Silver Lining, or How I Got to Love the Virus

PARIS

With half of mankind under house arrest and the global economy in a tailspin, not mentioning tens of thousand of deaths, it is hard to feel anything good about the invisible enemy which we are told should go by the politically correct Covid-19 or Coronavirus name, rather than by what everybody would instinctively call it: the Chinese virus, just like a century ago we referred to the Spanish flu - although back then the flu had nothing to do  with Spain whereas this one clearly originates from China.

And yet, there are quite a few unexpected positive developments from the global pandemic.

Finally, pollution is down 

With millions of cars off the roads and plants shut down in many countries, it is hardly surprising that air pollution has come down, as the two below shots reveal. Some might even think that the current pandemic is nature's way to get revenge against man's constant abuse for decades. Can't blame it, to tell you the truth.

From bad to better

Drug traffic and crime down
As some police have been forced to recognize, it is humiliating that an invisible virus, by keeping dealers and customers off the streets, has drastically  reduced the illegal drug trade, thus succeeding where governments all over the world have failed consistently for decades. Home burglaries have basically disappeared for obvious reasons. In my beloved Rio de Janeiro, street mugging, a common occurrence, has been reduced by more than 60% this month versus March 2019. 

The Wonder City is getting even more
wonderful...if a bit empty

Digital Transformation is here to stay
Your IT team? Not yet. Your Agile coach? Not really. Your HR department? Yeah, right. Your Change Management team? Who are these people, anyway? Never seen them. 

And suddenly Covid-19 lands on us and we are all working from homing, using technology at full throttle to communicate/engage/get things done. As someone whose professional life entails helping corporate clients' digital transformation, this pan(da)demic is a godsend.

Migration and tourism are halted

Now, some of you might think that the endless waves of migrants landing on Europe's shore is a blessing but many might beg to differ, and now that the EU has closed its borders to all non-Europeans and residents, the flow of millions of illegal immigrants has come to an abrupt end. Hss it? 

Another category of migrants, short-term and illegal, a.k.a. tourists, are also being rebuffed and considering the damage these hordes inflict on sites and places like long-suffering Venice, Covid-19 is definitely a blessing in that respect. Maybe we'll go back to the 1950s where mass tourism was unknown and traveling the globe was truly a unique, sometimes once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Market volatility offers great opportunities
Stock gyrations can offer great overnight gains. Some stocks go up and down several times in the same trading day. If you have some money saved which you don't need in the short term, pick a couple of stocks at the lower end of what they have been trading and a quick buck is almost a sure thing. One piece of advice: pick dividend-paying stocks so that in the unlikely case all the stocks you bought suddenly go south and stay there at least you get a steady income stream.

All that goes down ends up going back up...and vice versa!

Some jobs are coming under strong demand
 Last December's general strike in France which lasted a good month and a half (no metro, no bus, no trains) , saw some unemployed people suddenly sign up for Uber and with ride fares tripling many of them became a rags-to-riches story. Even people with a  day job took to using their car for additional income, proving the old adage that one should never let a good crisis go to waste. Now, that restaurants are closed, and many people are scared to go to crowded supermarkets UberEats, and Deliveroo delivery men are enjoying brisk business. Macy's may be shedding gallons of tears along with rivers of red ink, but Amazon is on a roll.

Quality time with your family
Those of you whose rat-race lifestyle meant spending too little time with your spouse and/or children, here's your once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make things right. That is, if spending so much time at work wasn't a way to get away from your  family in the first place...

Extra reading and movie-watching time
Great time to (re)read all  those books and watch (again) those movies you always wanted to and never had time for

BOOKS

History: If you think the current pandemic is bad, read Barbara Tuchman's Distant Mirror on the Black Death, or how the plague pandemic in the Middle Ages was called: Some countries like England lost half of their population. Feels almost like a relief, doesn't it?

Literature: You may have heard of, but never read, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. This is the perfect time to read this picaresque novel whose counter-hero Ignatius Reilly's adventures are simply hilarious. If you read French, Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), L'élegance du hérisson (The Elegance of the Hedgehog), the full 6-volume set of  Les rois maudits (The Accursed King)  are a must. In Spanish, I highly recommend Mario Vargas Llosa's La tia Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter) and  political page-turner La fiesta del chivo (The Feast of the Goat).

For sheer comic relief, anything by P.G. Wodehouse, especially the Bertie series, is a must read. In the same vein, Frasier sitcom writer Joe Keenan's Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz will have you laugh uproariously.

P.G. Wodehouse at his best

If you have a soft spot for thriller/crime/spy stories: John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the mother of all spy novels (I'm not crazy about most other Le Carré novels that I find a bit on the dull side). France's Pierre Lemaitre's Robe de marié and Alex are excellent, as is the unique dual-story line La caverna de las ideas, a virtuoso Spanish-language historical mystery novel published in English as The Athenian Murders. Another even more unique whodunit is perfectly titled The Daughter of Time aiming at discovering whether Richard III was the real murderer of his nephews five centuries ago. Of course, you can't say "whodunit" without mentioning the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie herself: Curtain, published posthumously, will shock you. Of course she spawned many spoofs, my favorite being The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, written in the vein of the grand dame's novels including idioms and contemporary references.

MOVIES
I'll avoid some obvious classics and focus on lesser-known films that will enchant, shock, surprise and amuse you. Starting  with the film noir genre, Laura  is as brilliant now as it was 75 years ago. Hitchcock's 1964 The Birds will still amaze you with special effects that will put current computer wizardy to shame. No Way Out's ending will shock you. French-language L'assassin habite au 21 (1942) is sheer brilliance (interestingly, I discovered in a Rio de Janeiro second-hand bookstore, or sebo, Hotel Brasil which seems to be inspired by the Clouzot film.)

Don't get distracted or you might miss
a dialogue gem

For wit, brilliant dialogue, great story line and flawless performances by the full cast, Woody Allen's Bullets over Broadway is a joy to watch again and again (I must have done so close to 20 times.) Little Miss Sunshine and A Fish Called Wanda are two other brilliant comedies. Mockumentary Thank You for Smoking may not make you kick the habit, but it will have you convulsed with laughter, as will the Coen Brothers' Intolerable Cruelty.

If you're into musicals, Victor Victoria is a gem with its fine performances, brilliant script and great score. Almost 90 years old, The Most Dangerous Game hasn't aged a bit (and no, it's not a musical, just had to wedge it somewhere.)

Feeling like a Roman epic of yore? I have little doubt you'll enjoy Quo Vadis with an amazing Peter Ustinov as the Emperor Nero, as well as Samson and Delilah starring Hedy Lamarr, the most beautiful woman ever to have graced the silver screen.

The citizen of the world I am cannot but mention great movies from Brazil (Central Station, City of God), India (Salaam Bombay), the Arab World (The Yacoubian Building which also doubles as a great novel by Egypt's best writer, Alaa Al Aswany), Germany (Goodbye Lenin, The Downfall with its companion reading piece, Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler, one of the best historical works ever written), Italy (Rocco and his brothers, I soli ignoti, Lo scopone scientifico), Japan (Spirited Away) and in Spanish little-known thriller The Hidden Face and Almodóvar's farce Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

The Yacoubian Building: Succeeding

in the jump from great literature to

great moviemaking

With this last title, I cheated on my promise to go with little-known movies, so in for a penny, in for a pound, let me add two more in the same vein: Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (picture me taking a bow, as I do every time I mention the master's name) and Mankiewicz's All About Eve: If the former is the best movie made by Hollywood on Hollywood, the latter is a sui generis tribute to Broadway


So, now that you can breathe a cleaner air, see bluer skies, made a quick buck playing Wall Street, feel safer that crime is down, enjoyed (re)discovering great reads and movies, be honest: Aren't you going to miss the big bad virus?

Woody Allen or the Vanishing of a Once-Great Filmmaker

Now that Woody Allen has been recycled
into a cliché-ridden tourist guide,
we will probably rarely see him on the
French TV spoof show, Les Guignols

RIO DE JANEIRO
With some time on my hand in this weeklong public holiday linking Republic Day and Black Awareness Day (Rio has more public holidays than anywhere else in Brazil) I took the opportunity to catch up with my movie watching. Woody Allen's latest opus, To Rome With Love left me with  a deep sense of sadness, not in remembrance of the great time I had had over the years in the Eternal City, but how his latest movie was ample proof of the complete loss of talent of one of the 20th century's greatest moviemakers.

It is always difficult to date with precision when an artist starts losing his soul, but with Woody Allen one can confidently say that from the moment he abandoned his muse city, New York, and moved to Europe he became irrelevant as a film director. (And ironically so since he tends to be more popular in the Old World than at home.)  I didn't find the London-made movies had any particular interest in spite of the critical acclaim of Match Point, clearly inspired from A Place In the Sun (he even "borrowed" some scenes from the famous 1950s movie.)

Clearly realizing that London was not going to be his new New York, Allen moved to Spain where he shot Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Apart from a fine performance by Penélope Cruz (which won her an Oscar), again, nothing of interest in this umpteenth retelling of Allenian themes about couples, traveling Americans and infidelity. Instead of London we get Barcelona photographed with every cliché one can think of: here they are in Parque Güell, then at The Sagrada Familia, before having drinks overlooking the Mediterranean. Worse: Allen has his cast of characters fly to Oviedo, in the Spanish region of Asturias, for a party with guitar playing and flamengo dancing. A little research would have told our former filmmaker that you are as likely to hear Andalusian music in Asturias as you are to see belly dancing among the Eskimos. How pathetic.

Last year, continuing his tour of European cities, he came to my home town. Again we get the familiar (I am still polite and try to avoid the B word) story of Americans abroad, entangled in complicated love lives, here seen through a not original trick of a writer-to-be who travels back to 1920s Paris. The name dropping (Look, it's Picasso, hey that's Hemingway, oh wow, here comes Dali) does nothing to help the storyline (nor does the dreadful cameo by then-First Lady Carla Bruni.) Clearly Allen can't get his movies produced in the US and has hit upon this strategy of getting financed through European cities'  marketing budget. Having sold his soul to the tourist devil, the latter exacts his price: cliché after cliché shots of Paris. Nauseating. And B-----.

The next city willing to bankroll him was, what else?: Rome. And we get the movie I just saw. Need I summarize what it is about? You've already guessed: complicated (never complex) love lives of American tourists or expatriates in another European capital, with Allen playing for the umpteenth time the neurotic character. The Italian characters he throws in are so one-dimensional that you barely see them (what on earth was Roberto Benigni thinking when he accepted that part?) Clearly the Roman officials drove a hard bargain and insisted Allen hire local technicians and actors, so he had to accommodate some local stories within the script, and show as much of the city as possible: so we get the characters acting out their various neuroses by the Trevi Fountain, in the Trastevere streets, at the Colosseum, on the Spanish Steps, even at Villa d'Este outside of the city limits. Obviously he didn't waste any time on it. Worse, he didn't even bother to check some embarrassing details. At the end of the movie, when the character played by Benigni is walking  down the street with his wife, he throws a tantrum in the middle of the street before she manages to calm him down and they walk back up the same street. And guess who is walking back with them? The same set of film extras walking down with them a few minutes earlier. The woman in the jeans, the guy in the green pants, and the two guys carrying a bag across their torso. Or maybe money was so tight that Allen had no choice but to reuse the same extras in the next scene with the same costumes. How sloppy. How careless. How pathetic. How revealing of a filmmaker who has clearly lost his way and stopped believing in his own art.

I stopped liking Woody Allen as a person years back, when he two-timed his wife, Mia Farrow, with her own daughter. I am no moralist, and if someone wants to change sexual partners, I feel it is their right to do so and for any other person or animal they feel like. With one exception: please don't do it with your own wife's daughter, someone you had been living with as if she were your own daughter. So despicable. So gross. I stopped liking him as a person, but as an artist I still admired him, especially when in the mid-1990s he came up with terrific movies, in particular Manhattan Murder Mystery and, one of my all-time favorites, Bullets over Broadway (the latter came out when I was living in Madrid and over a period of a year I took every friend of mine to see it at the Cine Ideal theatre and remember I could hear behind me some moviegoer anticipating every line - I was clearly not the only one to love that movie.)

But for the past decade, Allen has degenerated into consistently producing a type of movies I never thought he'd ever make, B- movies: BORING movies. They have become a caricature of his movies, just like the characters he still insists on playing have become caricatures of himself.

It is time Woody Allen follow the advice Judy Davis gives his character in To Rome With Love and retire for good and stop any of his former activity. The character he plays in the Rome movie, an opera director, gets qualified by reviewers in the movie as "moronic" and an "imbecile." How lucid.

I heard that Allen had his sights on this city as his next destination. Please let's not have him inflict any further damage on the 7th art.  Otherwise we know what to expect: American tourists will be having affairs with some hot Brazilians and we'll be regaled with every postcard shot from the Marvelous City: on Copacabana beach, at the foot of the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer, by the Sugar Loaf, dancing samba. Do we really need another mindless waste of celluloid, or whatever it is that they shoot movies on these days?

NO!

Woody, please follow the advice of your fellow countryman, Philip Roth, who has just decided to stop writing, and stop making a fool of yourself  before and behind a camera.