Flame & Citron (Flammen & Citronen, 2008)

Saw this at the Varsity with holyoutlaw last night. It's a WWII movie based on a true story about the Danish resistance movement -- specifically about two hitmen for the resistance (code names Flame and Citron) who specialize in assassinating Danish Nazi collaborators. In a lot of ways this felt like a standard WWII spy movie. As I said to Luke afterwards, "It's like Lust: Caution, except without all the sex." The focus is on deceit, betrayal, distrust, disinformation, the death of innocence/innocents, grey areas of morality. There's a neglected wife and a femme fatale. There's the scene where the Nazi villain tells the resistance hitman that they aren't that different. There's the patriotism in the face of certain death. (The latter is where Lust: Caution shockingly turned the tables.)

For all the familiar tropes, it's well done, and I wasn't familiar with the Danish resistance, so it was historically interesting as well. I think the most moving moment for me, however, came in the very opening shots, which are stock footage of the Nazis rolling into Copenhagen, with a voiceover in the second person asking, "Where were you when they came? Where were you on April 9th?" We don't yet know who the "you" is, so it could be us. The voiceover then talks about what it felt like to see the Danish Nazis come out of the woodwork. And it made me think: there would be Nazi collaborators in America too, even now. Which was a thought that hovered over the entire movie, as these two men went about cold-bloodedly killing collaborators, and then beginning to wonder whether they had killed the right people.

The film is very noir, too. Everybody is almost always smoking and drinking and hidden in shadow. I'm not sure how much spoken Danish I had ever heard before, and for some reason it sounded a lot more like English than German does.

Multinational organizations you've probably never heard of

AOSIS: Alliance of Small Island States

The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is a coalition of small island and low-lying coastal countries that share similar development challenges and concerns about the environment, especially their vulnerability to the adverse effects of global climate change. It functions primarily as an ad hoc lobby and negotiating voice for small island developing States (SIDS) within the United Nations system.

AOSIS has a membership of 42 States and observers, drawn from all oceans and regions of the world: Africa, Caribbean, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, Pacific and South China Sea. Thirty-seven are members of the United Nations, close to 28 percent of developing countries, and 20 percent of the UN's total membership. Together, SIDS communities constitute some five percent of the global population.

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Wikipedia:

Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is an intergovernmental organization of low-lying coastal and small Island countries. Established in 1990, the main purpose of the alliance is to consolidate the voices of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) to address global climate change. AOSIS has been very active from its inception putting forward the first draft text in the Kyoto Protocol negotiations as early as 1994.

Many of the member states were present at the COP15 United Nations on Climate Change Conference in December of 2009. Democracy Now! reported that members from the island state of Tuvalu interrupted a session on december 10 to demand that global temperature rise be limited to 1.5 degrees instead of the proposed 2 degrees.

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And yes, the Federated States of Micronesia (and thus Yap), are a member. Some of the Outer Islands of the State of Yap (many of which are low-lying atolls) will probably be submerged by rising ocean levels. Yap Island itself is not an atoll, but a chunk of continental plate that rises above sea level.

Xotic Xmases

Over at theinferior4, Lucius Shepard recently posted ten excellent capsule stories of exotic Christmases past -- although I guess jail isn't an exotic location for everybody. It got me thinking about my own Xmases in foreign lands. There are only three I can remember, not counting the four we spent on Yap when we were living out there (besides which I don't remember those).

1) 1989, Schwäbisch Hall



In 1989 I was in the small town of Schwäbisch Hall in southern Germany. I was visiting my long distance girlfriend, Nahid, whom I had met in May of that year when she and a friend came through Seattle at the end of a cross country trip around the US that had started in San Francisco. We stayed at her mother's apartment in Schwäbisch Hall for a week, then headed up to Berlin, where Nahid was going to the Freie Universität. Nahid's mom, Frau K., had a Hungarian weightlifter boyfriend named Laszlo. Laszlo, who didn't speak any English, was very friendly to me and shared bottles of the local beer, which he thought (and I agreed) was quite good. (When Nahid got back into contact with me a couple of years ago, she said her mom and Laszlo were still together, twenty years later, which made me happy.) I don't remember much about Xmas itself, except that Frau K. talked me into calling home, and my dad answered the phone. I told him he'd love the spätzle, which is a German noodle dish. We'd had Frau K's homemade spätzle that evening, and I was an instant convert.

The other thing I remember about that visit to Schwäbisch Hall was that Nahid took me to a party. Was it on Xmas itself? The weather was freezing, and the party was a surreal "beach party" with sand and fake palm trees in a hall or gymnasium of some kind. I had one of those lonely-in-a-crowd times, since I didn't know anybody (including Nahid, really), didn't speak the language, and was at least nine years older than anybody else there. I mostly drank beer and played wallflower, although there was at least one awkward conversation with one of Nahid's friends. Nahid asked me to drive home, because she'd been drinking too and the roads were icy. Great! The first time I'd ever driven in Europe. Better than that, we got stopped at a roadblock by the cops. Nahid did all the talking, and somehow she talked us through it. Maybe she explained that I was a poor, innocent foreigner who was driving her home because she was tipsy, I really have no idea.

( Two more under the cut )