‘Planet of Snail’ offers sweet but flat portrait of two lives

The Korean documentary “Planet of Snail” is spare and unemphatic — too much so — with an abiding sweetness of spirit. It affords a window into the marriage of Young-chan, a writer who’s deaf and blind, and his wife, Soon-ho. He lost his sight and hearing after he had learned to speak, so he has the ability to talk to her. She talks to him, too, but does her actual communicating to him by pressing her fingers into his hands to sign her words, in a tactile version of Braille. It is largely through touch that Young-chan experiences the world, which makes him akin to a snail, hence the film’s title.

As much as Young-chan and Soon-ho love each other, the camera loves them even more. He’s lanky and slightly stooped. Because of a spinal condition, she’s extremely short. Next to each other, they look like a stork and a penguin. The incongruity is touching rather than comic. And as the documentary shows the extent of the bond between them, the incongruity simply becomes another element in that bond.

The film presents the couple in various settings: their apartment; visiting a friend in the hospital; walking along the beach; snow tubing; at a rehearsal, then a performance, of a play he’s written; swimming. In a memorable scene, Young-chan embraces a small tree. The tenderness he displays as he hugs the trunk and caresses the bark is a marvel. The scene also gives him a chance to show off his sense of humor. “I’m dating now,” he says to Soon-ho, as he holds the tree.

Some reviewers have found “Planet of Snail” to be intensely moving, even transcendent. Certainly, it has elements that are intensely moving, even transcendent. How can a viewer not respond when Young-chan says, “All deaf-blind people have the heart of an astronaut”? Both stylistically and emotionally the filmmaker, Yi Seungjun, shows laudable restraint. There’s no sense whatsoever of intimacy exploited. But that same restraint has a flattening and distancing effect. “Planet of Snail” doesn’t so much unfold as present itself for random inspection. Sometimes a seeming artlessness can be the highest form of art. Sometimes, as here, it’s the absence of artfulness.

With free health and food subsidies for Venezuela's poor, which make up the vast bulk of the population, it is inevitable the majority will vote for the popular socialist party led by Hugo Chavez. Even the United Nations data shows that poverty has been greatly alleviated under the government of Hugo Chavez.

Capriles is playing to the poor by claiming, in spite of his foreign backing and clear background and allegiances with the rich and their foreign paymasters, that he is even "further left" than Chavez and would do even more for the poor. He also claims that Venezuela should use its oil only for its own population and not for the mutually beneficial support of and solidarity with others.

Most of Latin America (South America) now is under popular socialist governments, thanks to the efforts of Hugo Chavez to shore up support for those candidates, as well as financing a powerful independent news media network, Telesur, which broadcasts in Spanish and has done more to ensure that the neo-colonial, imperialist plans of the U.S. regime fail in the region.

Around 200 or more international observers will monitor October 7 voting. Expect confirmation of another exemplary democratic process. It puts America's to shame and then some. US federal and many regional ones lack legitimacy. Big money controls them. Ordinary people have no say.

Venezuelans get the real thing. They're not about to accept pre-Chavez harshness. They want no part of corporatism at their expense.

The Venezuela Solidarity Campaign published a report saying a leaked internal right wing document revealed plans to roll back public services if elected.

It calls for reducing state funding. Health care, education, food subsidies, housing assistance, communal council projects, and other programs Venezuelans rely on will be affected.

The document titled "First Ideas for Economic Actions of the National Unity Government" calls for "concrete steps to decrease, in the medium and long term, the heavy load of goods and services" by slashing overall social spending.