Two articles here and here about Walmart and the materialistic orgy that was this past weekend. Both revealing, but from different angles. Enjoy
So here's a review I wrote of Master and Commander. I wanted to publish it in the Bagpipe, but for reasons of space constraint, that didn't work out. I wanted to put it in Pulse, but Pulse has a review policy that excludes my review. So here's the text.
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a crew to make a man. A trite, but true notion, it puts Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World in the right context. While most adventure movies never move beyond the events of the story itself, Master and Commander goes further. As a film, it’s not just any old adventure movie; it is an adventure movie that manages to say a lot about who we are today in a depiction of the distant past.
All classic adventure movies have basically the same plot. The hero is caught in a sticky situation. He (and occasionally she) has to sink or swim. And swim he does. Through daring escapades, and tight scrapes, our adventure hero, saves himself, maybe the world, and definitely gets a girl.
As a basic narrative frameworks go, the adventure isn’t very helpful? These movies tell us that the world is saved by the greatness of an individual. At the heart of an adventure movie is a notion about a hero. Namely, that the hero is someone, who whether he knows it or not, has the capability within himself to conquer whatever life has in store. There is no mountain too great, no desert too dry, and no villain too dastardly, to thwart the hero’s inner gift to land upright on his own two feet.
While watching such a hero can be immensely satisfying, it isn’t a very good depiction of real life. No one is as resourceful as Macgyver, no one as tenacious as Indiana Jones, no one as strong as Rambo. All these classic adventure characters are pretty much loner’s. Having all the gifts they need inside themselves, they don’t need the help of others to get out of life’s more harrowing scrapes. Ironically, if we all tried to go it alone like these characters so often do, our ticket would be a fast-track to nowhere. We don’t have it within us to be these hero’s.
Master and Commander succeeds as it gives us a ship full of heroes. As a story, it’s about a Captain (Russell Crowe), his best friend the ship’s doctor (Paul Bettany), his crew (Including Billy Boyd, better known as Pippin from Lord of the Rings), and his ship (HMS Surprise). There’s a nemesis in a mysterious French privateer. But with the exception of two or three high intensity cat and mouse naval engagements, the rest of the two hour plus movie revolves around the complexity of relationships on a ship inhabited by nearly 200 men. These men struggle internally and between each other over a question of duty. How do we go about discharging our obligation to His Majesties Navy and more importantly to their homeland? Tensions over how to resolve this is seen in every relationship in the film from the top down.
As this film beautifully unfolds you see that everyone needs everyone in order to complete the task at hand, in order to discharge one’s duty. The captain needs his confidant ship’s doctor. The young need the old, and the old need the young. Victory doesn’t come from bringing out the best in others, but from finding out who others are. As it turns out, an adventure that tells us this about our heroic sides instead of our heroic idealizations ends up being much more satisfying.
Rather than having a ridiculously competent single super-hero to compare ourselves to, we have a super-hero crew, where every viewer can find where they fit in the whole, where their skills lie, what portion of greatness they have to offer.
Here's another article from Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has already started slashing prices on toys for the holiday season. Two whole weeks before the traditional day after Thanksgiving kick-off. Read about it here.
Notice the absurdly low prices they are charging for some hot toys. It seems unlikely that they are paying the normal wholesale price.
Here's an interesting article on Wal-Mart. This article gives a great look into the pro's and con's of Wal-Mart aggressive discounting system. Basically, Wal-Mart sells so much volume that it convinces manufacturers to sell things to Wal-Mart at razor thin profits. This is great for the consumer, and even lowers inflation, but it has other negative consequences.
Went to Books and Coffee last night. The review was by Lucien Ellington, an education professor at UTC. He reviewed Diane Ravitch's The Language Police. It was a good review, but the disgussion was more interesting. You had a lot of interesting characters, particularly Chattanooga intellectuals with chips on their shoulders. The more I see of it, the more UTC looks like this refuge for political conservatives that have been forced out of mainstream academia for their political views. I've met several professors now that all have that similar story to tell.
The book is about the un-democratic, anti-capitalist way the textbook publishing industry works. The industry self-censures their work based on several sensitivity criterion. These criterion are complex and convoluted, so I'll spare you, but they basically work out to exclude things like brithday cake from literary stories, and depiction of anyone in a traditional roles, they basically go so far as to eliminate any normative education from our education in the humanities.
Ravitch blamed this on the industry. I thought that this gives the industry to much credit. In my mind it seems much more likely that the industry is just reacting to our vague notion of tolerance that we holf so dear. Strongly held, vague beliefs, tend to work themselves out in unexpected ways like this.
This is a lengthy piece about comparing Lost in Translation with Kill Bill. I try two basic ways a film can connect with us, using these films as archtypes.
Most of pop culture can be described with continuums. For instance, pop music ranges from the almost completely instrumental to almost completely lyrical. Movies range from being driven by narrative (think Pride and Prejudice) to completely driven by action (think Speed). In a continuum that maybe transcends all pop art forms there are things that evoke a complex emotion in you (like joy or sorrow) and things that create a basic feeling (fear, anger, lust).
But aren’t these things two names for the same thing? I don’t think so. One can draw a distinction between the two. Emotions are learned. For example I can’t really understand joy until I have experience it through a degree of awareness of the outside world and myself. Feelings, on the other hand, are instinctual. A baby fears a loud noise without knowing why because feelings precede understanding. Feelings are the basis for our emotion, they’re what our emotions flow out of. This is not to say that one is better than the other, just to offer up categories for how to watch a movie.
Two movies of note for this fall season fit neatly into this discussion. One, Ms. Soffia Copolla’s Lost in Translation is a movie that is almost wholly directed towards engendering an emotional response from its audience. It does this to the point that even the story becomes a foil for delivering a particular emotion.
Lost in Translation is a movie about longing, and truly knowing somebody, for a brief time. Bill Murray is an action movie star that has been persuaded to visit Tokyo for a one week, two million dollar advertising shoot. The captivating Scarlett Johannson plays a young woman fresh out of college, married to a photographer working in Japan.
From the outset of the movie both of these characters aren’t exactly thrilled to be in Tokyo. In fact their imprisonment in the oppressively foreign Tokyo Hyatt is a metaphor for the larger captivity life is to these two. Bill Murray finds his wife’s attentions moving away from him and towards the mundane (interior decoration options, the rigmarole of child management). This in turn doesn’t exactly spark passionate love in Murray’s heart. Scarlett Jonhannson, looking across the hotel-room bed at her spouse, sees a man that seems more like a stranger every day.
Initially the characters struggle with insomnia coupled with profound feelings of isolation. As unable to communicate with the people speaking Japanese around them as they are able to connect with others, both characters feel seriously isolated in life. Yet as isolated and alone as they are, both characters share a marriage with a person that they don’t really feel connected. In short, the opening scenes of the movie show us two characters that are verging on internal death, a life based on going through the motions, and not living through the heart. As I watch this movie, that is the message that I get over and over again, the setting of Japan, and its alien ways just forms a great backdrop feeling both Johansson and Murray’s character’s pain.
And then something beautiful happens. Murray and Johannson meet, and come to know each other. They connect, things open up inside them, words unspoken become said. The connection that we see unfolding on screen before us is called love. But it is love that shouldn’t be. Twenty years and two wedding bands separate these two.
Lost in Translation quickly becomes a movie about not just isolation, but longing. Longing is definitely an emotion. I only knew longing after wanting something dangling in front of my face that I couldn’t have. Fitting well with its overall aim, the story and settings of the movie quickly become secondary to the rising knot in your gut as you watch the characters move towards resolving their situation.
On the other hand, Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume 1 is a movie that resides almost entirely in the realm of feelings. One film critic described Kill Bill Volume 1 as the most violent film ever made by an American film studio. They may be right. Tarantino seems to thrive on making these post-modern send-ups to old genre films that take the conventions of the genre to the extent of absurdity. Reservoir Dogs and the heist/gangster movie, Jackie Brown and Blaxploitation, in Kill Bill Volume 1 we see Tarantino’s all out tribute to the Kung Fu action flick. And since it is an action flick, Tarantino reprises his trademark style by making it as violent as can be.
Uma Thurman plays a woman who lived for a time as a member of the Deadly Vipers Assassination Squad. Pregnant, she tries to get married, only to have the other members of the squad burst into the ceremony, kill the rest of the wedding party, and put a bullet in her head. But Uma doesn’t die, rather she enters a deep coma, and wakes up 4 years later in a hospital bed, without her child, and with a hulking redneck standing over her, having just paid to have sex with her comatose self.
Uma escapes the hospital and goes out on the warpath, intending to kill the remaining five Deadly Vipers, especially their leader Bill. What ensues is about one and a half hours of carnage. This is not carnage like Saving Private Ryan, or carnage like Friday the 13th. This is the carnage that only an extremely sharp samurai sword is capable of generating. Limbs fly off bodies almost faster than the camera can track it. Stumps on shoulders gush gallons of pink blood.
Yet this movie is not just a gore fest. It’s as much a presentation as it is a depiction. Tarantino wows the audience with his camera work, his musical flavoring, and the sheer brilliant gimmickry that he uses to tell his story. One can watch this movie as an exercise in style, where the choreography of evisceration becomes a beautiful symphony of cinematic construction.
But that’s probably not what will happen. While Tarantino does dare the viewer of his film to separate themselves from the violence and see just the construction, it’s really too hard when you see this constant parade of violence, especially when Tarantino makes special effort to insert these scenes that tell the viewer to feel bad about the violence one sees.
If there is an emotional connection to be made here, it isn’t even revenge. We are purposefully not told why the Deadly Vipers rained on her parade. All we really see for sure is her anger, and because of her anger, her power. And on a basic level, this anger is all we really feel. We imagine what it would be like to be angry like her and to be able to act out on our anger with such ease. And this anger is something that we feel not from empathy, like the longing in Lost in Translation. Anger is something that is instinctual within us. It’s primal.
Neither of these two types of connection are necessarily better than the other. But in this particular case I really want to distinguish the two. But first, let me offer us another continuum. There are movies on one end that try to teach us something about mankind in general, and on the other end there are movies that try to teach us just something about ourselves. Horror movies, for instance, you’re not really pushed to understand the sex-starved teen being cut up, you’re pushed towards understanding the fear in yourself.
When you watch a movie like Lost in Translation and feel an emotional connection with the character because of common understanding, you in turn make an emotional connection with all people that have felt the same thing. This is done without actually imagining yourself as the character, but just by seeing yourself in their experience. This is not escapist fantasy, where you imagine yourself as that person, in order to escape the reality of life. Kung-Fu movies like Kill Bill Volume 1 usually get placed in the escapist category. You imagine yourself as this insanely potent Kung-Fu master, capable of dishing out extreme punishment to whoever crosses you.
Now I want to give Kill Bill Volume 1 more credit than the label of escapism. Kill Bill Volume 1 starts in the context of escapism, but quickly becomes so bloody that it challenges you to think about why you come to see violent Kung-Fu movies in the first place for escape. In this sense, Kill Bill Volume 1 is at its best a movie about what we as individuals get from violent content. But this interpretation is one that I get as a filmgoer. Who knows if that is actually Tarantino’s intention, his insertion of things that make us feel guilty about enjoying the carnage on screen could just be pure perversity. We’ll probably have a better idea once we see the second, and final installment to the series, Volume 2.
As Christians we are called to identify with others, to be compassionate with them. Literature and film perform a great service to us by pushing us to identify with humanity. A movie like Lost in Translation is a great example of this happening. I have already watched it twice at theatres and I suspect that each consecutive time I watch it I will feel the yearning of isolation and the longing of love over and over again, and in that emotional reaction, I will see how everyone, to one extent or another feels this same thing too.
One the other side, when I, as a Christian watch Kill Bill Volume 1, at the best I totally isolate myself from the very content of the movie, and just appreciate the craft of its maker. But more often that not, the best thing that I would get out of it would be this chastisement that I derive pleasure from the carnage of the escapist action film as it is depicted in all its absurdity here. The lesson from Kill Bill Volume 1 is so self-centered, that it just pales in comparison for me to something like Lost in Translation.
Well to break this long absence from this blog I have decided to post some content of mine. This is a review I just wrote about Luther. I liked the film, but here's my better worded comments. This review is a work in progress, so any advice on how I can make it better would be great.
Luther is a film more about events than characters, and as an emotional bridge to the drama of events 500 years past it works. Any work of historical fiction, written or watched, lives or dies based on its ability to connect the audience to a time that they have no natural way to relate to. Normally, this connection is made through making a character intimate. Through taking an obscure mover in history and making her almost a part of the present, a person that comes up along side you on the Interstate in her car, and then moves on to wherever she’s going.
Why do we like to watch Gladiator or Braveheart, to read the newest sea-faring yarns of Patrick O’brian? Because, as they make these men of the past understandable to us today, so they allow us to in turn inhabit their pasts. Without a connection of personalities and past, how does Luther work? Luther does something quite different, yet fundamentally similar.
When you watch Luther, you see a story of one man, an underdog, and relative commoner, elevated through education, challenge the authority and corruption of the elite for the benefit of all Europeans. As you may have guessed, Luther is the story of Martin Luther, instigator of the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe. As someone living today as a benefactor of the Protestant tradition, I felt very much involved with the outcome of the film.
Luther at its best tells you the importance of the events transpiring before you, Protestant or Catholic, the actions of this man wear critically important to the freedom and liberty you now enjoy today. As a movie, it becomes good, insofar as it can convince you to become emotionally involved in the unfolding drama, hoping that Luther will succeed in his reforms despite impossible odds, because you can sense that it is so important that he does.
While Luther does this beautifully, I wanted more. I never saw why the power of the pure story, had to come at the cost of understanding Luther more as the man he was. Through much of the movie, the motivations to his actions remained a complete enigma. At one point, as he was walking by idyllic green fields, with a beautiful girl in two, Luther reveals, “I’m so miserable I can barely sleep at night.” Is there any indication in that Luther is in these depths of despair? Not really. Would this movie be better if there had? Most definitely.