Amour -Michael Haneke's second Palme d'Or

The title is a challenge: not ironic, not celebratory, and yet somehow not complicated either. "Love" is boiled down to something elemental, something like survival, or perhaps the exact opposite, though calling it L'Amourmight have been to risk a pun. This is Michael Haneke's second Palme d'Or winner and shows the director as a film-maker of incomparable seriousness and weight, and this is a passionate, painful, intimate drama to be compared with Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.

La CIA: conexión Hollywood

“Al llegar vimos unos apaches”, asegura el oficial novato. A lo que John Wayne responde: “Si los vio, señor, no eran apaches”. Este famoso diálogo de Fort Apache resume la obsesión por el enemigo escondido, acechante y letal, ya sean indios, infiltrados comunistas como en la época de la Guerra Fría o terroristas islamistas, que ha marcado la visión de la seguridad de Estados Unidos y que ha sido trasladada tantas veces al cine. Tampoco es una casualidad que la operación para matar a Osama Bin Laden llevase el nombre del más famoso caudillo apache: Jerónimo.

La CIA y el espionaje siempre han formado parte de la cultura estadounidense pero este año, como ha quedado claro en los Globos de Oro que se entregaron la semana pasada, la pasión por la agencia ha superado todos los límites. Dos de los filmes de la temporada, Argo y La noche más oscura, la minuciosa reconstrucción de la caza y captura de Bin Laden, tratan directamente de la organización (y de Oriente Próximo, otra obsesión del cine político) y una de las series que más galardones recogió es Homeland, que va de los mismos temas pero desde la ficción. A diferencia del Reino Unido, donde los servicios secretos tienen una sólida tradición literaria que va desde clásicos como Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Lawrence Durrell o William Boyd, además de John Le Carré, claro, en Estados Unidos el espionaje tiene una tradición mucho más popular, está mucho más cerca de Jason Bourne que de George Smiley, hay mucho más cine que grandes obras literarias, con dos excepciones: El fantasma de Harlot (Anagrama), el novelón que Norman Mailer dejó inacabado en el que relata la historia reciente de Estados Unidos a través de la CIA, y La compañía (Paidós),de Robert Littell, otra rotunda y estupenda novela sobre el mismo tema. De hecho, El buen pastor, la película de Robert de Niro sobre el nacimiento de la CIA, fue escrita por Eric Roth cuando desistió en su imposible adaptación de El fantasma de Harlot.

Michael Haneke’s ‘Amour’

A masterpiece about life, death and everything in between, Michael Haneke’s “Amour” takes a long, hard, tender look at an elderly French couple, Georges and Anne — played by two titans of French cinema, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva — in their final days. Set in contemporary Paris, it begins with the couple’s front door being breached by a group of firemen. One moves through the rooms, delicately raising a hand to his nose before throwing open several large windows. He may be trying to erase the smell that probably brought the firemen there in the first place and which has transformed this light, graceful, enviable apartment into a crypt.

Django Unchained -slavery western

Foxx plays Django, a slave in 1858, who on being transported through Texas in the bitter winter cold, has a fateful encounter with the extraordinary Dr King Schultz, a mysterious German former dentist played by Christoph Waltz with dapper and dainty eccentricity and smilingly faultless English. Django's new friend gives him a taste of freedom, but is astonished to learn of his connection with a fellow slave, a beautiful woman named Broomhilda (Kerry Washington); it is a mis-hearing of the name "Brünnhilde" given by her German masters. She is being held at the plantation Candieland in Mississippi, owned by the revolting racist and sadist Calvin Candie, unforgettably played byLeonardo DiCaprio. Somehow, and with Schultz's help, Django must get her out. His soul will never be unchained until he sets his love free and takes a terrible revenge on her oppressor.

Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’

The mythology of the frontier, from colonial times to the eve of the Civil War.
When you wipe away the blood and the anarchic humor, what you see in “Django Unchained” is moral disgust with slavery, instinctive sympathy for the underdog and an affirmation (in the relationship between Django and Schultz) of what used to be called brotherhood.

Democracy controlled by millionaires and billionaires

As Billion-Dollar Democracy shows, 32 multi-million dollar gifts outweighed the collective voice of 3.7 million individuals who gave individual and transparent campaign contributions to the candidate of their choice. Moreover, most did so under a veil of secrecy using shadow non-profit groups and shell corporations created specifically to launder political giving by masking the identities of financial sources.

“When a tiny group of wealthy donors fuels political campaigns, they get to set the agenda in Washington, and the rest of us are left to argue over that agenda.”

Quinoa, asparagus, North-South exchange

The quinoa trade is yet another troubling example of a damaging north-south exchange, with well-intentioned health and ethics-led consumers here unwittingly driving poverty there. It's beginning to look like a cautionary tale of how a focus on exporting premium foods can damage the producer country's food security. Feeding our apparently insatiable 365-day-a-year hunger for this luxury vegetable, Peru has also cornered the world market in asparagus. Result? In the arid Ica region where Peruvian asparagus production is concentrated, this thirsty export vegetable has depleted the water resources on which local people depend. NGOs report that asparagus labourers toil in sub-standard conditions and cannot afford to feed their children while fat cat exporters and foreign supermarkets cream off the profits. That's the pedigree of all those bunches of pricy spears on supermarket shelves.