest son, Inacio, has been killed by the Ferreiras, so Tonio, the second oldest, kills the Ferreiras’ father.  This means their son, whats-his-name (played by Wagner Moura), will soon be coming to hunt down and kill Tonio.  In the meantime, a “circus” consisting of an eccentric scoundrel, Salustiana (no idea why the guy’s name ends in –a) and a beautiful girl, Clara, comes by; Tonio falls in love with Clara, and she with him.  However, Tonio is a marked man, so it’s only a matter of time before the Ferreiras come by to extract vengeance to keep the cycle of death and violence going so long as someone’s left to kill.

 House of Sand.  Basically a chick flick about a woman (Aurea) and her daughter (Maria) stuck in Maranhão, a province of Brazil in the far northeast on the coast with white desert sand.  The “kicker” is that the actresses switch roles.  When the daughter has her own daughter, the movie jumps about 20 years into the future (starting out in 1910, jumping to 1919, and eventually to 1940 and 1969, and the actress playing the mother, now plays the daughter, and the actress playing the daughter now plays the new daughter.  Anyhow.  Despite the switcheroo, it manages to avoid being confusing.  But it is a chick flick, and takes place 100% in this desolate but also beautiful part of Brazil.

 Mango Yellow.  This one takes place in the present time, in Recife.  It’s a bit offbeat and raunchy – some sex & nudity, plus some other disturbing images.  Various different colorful characters are here: Dunga, a flaming bicha, who has the hots for Wellington, a straight Romario-lookalike who works in the slaughterhouse and cheats on his attractive but superreligious wife Kika, with Daisy, a far less stunning but easy “puta”.  Isaac, another weirdo, has something for corpses (but he’s not a necrophiliac) for which he trades weed.  There’s an overweight woman, Aurora, who applies her oxygen mask to her second set of lips, and a pretty barmaid, who shows Isaac that (A) she doesn’t wear panties and (B) that her hair downstairs matches the set upstairs.  The locale is dingy, dirty, and rundown, but very bright and hot anyway. 

 The Middle of the World (DVD).  Nosso amigo, Wagner Moura, returns again – as the father of a family traveling from the northeast to Rio de Janeiro by bicycle.  They have to make money various ways – the mother makes hammocks in one city, she sings Roberto Carlos songs with one son, but more often than not they go hungry.  The father insists he needs R$1000 ($300 US) per month, but can’t seem to find anyone offering that kind of money.  Eventually they do make it to Rio; it’s a bit Kerouac-ish in a way, but with excellent views of northeast Brazil. 

God is Brazilian.  Antonio Fagundes (from “Bossa Nova” and countless novellas) plays God, who is tired and looking for a vacation so he can go off to remote parts of the universe and watch supernovas explode.  But he needs a saint to run things in his absence, and has one in mind.  Along the way tags Taoca (yes, Wagner Moura again), a ne’er-do-well trying to escape a particularly nasty creditor, and a girl Mada (somewhat of a provocative yet Virgin Mary figure) who helps them out.  They travel around the northeast of Brazil (it looks like the desert, Sergipe and Natal) discussing theology and ending up in various humorous situations.  In many ways, it’s a Brazilian version of “Oh God!”, that irreverent comedy from way back with George Burns and John Denver.  Leave it to Brazilians to be both deeply religious and irreverent at the same time.