feeling haunted

Every once in awhile there's a movie that haunts you in its simplicity, in its beauty, in its aching, stunning sadness. Sometimes it's the entire movie, sometimes it's just a scene, just a moment caught there forever in your head. For me, Tom Tykwer's Heaven was one of those kinds of movies. Jacob Estes' Mean Creek. Michael Polish's  Twin Falls Idaho. Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy.

I watched Last Night last night, while waiting for Evan to get home from a weekend road trip to Michigan and Ohio. It was supposed to be just another entry on my list of end-of-the-world / alien-invasion type movies that I've been watching in his absence, mostly ridiculous things like Carriers and Zombieland. I imagine it must have gotten on his nerves, coming home after being away for almost a week and finding me so distracted, in moments so far away.

That last scene, the circling, the oncoming light: it's proving difficult to get this one out of my head.

avatar & me

Went to see Avatar finally, Monday night, with trepidation. Not because I thought I wouldn't like it (though I did find its colonialist/epic-hero story both somewhat ridiculous and offensive), and not because it wasn't anything approximating original (see Disney's Pocahontas, McCaffery's Pern series, but especially LeGuin's The Word for World is Forest), and not because it wasn't beautiful and impressive and violent and moving and lovely, because it was all those things.

Mostly I was worried I would get a headache. A really bad headache. And nausea. And disorientation. And I did. It's the eye thing. I don't normally see in 3D, you see, and I guess those glasses can't make my eyes work right, either. Oh, I could tell when something was supposed to be floating out from the screen, and I could almost see it, but mostly those things just looked blurry. And about half way through the movie the splitting, shooting headache kicked in, and a little while later the nausea. I stuck it out (it was just compelling enough not to want to walk out of!), and poor Evan got me home afterward, made me peppermint tea, and put me to bed.

So I've learned my lesson, and I hope that though inevitably Avatar's success will lead to a 3D-ification of the film industry there will be hold-out 2D movies for us defectives to enjoy.

the dark side

Watched Taxi to the Dark Side this evening. Found myself crying a little (yes, Erica, again), frightened and saddened and frustrated and thinking too much about the banality of evil. Hannah Arendt, who first coined the phrase in 1963's Eichmann in Jerusalem, argued that what was so shocking about Eichmann was his very normality. He came across, to her at least, as being little more than a high-level bureaucrat who happened to have the task of streamlining the Jews' deportation to the death camps, and who performed the task, without independent thought, without any introspection on morality, exceedingly well.

There have been various studies over the years on the human capacity for cruelty, including Stanley Milgrom's shock experiments at Yale and Philip Zimbardo's infamous Prison Experiment at Stanford (re-enacted pop-culturally speaking in LeGuin's The Dispossessed and TV's Veronica Mars, but also apparently recently re-enacted for real). These two in particular, along with Arendt's theories, have in some ways come to dominate the field, at least in so far as almost everyone has heard of them. Two psychology professors writing for The Psychologist earlier this year argue that this dominance has actually been a detriment to the field by limiting further study.

But the banality of evil exists, whether it is manifested in powerful figures like Eichmann (or Cheney and Rumsfeld and their defense of torture) or in the individuals actually charged with carrying out relatively mundane acts (German civilians building the railroads that brought the Jews to the concentration camps; American soldiers charged with prepping a prisoner for questioning) that culminate in horrifying brutality, or, most likely, somewhere in the interactions between these two groups. The above-mentioned professors point out the quite obvious (but also sometimes ignored) notion that "brutality occurs when people identify strongly with groups that have a brutal ideology." Our leaders equivocate and dodge and set up legal justifications for brutality (Cheney minimizing waterboarding, the so-called 'ticking time-bomb scenario', it's only torture if your organs fail) and then blame a few 'bad apples' when scandals like Abu Ghraib go public.

No matter whether this evil comes down from the higher echelons of power or rises up from the masses, it remains a horrifying thing, this seeming ease with which people can sink into cruelty, can so easily fall into committing inhumane acts, and can be convinced that these acts are normal, even acceptable.*

But also this evening I've been listening to some Jose Gonzalez, who apparently has been around for awhile, but whom I only recently discovered: heartbeats, crosses, teardrop.

Which in turn got me to pulling out a couple old and much beloved Massive Attack songs: teardrop, risingson, unfinished sympathy, safe from harm.

Which made me feel a whole lot better.

*A couple other interesting articles on this stuff are here, here, here and here.

confession ii

I just watched Thirteen. I've loved Holly Hunter ever since dragging Catrin, Alice, & Erik to the Paramount Theater in Peekskill to see The Piano instead of hitting the Jefferson Valley Mall to see Ace Ventura Pet Detective back in high school. I've been intrigued with Evan Rachel Wood since seeing Down in the Valley a couple months ago. And I have a rather embarrassing confession to make. I've developed something of a crush on Jeremy Sisto of late. Oh the scruffiness.

celluloid city

It's kind of weird to live in a city that regularly gets destroyed, on film at least. At my subway station there's currently a huge poster advertising Cloverfield, soon to be playing in theaters near you, and involving, I gather, the decapitation of the Statue of Liberty.

I dragged poor Mom to see I Am Legend over Christmas and was delighted to see on the big screen the scene I'd stumbled across the filming of on 42nd Street months ago. There's something strangely thrilling about watching my beloved city get demolished again and again, from Independence Day to The Day After Tomorrow to I Am Legend to Cloverfield, only to rise again.

candy

I read Candy, by Luke Davies, back in my brief tenure working for not much more than minimum wage at the University of Pennsylvania Bookstore. We saw a lot of books come and go, we shelved and arranged and looked up and ordered from our little information kiosk in the middle of this vast store. We all kept a couple books tucked away, hidden, so that we could sneakily read them on our lunch breaks instead of buying them, despite our 35% employee discount. This was one of those.

It really wasn't very good.

I rented the movie this weekend anyway, partly because of Heath Ledger, partly because I have an inexplicable soft spot for junkie pop culture. I think I'm the only person in the world to have both read and watched Permanent Midnight. And like Permanent Midnight before it, Candy in film form caught something that the book was sorely lacking. I found it captivating, and endlessly human, in its predictable druggy way. And I often find myself amazed at the breadth of Ledger's performances (Brokeback Mountain, Monster's Ball, this) when for some reason I've never wanted to like him much. Abbie Cornish, in the title role, has a delicate, yet iron-laced, beauty that seems perfect for the character. And then there's this weird poem bit at the film's center, silly and yet somehow I found myself close to tears watching it. Turns out there's a kind of video of it in the DVD extras, and online.

But it's gotten late, at least for this gyrl, and time for bed.

recently watched films

I've been making poor Mako watch movies with me lately, my usual cheerful genre. Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, a quirky, upsetting, yet oddly beautiful tale of a disintegrating middle-class Brooklyn family in the 1980s, and Stanley Nelson's recent (and self-explanatory) documentary Jonestown: the Life and Death of People's Temple. Both highly recommended, though the latter was almost impossible to sit through, even given my fascination with the horror of Jonestown as a child.

movies i really, really want to see

macbeth, reimagined in Melbourne gangland

the golden compass, in anticipation of which I am currently rereading the whole trilogy

gowanus, brooklyn, the short film written by a Columbia grad that grew in to Half Nelson

wristcutters, a love story

more film stuff

Through the familial grapevine, I recently took a gander at Handcrank Films' website, and it seems they're working on some pretty cool stuff like the aforementioned Eagle or Ostrich documentary, as well as more commercial stuff which, I assume, is paying the bills. Here's just a few snippets of stock footage that Erik shot around Bellingham, beautiful stuff, makes me wonder if maybe I shouldn't move out west after all.

eagle or ostrich?

One of the best things about my mom marrying Paul almost five years ago was that Nate and I got a fantastic stepbrother out of the deal. Erik's been working on a short documentary called Eagle or Ostrich, about an American Muslim learning to fly. Erik did most of the filming and audio, and it was mostly filmed around (and above) his hometown of Bellingham, Washington. Check out the trailer, and keep an eye out for it's first showing on PBS, hopefully sometime this spring.

please note: for proper aspect ratio, in the youtube viewer, click the small box just to the right of the volume bar, or the film will look stretched.

late night indulgences

I have a small, yet embarrassing, confession to make. Chris went back to school yesterday and Nate was off gallavanting about town, and despite having every intention of going to bed early so I would be all bright eyed and bushy tailed for work this morning, I failed miserably. TNT, that marvelous channel for Law & Order reruns and not much else, was showing Titanic last night. And it's not like I hadn't seen it before, this ridiculous, aggravating, and yet in moments strangely moving tearjerker of a movie, yet here I found myself raptly watching that great old ship go down until the wee hours of the morning. And paying the price today at work, let me tell you. It doesn't quite translate to the small screen-- though the acting may be a bit less whiny within the smaller structure of television, all those amazing rushing gushing torrential water scenes lose a lot of their power as well, of course. Small comfort, but at least there was no one around this time to berate me for giving away the end by mentioning that it's hard to watch a film in which you know many of the people are doomed before that movie ship even sets sail. I know it's been almost a century since she hit that iceberg and went down so hard, but still, had we so little sense of our collective history that at least some amongst us had forgotten her until Kate & Leonardo acted out their wee American drama of little-rich-girl-meets-down-and-out-artist on the ship of a thousand dreams?

A dear friend of mine was, many years ago, somewhat obsessed with the Titanic, to the point of joining a Titanic fan club of sorts, I can't remember exactly what it was. I think I teased her quite a bit about this at times, not quite getting her fascination. But there was a poem that she quoted, written by a man whose name I have forgotten, about man's essential faith in his own inventions, and the eternal and ongoing collapse of this faith. This friend of mine had a baby boy last week, an adorable, round little thing. I'm not sure when I will get to meet this child, being so far south in North Carolina that to me, sadly, he seems almost in another world. But I hope that this this boy child inherits his mother's childhood love of majesty and beauty and grace, her ability to get lost in a story who's ending is tragically already known, and yet question in disbelief and rage the inevitablity of that ending, and her compassion for those lost.

girl with a pearl earring

Chris's parents, a few years ago, gave me a copy of Girl With a Pearl Earring. I, surrounded by my shelves and boxes and piles of books, never quite got around to reading it. But the other night we watched the film version of this book finally, and it was strange. It was like watching a moving breathing re-enactment of a still life, and not a movie in the traditional sense, with characters and plot developments or twists. The details were taken straight out of Vermeer's masterpieces, the brocade fabric and the way the light slants down through the windows and washes over a table, across a black and white tiled floor. Every scene is staged as if it could have been a Vermeer painting, even though really he only left behind about 35 paintings by the time he died. And the Girl is in almost every scene, a nearly silent observer, the still center of a still movie, moving between the saturated colors of helping her master with his paints and the billowy empty whitness of hanging the laundry to dry in the house's courtyard.

But there is little emotion in the movie, little sense of gravity to keep it from flying off into a beautiful and amazing and hollow embodiment of a painting. Nothing much happens, and the Girl's blank stare and open mouth, the awe and fear reflected in her huge wide eyes, can't carry the film forever. In the end, I felt both moved by and disappointed in the emptiness at the core of the movie. So I decided I'd read the book, and am now almost done with it. The book provides the Girl's inner world, the thoughts that fill in those long spaces between her words. Yet it cannot possibly capture in words the simple sensuality of grinding down lapis lazuli or burned and blackened ivory tusks into a powder and mixing it with linseed oil to create paint.

In the end, while neither the book nor the movie stands entirely on its own, they complement and complete each other in a lovely balance of lush, saturated visual images and distilled thoughts and speech.