 at Semi-State, survive right on the leader down the long Lavern Gibson homestretch, and then find her top end gear the last 50m-100m, she could steal the win away from the traditional 3,200m/5K XC girls ranked ahead of her.
* Why Madeline Keller will win: Keller is the Shelbyville Semi-State Champion. The winner of this highly competitive semi-state should always be considered a title contender. She holds a 10:56 3,200m best on the track from last year, her freshman year. Keller finished outside the top-40 at last year’s State Meet as a freshman – but based on the way she is running as of late, she is looking to make a big statement during her sophomore campaign.
* Why Katelyn Wasson will win: Wasson either had an off day or ran conservative for her highly ranked team at last week’s Shelbyville Semi-State where she finished in 8th place. Wasson is arguably the most accomplished track runner in the field, holding personal bests of 4:57 and 10:31 over 1600m and 3200m, respectively. The track success hasn’t seemed to fully translate to top-tier cross-country champion status quite yet – but that can quickly change on November 2nd as Wasson has the tools to hold onto a fast pace and finish hard.
How the race might unfold:
Strzelecki, Crain, and James (and Keller to a lesser degree) all seem to be highly aerobic/strength runners. It is very likely one, two, or all three of these athletes get to the front early and push the pace from the gun. If anyone gaps the field early in the race, it will likely be Strzelecki – as she is very experienced going solo in no man’s land all season long and is likely very comfortable with that approach.
The big question is whether or not the superior track athletes Duffus and/or Wasson can keep pace with the strength runners mentioned above. If Duffus and/or Wasson can remain composed and hold it together through 4K, we could be in for a treat of a race down the 400m homestretch at Lavern Gibson.
Whatever happens on Saturday, this race looks to be full of contenders and potential surprises!Political cinema often goes over big at the Cannes Film Festival, to the extent that someone could probably teach a class on the subject and select nothing but Palme D’Or winners for the syllabus. Hell, in the scant two years I’ve been writing Palme Thursday, I’ve already covered films on the inequities of Italian peasant life, the rapid upheaval of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the founding of the Solidarity movement, the horrors of Communist Romania, the follies of the Bush administration, and—metaphorically, anyway—the spirit of the 1968 student revolts in France. Google plays a big part in my process.
But no amount of hours spent plugging keywords into a search engine is going to definitively settle the debate surrounding one of Cannes’ most divisive prizewinners. From the moment it took top honors at the festival, in May of 1995, Emir Kusturica’s Underground was mired in controversy. Subtitled “Once Upon A Time There Was A Country,” the film is a wild, seriocomic eulogy for a unified Yugoslavia. To its detractors, however, it looked more like an apology—or worse, propaganda—for Serbian nationalists. “Kusturica’s reconstruction, in this film of the history of the revolution and of Yugoslavia during and after World War II, has nothing to do with reality,” wrote Stanko Cerovic, Montenegrin journalist for France’s RFI radio station. He was not alone in his attacks on the film and its director, and half a year after Underground won the Palme, Kusturica announced he was so weary and sickened by these battles that he was retiring from filmmaking—an impulsive announcement he would later walk back.
Some context here might be helpful. Born in Sarajevo, Kusturica quickly established himself as the cinematic laureate of Yugoslavia, and a star and national hero in Bosnia. Before he was even 40, the filmmaker had picked up major prizes at Venice, Berlin, and Cannes; his Palme for Underground was, in fact, his second, after nabbing the prize a decade earlier for When Father Was Away On Business. But by the early ’90s, when the Yugoslav Wars escalated into horrific violence (including war crimes committed by Serbian nationalists), Kusturica’s allegiance to Yugoslavia—as opposed to Bosnia specifically—made him a traitor in the eyes of his countrymen. It didn’t help that he began self-identifying, ethnically, as Serbian, or that he never spoke out publicly against Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic. And so it’s probably safe to say that the backlash against this particular Palme winner grew at least partially out of resentment for the man who made it.
For someone like myself, a layman on conflict in the Balkans, it’s difficult to evaluate Underground on strictly political terms, as that requires formulating a staunch, coherent position on the Yugoslavian experiment. (Give me a year and a library card and I’ll get back to you on that.) On purely artistic grounds, however, the merits of this boisterous, whirligig epic—which covers 40 years of regional history through the madcap exploits of two incorrigible scoundrels—are hard to ignore. And I have the nagging suspicion that it was through that (mostly) apolitical lens that the Cannes jury assessed Underground. What they had was the luxury of distance—an ability to judge the film from an outsider’s perspective, free of vested interest in the events it depicts.
On paper, and in retrospect, the 1995 lineup looks stacked: Terence Davies, Ken Loach, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Jim Jarmusch, Tim Burton, Manoel De Oliveira, and Zhang Yimou were all there, vying for the Palme. But from the perspective of the American media, at least, this was an off year. “As the 12 days wore on, folks spent much of their time grousing, walking out of movies, and waiting for a real winner,” Jeff Gordinier reported for Entertainment Weekly. The deflated energy Gordinier was describing could possibly be blamed on the bar set by the previous year’s festival. Folks who went in expecting another Pulp Fiction didn’t find one, though there were films of a comparatively punkish spirit. Fresh from Sundance, where it scandalized as intended, Larry Clark’s Kids provided Harvey Weinstein with another lightning rod for discussion (much to the chagrin of Jonathan Rosenbaum). And La Haine, a hellish but exhilarating portrait of life in the French ghetto, was another stylish sophomore feature from a crime-obsessed young auteur.
For pure scope and verve, though, there was no competing with Underground. The version that played at Cannes—longer than the one that opened in U.S. theaters, shorter than the one that later ran on Serbian television—surpassed the three-hour mark. (Film critic Kenneth Turan suggested that it was the probable winner sight unseen, just as many did with last year’s champion, the similarly lengthy Winter Sleep.) It was not just bigger than anything else in competition that year, but louder, brasher, and maybe funnier, too. Its nearest cousin, in the apples-and-oranges competition of Cannes ’95, was Theodoros Angelopoulos’ comparatively long Ulysses’ Gaze, also set in a war-torn Balkans. But Underground passed its own hefty running time with—among other crazed sights and sounds—a chimpanzee operating a tank. No surprise, really, that the jury ended up handing a dismayed Angelopoulos the Grand Prix (or second place).
Dividing its decades-spanning narrative into three distinct chapters—the first and third are both called “The War,” to underline the sadly cyclical nature of Yugoslavia’s troubled history—Underground is an audacious black comedy, comingling horror and humor at every turn. Its guiding principle, beyond a general impish embrace of chaos, is that the only way to approach so much violence, turmoil, and cultural change is through the mad mechanics of satire. For a film set in a war zone, it’s brazenly zany.
The lunacy commences with the opening frames, as our “heroes”—two heavy-drinking, skirt-chasing rapscallions, thick as thieves—lead a brass orchestra through the streets of Belgrade, tossing money and firing bullets in the general direction of the musicians. Marko (Miki Manojlović, who looks a bit like Harry Shearer) is the brains of the operation, slick and cunning. Blacky (Lazar Ristovski) is more like the brawn, a hotheaded electrician prone to flairs of passion and anger. Over the film’s first hour, as Axis forces invade the city in the waning years of World War II, these crazed comrades behave like the amoral jokester crooks of a Martin Scorsese crime epic. They also wage slapstick war on the Nazi occupiers; in one daft early scene, Blacky bounds onstage during a play, infiltrating the show to shoot at the Wehrmacht officer (Ernst Stotzner) in the