Programming Note: Olympism Descends

During the old-old school Olympics of ancient Greece, a Truce was brokered, allowing athletes and spectators and whoever else to travel from and then back to their respective hangouts in peace so that they could come and see the athletic feats of strength without any provocateurs starting some shit, as the Greeks used to say. The truce has mostly been done away with in the modern era, aside from acting as a kind of International Olympic Committee (IOC) dog and pony show, like Putin and Russia promising peace during Sochi 2014 until they militarily sashayed into Ukraine on the sly.

Cinema Romantico, however, still likes to honor its own version of an Olympic Truce every four two years. We like to push pause. We like to step away from the cinema, consciously ignore social media and even do our best to put a moratorium on things like, say, the worst Presidential election in the history of my country. We like to give ourselves over to the Olympics. We always have. We always will. We do, again, beginning tomorrow, and for the next two weeks.

Yet, even as we do, we remain conscious of the infinite ails plaguing these Games. Those ails go beyond the IOC’s corruption, which is real and rampant, and they go beyond doping, which is real and rampant. No, this is about the root problems of Rio, and the root problems of Brazil itself, and how the presence of the Olympics has merely exacerbated them, and how the IOC’s claims of “harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity” is awe-inspiring blarney. And even if we devote ourselves to the Olympics themselves, we wish to remain conscious of the plight of Brazil itself.

You may have long since noted that Cinema Romantico gives space on Mondays and Tuesdays to reviews of new(ish) movies and on Fridays to classic cinema. So, for the next fortnight, Mondays and Tuesdays will consist of reviews of new(ish) Brazilian films and Fridays will consist of classic Brazilian cinema. And please, please forgive us for the inevitable Olympics-related posts that will infiltrate this otherwise sacred cinematic space (like, you know, maybe tomorrow). I guarantee you we will not be able to help it. Thank you in advance.

Love, peace and Olympism.