In a Better World… not Biutiful.

Another submission for the International Section of this week's issue of The Cambridge Student, which was not published since most of the space was devoted to oncoming CUSU elections.. enjoy!

In a Better World… not Biutiful.

By Noor-Hal Cuellar

On February 27^th, 2011 the 83rd Academy Awards ceremony took place in the Kodak Theatre, in L.A., and within all the film entities that were honored by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) the award for the Best Foreign Film was granted to the film “In a Better World” a Danish production which portrays the story of a boy named Elias living in a small town in Denmark, whose Swedish roots, plus wearing a dental retainer equals frequent poundings for him, aside from his own personal struggles due to his parents’ separation. His idolized father is an advocate of turning the other cheek, an altruistic doctor who is often absent due to his volunteer services at an African refugee camp. Within this situation, a new kid called Christian intervenes and defends him, making them to create a strong bond that could lead not to a good end.

Rather than giving another movie review, I would like to emphasize the motivations behind the idea of making this film. In my opinion, “In a better world” shows the current complex reality on many households of our society. Even though the film in several moments confuses purposefulness with deepness, since it dwells a lot into the former but loses grip on the latter. However, with the portrait of two different realities being witnessed by Anton, Elias’s father, and the escalating anti-social behavior of Christian, holistically the message given is that the tendency toward the animalistic is present in us all, even the idyllic scheme known as the Denmark society. And this holds true if we reviewed the origin of this film that was started as a discussion between the director, Susanne Bier, and the screenwriter, Anders T. Jensen, about the perception of Denmark as a quite harmonious society. Then, the idea was to develop a plot when the dramatic turns of events would break the idyllic image of a blissful place. This entire together, plus several other ingredients like the cinematography capturing the harsh beauty of African landscapes, made it the kind of prestige film that would perfectly fit into the Academy’s sensibilities. And it obviously did.

Even though the rest of the nominees were movies with high standards of quality, I would like to talk about “Biutiful” which was clearly a favorite of the critics. And also it was strongly expected since his leading actor, Academy Award winner Javier Bardem gave an overpowering performance as a troubled middle-aged poor guy and got a nomination as Best Leading Actor, category whose strong candidate to win was Colin Firth for “The King’s Speech”. Even though it shows the less glamorous face from Barcelona, and its attempt at a globalist aesthetic of compassion at a certain extent gets too pretentious, Biutiful is clearly an impressive sample of Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu film-making he has shown in previous movies as 21 grams and Babel. By showing the other side of the dazzling and idyllic Gaudí reality, full of exploited immigrants living in turbulent suburbs and far from the perfect tourist destination scheme, Iñarritu goes beyond his previous work focused in entangling disparate lives together by a random event, and jumps into a different sort of magic naturalism.

All these factors were heavily considered by the Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to be chosen as the Mexican submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a decision quite controversial, since the plot takes place in Spain, and there was another strong candidate which was submitted to the Spanish Goya Awards, a film named “Hell”, which was quite polemic, since it is a political satire about the drug trafficking in Mexico. However, the reception the film had all around the world, as well as the successful background of Bardem and Iñarritu quite justified the Mexican Academy selection.

Nevertheless, it was not enough to beat the holistic scheme portrayed by “In a better world”. Even more because I reckon that the situations reflected in Bier’s film can be applied in any other context on our reality, in any other country. Even there are societies more or less troubled than Denmark, the same tribulations can take place anywhere else.

Revenge of the Lions

OK, this was the original article I submitted for The Cambridge Student, but they shortened and put it together since this issue devoted most of its content to incoming CUSU elections...

Revenge of the Lions: Victory for Cambridge Second Men’s Basketball team as it breaks a Varsity Games losing-streak!

By Noor-Hal Cuellar

With seconds left, the 71-53 home victory over Oxford Twos was already celebrated by the Cambridge crowd when the German guard Sven Krippendorf took his time and before the clock stopped, seized the chance and scored an additional three-pointer that left the game with a 21 points victory for the Lions, who finally broke a losing streak in a gripping, actionpacked Varsity encounter.

The home team, which was craving for a win after a chain of defeats vs their archrivals in this annual game off-season, showed their bravery fighting and beating Oxford on quite a dynamic match. Even when the first two quarters were slightly slow in points and both teams went to half-time with not a clear advantage for any of them, with Lions defense slightly troubled by the intensive attack of Shaan Dalwadi and Daniel Peng. This, combined with some slight issues in the Cambridge defense that started allowing fouls to the visitors could have become a negative effect on the scoreboard by the end of the match.

However, the team coached by Elias Mouchlianitis seemed to have acknowledged their purpose in the court when half-time was over. The forwards started building up, Lithuanian Tadas Jucikas and Chinese Jin Zhang. The German center Marc Steuber improved his performance through the last quarters, and the addition of Americans Wes Hromowyk and Sam Ferguson fitted perfectly with the already stunning performance of Canadian guard Andrew Sullivan, who assisted all Hromowyk points and leading the strategy of the team especially at the last quarter. Even though Sullivan was replaced just a few minutes before the end of the match, clearly his performance made him the Man of the Match.

For the crowd, the most exciting part of the game was the last quarter, since the score was 51-50 by the end of the 3^rd quarter, so basically we are saying that the conjunction of superb performance, triangle offense and strong coaching gave no room for Oxford to score and overcome the increasing difference that Cambridge was accumulating due to the excellent drives and the strong games that the Lions were showing to the Other Place folks. Oxford coach, full of frustration, started yelling at the referees for every other foul marked against his team, prompting a technical foul while the whole Cambridge crowd booed at him. The same people that kept cheering their team all game long, hitting with their hands on the wooden edge of the viewing gallery of Kelsey Kerridge Sports Centre, and yelling loud “DEFENSE, DEFENSE” to inspire their players to keep on the amazing performance that led into a marvelous difference of 21 points.