Super 8

I hadn't heard about Spielberg's latest until a student started insisting that I had to see this movie. Based on this recommendation alone, I found it, and settled down to watch it with a few loved ones. Well it had me from the first strains of ELO, and then when The Knack started up, and then The Cars, and then they were driving that 2-door Buick Skylark - which reminded me of my friend's Chevy Malibu - I was completely transported back to my adolescence, and the friends and innocence of that time just before you're not innocent anymore - those moments when you're just becoming aware of one another as having motives beyond fun and building stuff and then tearing it down again. My friends and I didn't make movies (like the kids in the movie), but we tore banana-seat bikes apart and made them into proto-bmx things to ride around town on, late into the nights. We made model cars and trains and raced things, and watched Star Wars and Indiana Jones and Jaws and loved to shoot things and light them on fire. And we were just starting to think that girls might be interesting as friends of a different kind.

So when the train wrecks gloriously, stupendously, right in front of them when they're doing what they most want to do, and there's a girl there too, it's just rapturous! It's that small apocalypse that you escape to tell about - and it gets better in the telling. Except, in Super 8, it gets better and then worse too in the telling. Unaccountably, ominously, foreshadowingly, Cloverfieldishly worse. J.J. Abrams produces this movie, as he did Star Trek, and Cloverfield. The monster here might as well have hopped frames from Cloverfield to the train car from which it escapes here. 

Which bring me to this thing that successful directors do - they re-iterate (some call it homage) the work of other auteurs, and their own work as well. Auteurs do this sort of thing - you can see an Atwood or a McCarthy novel coming from a mile away - and it's mostly okay. I appreciate it that I can buy a Dylan album, and settle into the comfortable "re-runishness" of it. Shakespeare constantly pirated his own best lines. I find comfort in knowing what Ian McEwan will supply in a novel. The good ones however, like Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds, do more than just revisit the old riffs, they make something new, something fresh, something magnificently unexpected.    

I liked ET and I as soon as the kids in this movie start riding their bikes across open fields, the camera staying low to expand the horizon that overlooks a sleepy midwestern town, I started to expect that this was what Spielberg was re-serving. Which was fine. I love the "sharp fresh kids versus the blunt jaded adults" trope. It's a reminder to stay young and to act less (hopefully a lot less) like the narrow-scoped dopes that run the air force, the police force, or the school (at least they're dopes in the movies). There is a modicum of freshness here. The young male hero's dad isn't quite the dope we might expect. Neither is the biology teacher that seems responsible for initiating the whole shebang. Otherwise though, the adults deliver their stupid, unaware, uninteresting lines, and the kids wisely dodge them.

No, Spielberg's got nothing new to offer here: not in the relationships between the kids, nor between the kids and the adults, nor between the civilians and army guys. Further, he's got nothing new to offer to the alien-intelligence meets human-xenophia situation either. Not since District 9 (well okay, Cloverfield wasn't bad either) has anyone really tried hard to re-fresh this plot. Spielberg and Abrams, for all the money, technology, and ingenuity (got writers anyone?) at their disposal could do nothing more imaginative than an upscale, more spectacular, ET phone home. 

Where are the good sci-fi writers when this kind of film gets proposed? What could LeGuin do with these resources? I know I know, Spielberg and Hollywood don't really want to make us fundamentally uncomfortable at the end of a show that features adorably innocent, truth-seeking teens. Good point. So I'll just have to accept that after all that cash, and all those technical resources were thrown at the screen, what stuck were the first twenty minutes or so with its shazamic late 70s rock, its youthful imagination, its blossoming love, and its orgasmic train wreck. After that  this train gets back on that pretty narrow successful train-track feel-good formula. It mails it in. It's a nice to get a care-package now and then, but these cookies are stale.

Ride report(s)

It's worth noting that I rode from Altona to St. Joseph and then home yesterday (about 29 ks). It was about -10'C and the wind was from the North. I rode gravel and dirt roads, and this reminds me of my absolute love for my cross bike. There are so many more options for rides.

Today

in:      -25'C wind 10ks N

out:   -14'C wind 10ks N

The Taste of Tea

You don't need plot to tell a story. Well, not this sort of story. Strictly speaking, this film unfurls the lives of one family of six, and if you'd isolate each character - for each of them get full treatment - you'd see six plots interwoven into the over-arching action of "loving family." In a nutshell, perhaps better, in a teacup, or maybe even in the tea leaves, here are the six plots.

A young girl struggles to accept, and let go of, the larger than life-sized alter-ego; she does it by finally completing a full flip on a horizontal bar.

A teenage boy learns to accept himself and fall in love, through a simple game-play ritual forced on him by his father; the girl of his affection plays the game too in an after-school club, and he's good at the game.

A grown son returns home and meets his high school love; he leaves once again and finds satisfaction in his work.

A father helps others through his hypnotism; he admits to a patient that his joy device was a telephone.

A mother finds that, with hard work, she can draw anime and be a mom; she is discovered, screens a short film, and re-defines herself.

A grandfather conducts it all, observing, supporting, and entertaining them all; after he finishes a gift for each of them, he passes away.

This film is long on time, big on imagination, delightful in sound, serene in colour (for the most part), and hilarious as often as it is serious. Quirky, yes. Rewarding, absolutely.

Today was our first snow-day of the school year. Enough snowfall and wind to stop the buses. Snow-days are so nice. Need we say more?

endings ... hmmm

We watched A Single Man tonight. It's a poignant love story, and a meditation on life, and what makes it worth living. Whether you end up drawing the same conclusions as the film is beside the point. The insights offered stand regardless of the heavy-handed work at the end of this one.

Colin Firth plays George Falconer, an English English professor living in Los Angeles since WW2. He's forlorn over the death of his lover of sixteen years. We catch him at the beginning of, as he puts it, "a very big day." He intends to commit suicide. As we observe his meticulous preparations (he sets out his funeral suit, with the instruction to tie the tie in a full Windsor knot) we also see that his life is rich with people and possibilities that he seems unwilling to recognize. He lives in this wonderful house, he has great style, and his students, at least one of them, seem to care about him.

In fact, when that one student takes the initiative, it breaks him out of his woe and self-pity. He looks out at the orange moon, coloured by the smog of the city, and is reminded, visually, of an earlier character's comment that even ugly circumstances can bring about beautiful results. So he sees the possibilities again, puts away the gun, burns the notes, and gets ready to continue his life.

Why then (Spoiler alert! (This is for you, Lois!) I feel I can't complete this comment on the film without referring to the ending ) must we still kill him off with a heart attack? It's an old, sentimentalist, and hacked device intended to approach "tragedy" but I find it weak and cheap. In fact it's a kind (the worst kind) of Christian ending: He's had his Damascus Road experience, he can see clearly now, so it's time to take him home to his maker, or in this case, to his dead lover (who appears in order to provide the bookend to the opening scene). In this situation, the more brave, less sentimental way to confront this is to allow the man to keep on struggling. We know that the clarity of his revelation will be tested. We know that he'll run out of gas again and lay out the suit, with the notes. We know that just because you stave off that mortal impulse, that it will return.

Everything in this film is well-set, until the ending yanks the table-cloth. To provide this escape hatch via a massive, unforeseen heart attack constitutes a shirking of the challenge of any work of serious fiction to examine and imagine anew the truth of what it is to live and love and yet to know that the brightness of the present moment will fade into the ugliness and smog of the next.

A good chaser/companion to this film would be the Coen brothers A Serious Man. And then of course, The Big Lebowski, if not just to reset the lane.

"9" and "Shutter Island"

Take about a thousand B-movie tropes and effects and have them played by good actors, directed by a good director, and you get an enjoyable, though sometimes baffling (for the wrong reasons: that is, Is Martin Scorsese really going to take the plots of "A Beautiful Mind" and "Fight Club" and turn them into a thriller, without the biography and the grit? Yes. Yes, he is.). Still I could deal with Shutter Island. Even enjoy it.

9? Well, like Avatar, the writer and director believes that you don't need a new story (see The Matrix, Toy Story, Children of Men, V for Vendetta, etc.), you don't even need new visuals (see Return of the Jedi, The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, etc.), all you need is competent execution of the visuals, using CGI, and you'll make a movie. And you know what, he's right. It is a movie. But the best thing about it, besides the visuals, is that it's only 70 minutes long.

The possibility of redemption

Started the day at 6 AM. Margruite and Harry were heading out to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, near Tolstoi, at 6:30 AM, so saw a chance for a nice one way morning ride - 80 ks. Rode non-stop in 2 hours and 38 minutes (avg - 30.58 kph) (There was basically no wind.). 

Yesterday we watched Revanche, (Austrian) a kind of crime thriller, although it's as much drama as anything. The main character, Alex, an Austrian ex-con works at a brothel. He's in love with a Russian immigrant, Tamara,  who's working as whore to pay off an illegal immigration debt. He's also struggling with his relationship with an aging father who still needs his help on the family farm. Alex and Tamara are indeed in love and, as her situation in the brothel deteriorates, he devises a plan to rob the bank in his own small town. After he steals a car, and she runs away from the brothel, they set off to rob the bank and to start a better life. Things derail suddenly, however, due to his own errors, and Alex is left with guilt, regret, and a deep desire for revenge.

I will do no more to spoil this show for you, because I recommend it highly! You will not find this kind of gutsy writing in Hollywood. With minimal violence, the tension stays high. Every conversation becomes fully loaded, and the characters all say what needs to be said in order to drive things along. The tension arises from the possibility of violence, and from the stark confrontations of people in high stakes conversations. And, the wonderfully enlightened (or just more realistic? less Hollywood?) revelation becomes that, although people, in extremity, threaten to do rash and dangerous things, when confronted by the humanity and suffering of their fellow travellers, can and will step away from this brinkmanship. This is a thriller, with the possibility of redemption.

Tom Waits? Faustus? Jephthah?

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus retells Faustus with a twist of Jephthah (Judges 11:29-40). The story is biblical, or epic, in proportion. The old magician (the father? God?) has made a deal with the devil (Tom Waits!) for eternal life. For this (which becomes a horror rather than a blessing) he must give his daughter, at the age of 16, over to the devil. Why he makes this selfish wager, that is what makes him the kind of person that will make such bonehead deal, is left unplumbed. We do find out that he believes (naively of course) that over time he will find a way to undo the deal and keep his daughter safe. To quote another great screenstar: "What a maroon!"

Well you can guess how it plays out. And you'd be right. It's an entertaining enough movie. Tom Waits is worth seeing, but the film is locked into its own devices. Having chosen the back story, Gilliam can't find a way to us in to care about it. Even as Parnassus offers similar deals to other souls, in an attempt to appease the devil, and we are presented with a listing of the ills of humanity, they are too societal. Certainly we have a problem with stuff, with ambition, with greed, etc, but why do I  have this problem? Why do you? And since the movie's not about me or you, well then it might as well plumb the characters it presents. But this film doesn't. Everyone does what the book says they should do, in flat and predictable ways. The film might have been interesting if we'd been give some sense of why Parnassus (other than blind love) wishes for eternal life when given the consequence of losing his daughter's soul? Why doesn't Valentina run off with Anton, even though she says she'd like to? Why does Tony use a charity as a front to launder gang money? Instead these are simply trotted out as back story, to explain a character's actions, rather than offering an opportunity to illuminate the character him/herself.

The answer to all this might be that when you have money to spend on effects, you will spend that money on them, rather than on writing, which means the plot (and it'll have to be a simple one) rules (even if you are Terry Gilliam). This is how you make a Hollywood movie. Plot, plot, plot. Celebrity, celebrity, celebrity (Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law). Effects, effects, effects. What usually makes a Terry Gilliam movie interesting is the way he uses effects to create a setting that makes the plot feel new. Then he engages memorable characters in real-life dilemmas, in these other-worldly settings. His great movies - 12 Monkeys, Brazil, The Fisher King - do this in most excellent ways. Since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas however, Gilliam seems to have lost (or forgotten, or ignored) that a compelling character is necessary in any sort of narrative project. If people are supposed to care, and not simply be bamboozled a la Avatar they need to be anxious for the people they watch. As long as we fall in and out of love and getting beaten in a bike race, we will be compelled by the drama of watching someone in these sorts of common dilemmas. Even the Bond and Bourne series understand this.

Fear the reaper

If you've seen the movie version of Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (you should read the book) and if you pay attention to style, you'll be reminded of "Natural Born Killers." Unlike the film version of Fear and Loathing (an adaptation that provides a visual montage of some scenes from the book, but does not provide you with the cut and direction of the book), Natural Born Killers stays focussed on the message. The film is a cogent, frenetic, violent, and loving anti-fantasia of what America is, what it exports, and what it could become.

(To be clear, I had not, until yesterday night (this morning) seen this movie (originally out in 1994 - it's 16 years old!) and a Bill Murray interview I was reading mentioned his cameo in Zombieland and Woody Harrelson and Natural Born Killers and I thought, I guess I should watch that movie ... so yesterday I did.)

After killing her abusive father, and her trembling mother along with him, Mickey rescues Mallory from the stereotypically way over-the-top (Married with Children?) lower-middle class family nightmare. This release sets them off on their journey together. They are both father and mother-less, and without this anchor, they fall prey to despair and revenge. In short, Mickey and Mallory Knox rampage across the countryside killing. They are in love with each other. And they kill. They kill for a variety of reasons. Some people, they say really don't deserve to live. Some people are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes they kill with a shrug of self-preservation. For the most part they kill because they aren't convinced that living or length of life is all that consequential. That is, we all will die, so what's the point of worrying about when?

Eventually, as is the way in America, they get caught, incarcerated, interrogated, packaged, commodified, and celebritized. This is one of the central themes: America's main industry is to package things, anything, for sale. American is one giant retail chain. A commodity-seller with sights on getting rich on someone else's gullibility (or necessity, whatever suits). Into this morass Mickey and Mallory inject some moral clarity with the business end of a shotgun, or handgun, or rifle, and so on.

Visually and aurally this film is wonderfully difficult to take in. The camera fidgets and squirms. The backdrop is as often a montage of history panels and dream sequences as it is "reality". Which illustrates the point: we all live and act in the context of our families and our society. We cannot escape what they say about us, and what we say about them.

In The Sibling Society poet Robert Bly observes that Western society is a culture of adolescents. Parents are absent, either physically, or emotionally, from the lives of their children. Even when parents are physically present, they are as ill-disciplined pleasure seekers as their children. So we are a culture of siblings, with no adults around to run the show. This seems also to be the premise of Natural Born Killers. Combine a lack of loving supervision, with a heaping measure of a culture born of, and raised on, violence, and you just might get a disaffected, nearly incapacitated, person. If this doesn't result in Columbine, it might spawn Gordon Gecko (reincarnated as Lehman Brothers, et. al), or the guy asking for spare change in front of the MTS Centre. The ultimate result of this absence is the individual's alienation from community, and the loss of the fellowship that comes from good work (this point needs developing, a la Wendell Berry, but I've no time right now).

This film is unflinching in its observations. Brace yourselves if you haven't seen it.

Death does not arrive to sit in your easy chair

Yesterday we watched Departures, the winner of last year's Oscar for best foreign language film. Although it's a better show than a lot of the movies that come up for Oscar consideration, it was no masterpiece.

Departures makes no pretension to be anything bigger than a well-mannered rom-com, except that the main character prepares dead bodies for the casket - he encoffins them. Never mind that we meet him as his personal dream to play cello in a great orchestra evaporates, and that his subsequent freeing of himself from this dream is complicated by his accidental (and somewhat comical) falling into this new occupation, we don't really get to understand, or care deeply for him. We more closely connect with his new boss, the aging encoffiner who also got into this work via the back door, and now lives a pleasant, but lonely life. Here we have a man of will, and who cares little for what others think of his work, except that they think that he does it well. Here we have a man who has insight into people, and though he manages his emotions stoically, he negotiates overwrought situations with a calm sensitivity that causes his clients to respect and thank him deeply. He is that person who you underestimate, even scorn, until you watch him work. Then you wonder why you'd been so blind to his skill. But he's not the centre of the story. Nor is his relationship with his young conscript really at the heart of it, though it could, and should, be.

The story is about the loss of the father. And it is about the relationship between father and son, but this theme only skips in and out of the storyline. We are distracted by the main character's trouble with his own marriage, and with his self-esteem, and with the odd encoffining situations these two get into. In this it reminded me of Sunshine Cleaners (also a movie about cleaning up after death). That's not a bad thing, but Departures has more on the brain than Sunshine Cleaners. It just can't seem to focus on it.

At the end of the movie, when the main character finally confronts the father that deserted him, what should be the most affecting scene, is more of a curiosity. We've never met the father so we don't know how to care about him, or hate him. The main character's anger about his father is too quickly overcome and, frankly, things just all come together too easily. It's a nice movie. Compared to most, I'd even say it's a good one. But the best foreign language film? There are a lot of foreign films out there. And a lot of them are better than this one.

Next up: Natural Born Killers (a little contrast anyone?)

Short ride today: 32 ks (to the 75 and back) Avg 30.10 kph Wind NW 30+ ks

23rd Anniversary

We've made it an irregular tradition on this day to mark it with some physical exertion. (I will make no jokes along this line.) Last year we embarked on a reasonable, exploratory paddle along the Buffalo Creek. This year we decided a bike ride was in order, despite the 30'C day (with a humidex of 40'C). 

We loaded the bikes into the truck and headed off for Pembina Valley Provincial Park. While I've ridden a bit of offroad, Margruite ... not so much. These trails are quite challenging, and a lot of fun, but our lack of practice, and the significant heat, bagged us after about an hour and a half. Margruite endoed once, but other than the heat and the difficulty of the trails, it was a great ride. So great that we forgot that we'd taken our camera along to document it. 

We remembered the camera, after we were done ... quite done. These pictures of the aftermath tell the tale. 

After supper we watched Notes on a Scandal with Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, and Bill Nighy - three great actors. But the story! Yikes what a crazy idea. Hopefully not a harbinger of anything to come! 

I was a bit surprised at the positiveness of the reviews. I mean they were really positive. Certainly the performances are great, but the storyline felt a bit too forced and dependent on coincidence. Of course it's fiction (based on a novel by Zoe Heller), so coincidence and contrivance are the name of the game, but my taste is that I'd like the set up to work toward something, I don't know, meaningful. This show gives you suspense, depravity, obsession, acrimony, crazy-time-ness, without blood or skin. So it must be trading on meaning right!? That's what I'm looking for anyway, if the eye-candy isn't, you know "popping out" at you. What do we end up with? The crazy old woman takes a hit, but she's not out. The crazy old woman comes around for another swing. One reviewer called it a "fresh script". If "off the high branches" is fresh, well then I guess it's right off the tree. But having tasted of it, this fruit is not one I'll be tempted to pick again. 

     

The dealio

After a hard day of marking provincial exams, what could be a better eugoogaly for the day than to sit down to watch Zoolander? This is a rhetorical question. If you've seen Zoolander, you'll just nod and wonder how I can be expected to teach children to learn how to read if they can't even fit inside the building? Or you'll just want to tell me what a bad eugoogoolizer I am. Whatever?! You can save what you want for me, I'm not taking any of it. I am sphereically this close to being able to derelicte those babies off for another year! Yeah man! That's the dealio! That's the freak fest around here, yo.


Ride in       Temp 10'C Wind NE 10 ks
Ride home Temp 13'C Wind E 15 ks

What blinds you?

The Russian movie 12, patterned after the American movie, 12 Angry Men, tells the story of 12 jurors who must decide the fate of a Chechen boy accused of stabbing and murdering his Russian stepfather. Following the formula of the brave one, prepared to stand up against the many, the jurors turn, one by one, from what was to be an easy verdict of guilty, to a solemn not guilty.

As each of the men grapples with his vision of himself and his people, they reveal and discover their blindnesses. Writer and director Nikita Mikhalkov seems to say that we can only see others clearly, when we see ourselves. I cannot comment on the complexities and prejudices of the relationship between Chechnya and Russia, but his conclusion about our blindness is universal. Just as the men testify of their personal doubts to one another, they uncover the fissures in the testimonies and the evidence. They bear witness to the truth of the matter, only because they are prepared to speak their own truth, not the conventions and bigotry of their upbringing. Yet, while they are able to confront the narrowness of the past, they also become open to the wideness of human experience as they share these points of view with the others.

This is also a story of a discipleship to truth. The 12, saved from and by their stubbornness, sift the facts as they are presented and find the way. But personal enlightenment, albeit with the help of others, is not enough. The final juror to convert, the chair, reminds them of the consequences of their mercy. The accused will be set free, but to what? A life on the streets? The chair suggests that they may be right to determine him innocent, but they cannot, with clear conscience, do that without understanding the fate of the boy because of it.

The film challenges us to do the right thing, but it reminds us that there is a cost. The final convert, the chair, takes the boy into his care after the acquittal. As if to emphasize that moral clarity should not be easy, he makes it clear that he, a former secret service agent, and the boy will hunt down those who killed the step-father and framed the boy. From the mercy and will to see, spawns a continued determination to vengeance.

The movie is painfully male. Despite the compassion and vulnerability of the jurors for one another, and for the boy, they laugh, joke, harass, mock, and tussle, like boys. This story, like Alexandra (reviewed here April 17), is just as much about the absence of the female. Whereas in Alexandra the grandmother plays a central role, though she is a stranger in a landscape of war, there is virtually no female presence in 12. The judge is female, but even as a stern overseer, she is not significant in impact or in presence. One of the last frames of the movie is of the accused's mother, who has been murdered, along with her husband, by her fellow Chechens who do not take well to her husband's unwillingness to fight, approaching the camera. She walks confident and she gazes directly at us. Then the screen darkens and a final quote scrolls, ending with words that echo one of the jurors earlier, "I'm blind."

Though surely we are to associate the gentle eyes of the mother with the mercy of the jury, we are also left with the merciless knowledge that the violence of the boy's life will continue, as the one who freed him will help him exact revenge. In some moral universe that may be the right thing to do, but it's a cycle that leaves us all blind.      

Ride in            Temp 12'C  Wind SE gentle
Ride home       Temp 14'C  Wind calm, rain