Posted on 10/24/2009 7:07:18 AM PDT by La Lydia
MEXICO CITY -- When the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez penned his most recent novel, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," he was being provocative. The book begins with this line: "The year I turned 90, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." But there is art and there is life. And so just as an international cast and crew were about to begin filming a movie adaptation of the 2004 novella, the plug was pulled as the filmmakers and García Márquez were denounced as aiding and abetting perverts. A human rights organization called the Regional Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean filed a criminal complaint with the Mexican attorney general last week, asserting the filmmakers would be "responsible for acts that could be constituted as the crime of condoning child prostitution."...
The attorney general has not moved against the film, but the government in the state of Puebla, where filmmakers were preparing to shoot this month, announced that it would no longer finance the film with $1.5 million in taxpayer money, a grant that represented about 25 percent of the film's budget.
García Márquez has lived in Mexico City off and on for two decades. The controversy has quickly escalated here, as artists and intellectuals and human rights advocates trade fire in news columns.
"The question of the week is why García Márquez agreed to take to the screen 'Memories of My Melancholy Whores' at a time when the world is fighting against the growing commercial sexual exploitation of children and adolescents. The novel has a limited audience, while the film would end up on television and find a mass audience," wrote Lydia Cacho in the newspaper El Universal....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
>>winner of the Nobel Prize for literature<<
And we know how hard those Nobel Prizes are to get.
He probably got it BECAUSE of the sexual exploitation of women and children.
Just sounds like a run-of-the-mill jerk, to me.
Is there a genre that’s easier to pull off and easier to disparage than Magic Realism?
It sounds like he is a friend of Hugh Hefner!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2369945/posts
“No one denies that García Márquez is a powerful novelist...”
I guess that means I’m someone rather than no one.
No there isn’t. I watch a lot of Spanish TV, and it is regularly made fun of. There was an entire “magical realism” telenovela several years ago that was the butt of countless jokes and parodies. People still make fun of it.
I agree with Lydia Cacho that such a film would “normalize” and advertise the sexual exploitation of women and children.
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The communists are down with such exploitation. They love to talk about equality, but their entire system is based on exploitation of various groups.
They probably share some of the same teenage whor...eh, er...girlfriends.
The movie will be made! I’m sure Hugo, Fidel or Raul will come to the rescue. On second thought, Raul may have a problem with the story line because it doesn’t have any young boys in it!
If you can suspend your disbelief for long enough to read him, he is a premier novelist, in that he is a master of the language (I read him in Spanish, and can only assume his translator do him justice). I enjoyed “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” and “Love in the Time of Cholera” very much. All that said, he is a dirty old man with dubious political beliefs.
Geez. I saw that in the New York Times. Gag. Do you ever watch The Soup on the Entertainment channel? They make fun of Hefner on a weekly basis.
We all agree that he’s a kinky old goat and a great author!
His Nobel Prize for Literature was more reasonable than a number of other ones they have handed out.
Does that mean that this movie should have been titled "Love in the Time of Depends" ?
Cheers!
All of us would like to live until 90 and still enjoy sex. However any 47 year old like Andie McDowell will suit me.
That's a charge that might be justifiably made generally about those in charge in Hollywood - the Roman Polanski apologists.
Which novela are you referring to?
Actually, the people in charge...studio heads...have been mostly silent on the Polanski issue. Weinstein was the only one who spoke up. The rest are line empoyees (actors...)
Of interest, 21 year old Ana de Armas is supposed to star in the movie. You can judge but she looks much closer to 25 than 13!
http://top-people.starmedia.com/tmp/swotti/cacheYW5HIGRLIGFYBWFZ/imgAna%20de%20Armas8.jpg
Mariana de la Noche, in which José Carlos Ruiz would turn into a bird and fly off to rescue Jorge Salinas.
from the article:
>>> “This is not a movie about child prostitution but a movie about the central idea of the novel, which is that even on the last day of your life, you can change your life,” he continued. <<<
Apparently, you can change your life on your last day just by fornicating with a drugged, young prostitute. Fascinating! A novella about the liberating power of Sin. How Romantic!
>>> Del Río said he has spoken with García Márquez about the criticism and said the 82-year-old author “was not surprised. His novel is a polemic. It is an extreme. But he is also confused.” <<<
Let’s see — his novella is an extreme polemic, and yet he’s “confused” about the negative reactions when it’s to be filmed as a movie. Yah, he sounds confused.
>>> “He respects the activists, but he also defends his right, and our right, to be free to express our art.” <<<
There’s no prior censorship, just denial of funding by a provincial government. Express your art with someone else’s money, parasite.
Who here whan’t been at a good mall lately? Tell me about the young female “mall rats”!
“If you can suspend your disbelief for long enough to read him, he is a premier novelist, in that he is a master of the language (I read him in Spanish, and can only assume his translator do him justice). I enjoyed “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” and “Love in the Time of Cholera” very much. All that said, he is a dirty old man with dubious political beliefs.”
I agree. Cien Años is good too.....but its author lacks fundamental wisdom and he needs to repent of many things (like perhaps many of us).
“I agree with Lydia Cacho that such a film would “normalize” and advertise the sexual exploitation of women and children.”
So when a film shows a violent murder, does that “normalize” and advertise the killing of fellow humans?
In this film, the woman’s age is never discussed. The actress is 21 years old. He falls in love with her. There is no sex. Doesn’t sound so bad.
"One hundred years of solitude" is also very good. Very good.
Big Ewwww factor there.
Makes you wonder whether the Havana gov't is one of the film's producers, too. Anything to tweak that pesky outmoded bourgeois morality, don't ya know.
Ana de Armas is nothing, if not STUNNING!
The guy’s a game codger, I gotta say that. At 90 you could easily break something, permanently pinch a lumbar nerve, swallow your teeth, bring on an anurism or pulmonary edema, exacerbate your sciatica, work loose an embolism, or suffer an episode of extreme incontinence. Keep your cell phone on 911 speed dial, Mr. Cholera.
“He falls in love with her. There is no sex.”
Hits a little too close to home for me...
Yah. Too bad she’s an actress who’ll drop her clothes in front of a movie camera.
According to the WPost, the author Marquez — Mr. Cholera — is 82. The pervert caharcter in his novella is the one who is 90.
But perhaps that’s a difference that doesn’t make a difference.
Anything to tweak that pesky outmoded bourgeois morality, don’t ya know.
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Exactly. Destroy morality to destroy the family to make each individual’s primary allegiance to the State.
So when a film shows a violent murder, does that “normalize” and advertise the killing of fellow humans?
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Quite possibly. Depends on how the killing is handled in the film.
I am not familiar with this writer or with the novella that this film is based on, so I have to go by what the piece tells me. It says that in the story a 90 year-old-man decides to have sex with an adolescent. I have no way of knowing, just based on what I have read here, if the girl’s underage status is mentioned in the film as it is in the book.
I was referring to the director’s intentions in making the film, as quoted later in the article.
Because he's entitled. Marquez is a friend of Castro, who can pull any woman in Cuba off the street and into his bed, willing or not, overage or not. The laws against human trafficking don't apply to the Communist leadership.
As, I said earlier, I read only what was on this page — the exerpt.
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