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Argentina has been in the news lately for the bizarre circumstances surrounding the death of a special prosecutor. So perhaps it makes sense that the country's Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film is called Relatos salvajes, Spanish for Wild Tales. The film is an anthology — a collection of six separate and unrelated stories — every one of which lives up to that title.

The opening relato would make a great Twilight Zone episode. Passengers on a commercial airline flight start chatting in mid-voyage and realize they all — everyone on the plane — know a fellow named Gabriel Pasternak. Their memories are not fond ones. His third grade teacher remembers telling him he was being held back. There's a music critic who panned his work, a boss who let him go, and a model who cheated on him. And the more they share their stories, the more nervous everyone gets. With good reason as it turns out.

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Each story in Wild Tales takes apart some function of Argentine society — like corruption or social privilege. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Each story in Wild Tales takes apart some function of Argentine society — like corruption or social privilege.

Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

It's a nifty start for a film that will repeatedly take a dark comic idea and run with it until it turns apocalyptic. There's a story about a towing company for instance, that chooses the wrong guy to torment over parking violations. Turns out he's a demolitions expert.

Another tale looks at two restaurant employees and the cataclysm that unfolds when they decide to hold a gangster in their diner accountable for his crimes.

The stories aren't related to each other, except that each of them expresses exasperation verging on outrage at some aspect of Argentine society. The towing company story is all about getting back at bureaucracies. The airline one has fun at the expense of psychiatry. Others deal with corruption and social privilege.

Writer/director Damin Szifrn crams each one with gallows humor, and films each in a different mood and shooting style. Unlike most American comedies, which tend to be just bright, each of these stories has its own elegant look. Even a gloriously slapsticky road-rage battle that starts out feeling like a live-action Road Runner cartoon by the end becomes downright Tarantino-esque.

Szifrn caps his comic anthology with a lushly imagined bridezilla finale that is weird, sexy, and violent enough to make you think of the wild tales of director Pedro Almodvar, which makes sense, since Almodvar is listed as one of the film's producers.

But he's only one of many influences for a collection of Wild Tales that's clever, gorgeously shot, and quite a romp.

President Obama gave a shout-out to the beauty of the "backwaters of Kerala" when he visited India last month.

How Did Obama Play In India? We Ask 4 Villagers To Weigh In Jan. 27, 2015

So our intrepid village correspondent in India, Wilbur Sargunaraj, went to make a video about it. Off he went to the southwestern state whose canals, ocean beaches, mountains and abundant wildlife have put it in the top ten paradises of the world according to National Geographic Traveler.

Sargunaraj had been to Kerala once before, about 20 years ago, visiting an uncle who lived in a banana plantation. This time he was as a tourist, sampling the coast and backwaters. "I've heard all my life it's so beautiful," he reports. "It really is gorgeous."

If you get tired of exquisite natural beauty, there are other ways to spend the time. Kerala is known for its massages and elephant rides. Sargunaraj urges tourists who are interested in the latter to be on their best behavior: "Elephants have such a tremendous memory, so my mother would tell me always be kind to an elephant, treat the elephant with deepest respect."

And then there are the bananas. He saw "red bananas, small bananas, tiny bananas." One vendor was hawking "sugar-free bananas." Sargunaraj reports that the yellow-skinned, very skinny banana (shaped "almost like a cucumber") was not as sweet as a typical banana but still "sweet to my taste."

"I think it's a gimmick," he says, catering to sugar-fearing tourists.

But Kerala is in fact a healthy state. The average life expectancy there is 74 years, making it No. 1 in India. So maybe those bananas do have some secret powers?

What's more, Kerala is a very well-educated state. In 1991, India's National Literacy Mission honored it as the only "state with total literacy." The actual rate is in the 90th percentile, comparable to that of the U.S. and far higher than the rest of India, where the literacy rate is around 65 percent. A Christian Science Monitor article credited a refusal to cut the education budget for the high literacy rate: "The Queen of Trivandrum issued a royal decree in 1817 that said, 'The state should defray the entire cost of the education of its people in order that there might be no backwardness in the spread of enlightenment." She hoped education would make her people "better subjects and public servants.' "

Kerala also stands out for its "sex ratio" — reportedly 1,084 women for every 1,000 men. In other parts of India men outnumber women because of the practice of "gendercide" — killing unwanted baby girls.

"I would say they value women in Kerala," Sargunaraj says. "That's not to say [the state is] devoid of any problems. You do hear about rape, domestic violence and abuse cases all around India — and it's a shame that we are treating our women like this!"

But to his mind, Kerala is different in the way women take a full part in society. "I saw so many women driving the boats in the canal. I would love to see more women thrive in male-dominant jobs in rural Tamil Nadu." That's his home state, which borders Kerala on the west.

If you're inspired to check out Kerala for yourself, Sargunaraj's video gets you off to a good start by teaching a few words from the local Malayalam language. Perhaps the most essential phrase: "Kurachu kurachu Malayalam" — roughly translated as "I speak little, little Malayalam."

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At heart, mainstream superhero comics are about adolescent wish-fulfillment, "a power fantasy for people who feel powerless," as Astro City author Kurt Busiek once put it. Heroes like the ones in Busiek's comics overcome obstacles and break down barriers. They revel in great power and deal with great responsibility. They fight villains as colorful and outsized as themselves. And they represent a form of escapism from the mundane world.

But as American comics mature and diversify their audience, some of them are taking different tacks on the wish-fulfillment concept, exploring exactly how complicated it can be when people get what they think they want. These books are anti-fantasies: Stories in otherwise-realistic settings where gaining a supernatural ability doesn't solve problems so much as provoke crisis, self-contemplation, and regret.

Where a superhero might punch through a wall, these characters spend more time on learning what the wall represents, why it's there, and why smashing it might be unsafe, unwise, or just not helpful. And while there's an element of escapism in the way these books use their supernatural elements to whip up exciting drama, it's entirely for the readers' benefit. The characters have to take care of themselves.

The Sculptor

by Scott McCloud

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Hardcover, 496 pages, First Second, $29.99, published February 3 2015 | purchase

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Scott McCloud's absorbing comics comeback The Sculptor stars an ambitious young artist named David Smith who makes a deal with Death and gains the power to sculpt any substance with his hands and mind. Once he has the power to create art instantly and easily, with any material he can find, he assumes fame, success, and recognition of his genius will follow. But even a magical ability can't make an artistic success out of someone who doesn't have the right vision, luck, art-world connections, or clarity of desire.

And David's new power is more in his hands than in his mind. It can get him past the technical effort of sculpting in granite, but not past his own indecision and doubt. Knowing he wants to make something that will outlive him isn't the same as knowing what to make, or how to get it recognized. There's much more to The Sculptor, in terms of its melancholy approach to the real world, to romance, depression, friendship, city life, and other things; David's powers are only a small part of the story. But it's significant that instead of helping him fulfill his dreams, they highlight his flaws, and suggest uncomfortable truths about creativity and the art industry.

Seconds

by Bryan Lee O'Malley

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Hardcover, 321 pages, Random House Inc, $25, published July 15 2014 | purchase

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Seconds, from Scott Pilgrim writer-artist Bryan Lee O'Malley, is a terrific book about the necessary sacrifices of making choices. Successful young chef Katie Clay gave up on a crucial relationship to focus on her work, but when she finds a magical route to rewrite the past, she complicates her life immensely by trying to fix all her mistakes, starting with that relationship and then continuing into other factors. Obsessed with changing the past again and again, looking for a perfect version of the present, she warps her life until it's unrecognizable, and dangerously close to unrecoverable.

Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen

by Dylan Horrocks

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Hardcover, 221 pages, W W Norton & Co Inc, $29.99, published January 18 2015 | purchase

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In Dylan Horrocks' Sam Zabel And The Magic Pen, the eponymous Sam is a comics author with writer's block and a vague fantasy about escaping to an untouched utopia. And yet when a magic pen lets him jump inside comic books, he takes his depression and dissatisfaction with him. This is a complicated, rich story about confronting the sometimes-lurid or nakedly obvious wish-fulfillment aspects of comic books, but it's also about the ways Sam's distress with the world can't be satisfied by other people's ideas of paradise. Unlike the companions he meets along the way, he has a hard time accepting the magic or enjoying his experiences, because he knows too much about the prurient emotions underneath the comics he's exploring. He can't be happy until he gets back to creating his own books, designed to his own tastes.

The funny thing is that all these books get to have it both ways. They examine common adolescent fantasies with adult regret and melancholy, but they also mine them for thrills. David in The Sculptor melds entire buildings to his will, with the police in hot pursuit. Katie in Seconds fights off a ghostly force trying to reclaim her stolen powers. Sam Zabel hops through worlds full of sexually available sirens and worshipful followers. Deconstructing these daydreams and looking for the downsides doesn't get in the way of making them exciting. It just makes them smarter and more sophisticated.

Ultimately, the anti-fantasies aren't scolding readers for daydreaming about power. Their authors understand the appeal of the exceptional ability and the secret identity. But they are suggesting that it's worth thinking about why these fantasies exist, why they represent universal longings, and why having those longings fulfilled might not be simple and satisfying. These stories are still about escapism. They're also about better understanding what we're all trying to escape, and why even in our wildest dreams, that still might be harder than it looks.

Tasha Robinson is a senior editor at The Dissolve.

With the bailout package that has kept Greece's economy afloat set to expire in just over a week, the country has formally asked Eurozone members for a six-month extension. Finance ministers will hold an emergency meeting Friday to consider the proposal.

Since the start of the recent debt crisis, Greece has received hundreds of billions of dollars in relief packages. That money has been accompanied by demands from Germany and other nations that Greece adopt austerity measures and hit budget targets — a situation that has sparked resentment and suspicion in Greece.

From Athens, John Psaropoulos reports for our Newscast unit:

"A similar Greek request on Monday divided the Eurogroup, because Greece's new left-wing government insists on receiving the money without austerity terms. It says the next six months will be used to renegotiate the spending cuts and reforms Greece's European partners have ordered it to make.

"But Greece needs to convince them to finance that truce, because although it now has a balanced budget, it cannot afford the $25 billion in debt repayments that it faces this year."

The current agreement was meant to end in December, but it was extended to Feb. 28. Greece's hopes for reaching a compromise with Eurozone members are seen as hinging on promises to reform its economy — and submit to outside inspections.

The promises also include a pledge to fight corruption and tax evasion, says Reuters, which reports seeing a document in which "Greece pledged to meet its financial obligations to all creditors, recognize the existing EU/IMF program as the legally binding framework and refrain from unilateral action that would undermine the fiscal targets."

Greece's recession is nearly as deep as America’s Great Depression was—and more prolonged http://t.co/OtwNR4CFcN pic.twitter.com/2yfKPGrJqm

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) February 18, 2015

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