sins and expiations

I've been busy. Well, that's only partially true. I've been busy, yes, but I've also been not writing. That isn't to say I haven't been doing anything. I've been really after Netflix again, and in the past week I've racked up Kurosawa's magesterial Kagemusha, Polanski's superb Chinatown, and Scott's brilliant Blade Runner. I also watched Lucas's poor excuse for a film, Revenge of the Sith, today.

Naturally, I've got strong opinions on all of these. Kagemusha is superb (Times, Ebert, Ruthless), of course, although perhaps not getting the attention it deserves by the nature of it being (in Kurosawa's words) as merely a "dry run" for Ran. I don't deny that Ran is a superior film, ranking as it does as one of the best films of the master, but I'm telling everyone that Kagemusha is amazingly good. A lesser director would count it his finest moment; only the transcendent genius of a Kurosawa would consign as mere rehersal. Kagemusha is dark, dealing with Lear-ish themes such as performance, simulation, identity, and the ultimate nature of man's interaction with the universe. I'd say that Kagemusha and Ran are as darkly nihilistic as anything in Lear, the most devastating of tragedies, and that there's an unrelenting hostility to paliation that marks these late films. The activities of mere men are foolish, inconsequential, and perhaps more damning, easily forgotten. See it, if you have the opportunity. Unlike lesser directors, Kurosawa is able to frame meaningful, memorable characters in the midst of great tableux. He's a fluid director of state activity and battle, but when he zooms in, the individual players are not squashed by their scenery but enliven it. George Lucas, who with Francis Ford Coppola helped finance Kagemusha could have learned a lot from the master.

What more to say about Chinatown (Times, Voice, Ebert) that has not already been said? Perfect, really, one of those movies (like Fargo) that has not a hair out of place, just a satisfying amalgamation of great shots and greater acting. Jack Nicholson caries the film with his bored, drowsy detective work (with his schnauze ensconsed in gauze, to boot). Great movie, taut and exciting, with a cruel nihilistic edge and a superb gut-punch of an ending, too.

Revenge of the Sith? I'm sure everyone's been waiting to hear what I think. It was lousy, poorly written, stupidly plotted, and did the great injustice to the franchise to forever link the inky black knight, Darth Vader, the menacing dark father, with the sun-kissed curly Californian locks of Hayden Christensten. Hayden can only pout, he lacks all dramatic range to hoist a tale of betrayal and violence upon, and he's undercut at every turn by Lucas's excerable script (reportedly doctored by no less than Tom Stoppard which can only make us wonder how bad it was before). In the end, Lucas's failure will net him billions of dollars and greater creature comforts at Skywalker Ranch but the rest of us, having sat through one leaden, groaning, unfunny movie after enough, will have to ponder how, exactly, he caught lightning in a bottle with the original Star Wars. All of Lucas's later sins are still under wraps in Star Wars. The dialog is crisp and often funny, the picaresque inventiveness of locations like Mos Eisly and Tatoine stands as a stark contrast to the arid, hermetic space interiors, especially on the Death Star. There's particularity. There's human interest. There's the sense that actors acted on sets, actual plywood sets built on sound stages, and didn't have to act in green rooms and imagine whole cloth where they would be standing. Episode III feels artificial, pinioned down under glass, beautifully crafted on a computer, but lacking verve...

At the end of the day, Darth Vader was a great villain. He might not have had the chops or pure malevolence of Iago or the sadistic excess of a Macbeth or even the psychological baggage and furious hatred of a Richard III, but he was big and he was mean and he cut off his son's hand when he wouldn't take out the trash. There was something majestic about Darth Vader and something mysterious. You got the sense through the snippets that he had this old life, as Annakin Skywalker, that he had a familial name, and parents, and kids, and that he walked towheaded and barefoot on a planet, too. But that was just hints, just whispers and inferences, and that was enough. The reality was plain: black suit, demanding boss, and that breathing. Great villains don't have exhaustive backstories. Nobody wants to know that Buffalo Bill was picked on as a kid, or maybe got rejected by a chubby girl at prom time. Nobody cares that Dracula was picked on for being pale at recess. Nobody cares! That's the point--villains need a chip on their shoulder above and beyond what is reasonable, beyond what can be explained by happenstance alone, beyond what is orderly and just. That's, I'm afraid, why they are villains. Lucas, in his idiocy, sets out to explain exactly why Skywalker went to the dark side: he was worried about his wife's pregnancy and he didn't get a promotion. Sounds like a reason to go to the bar, not join the dark side and start slaughtering everyone. Sheesh.

At the end of the day, after 3 crappy movies, I'm just left thinking, "why couldn't have George just left well enough alone?"



That's the difference between being a hack and being transcendentally brilliant. Kurosawa he ain't. But then again, financing Akira just might be the good deed George needs to get into heaven.

a few thoughts on romantic love...

In the interests of posing perhaps stupid commentary on issues near (and dear) to the hearts of my readership, I've got, perhaps as advertised, a couple thoughts on romantic love. There are usually a couple things people point out before considering such a subject, namely: (a) the genre was invented in 1949 by officers of the Hallmark Corporation, (b) before this stationary revolution, all marriages were arranged by meddlesome aunts, and (c) the divorce rate was much lower. I'm not sure, in a very impressionistic way, that this subtle concoction of nostalgia and misinterpretation really leads to anything. Sure, Foucault invented human sexuality whole-cloth, and sure, before Valentine's Day became a commercial holiday, nobody "dated" per se, but I'm not sure if these floating facts somehow serve as a rigorous proof for the rise of the divorce rate. Then again, I'm abundantly naive on this issue myself, so I'm approaching these concerns with an open mind.

A.

In any case, it seems to me that the concept of "transformative romantic love" belongs in no small part to film. Film permits the close personal observation (and intimate access to emotional state, read out upon the planes of the face) that certainly mythologizes (reifies) our terms. Take, for example, everyone's favorite French art film, Amelie. Amelie is the perfect French art film because it isn't weird, it is benignly "quirky." Nope, Jeunet, our director, isn't abducting children or eating boarders. He's toned it all down, reducing his passing strangeness into a tasty broth, let's cycle madly through the streets of Paris and love!

Now, I don't want to argue that every film, or even every decent film (I'm going to ignore whole swaths of swill that are heaped before the plebes every October before Oscar season...) has these themes. Take Terrance Malick's superb Badlands, where the landscape, lovingly shot, becomes the perfect backdrop for an appealing amoral couple. Their love ain't redemptive, I'm afraid, and it is all the better for it.

But I want to concentrate, for a second, on the myth, not on the rank misery Ang Lee captures so evocatively in The Ice Storm or the deliberately cruel direction of Tom Solondz or Neil LaBute, reveling, in a small, sick, way, in the suffering of their characters. Don't we, for a second, want to love? I find a similar motivation in Tom Tykwer's work. Both Lola Rennt and The Princess and the Warrior (using the powerfully beautiful Franke Potente) deliver such redemptive promise. Lying in bed with "Manni," her dull German boyfriend, "Lola" delivers a penetrating line of questioning, wondering what she'd do if he was dead. Perishable memory versus the enthusiasm of youth? Cynicism aside, we believe "Lola"--we believe her youth, her sincerity, we believe in the transformative power of her love.

B.

Are we cynics, though? I've found, in my own short career, that Bob Dylan is the man to listen to while falling in and out of love. Depending on where you are (wistful, lustful, saddened, pained) there's a couple of tracks with your name on them. Take, for example, "Boots of Spanish Leather" from The Times They Are a Changing, which I had the privilege to hear live a couple of years ago.

Oh, how can, how can you ask me again,
It only brings me sorrow.
The same thing I want from you today,
I would want again tomorrow.

Perfectly put, I'd say. Dylan gets right to the heart of lovesickness, here, both the repetition and the continuous exercise of the same emotions. Like any repetitive conversation, there's a solemn rhythym to it. Repetition, emotion, constancy.

Take, for example, two Dylan songs dealing with his marital troubles. "Idiot Wind" (Blood on the Tracks) becomes implicitly autobiographical. Dylan follows the strange combination of affection and bitterness with an explicitly autobiographical appeal, "Sara" (Desire). In fact, scuttlebut has it that Dylan called Sara into the studio to perform it for her, live, first audition. Gutsy move, I'd say. "Idiot Wind" careens into biography from narrative towards the end of the song:

I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made you blind
I can't remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed, your eyes don't look into mine.
The priest wore black on the seventh day and sat stone-faced while the building burned.
I waited for you on the running boards, near the cypress trees, while the springtime
turned Slowly into autumn.

[chorus]

I can't feel you anymore, I can't even touch the books you've read
Every time I crawl past your door, I been wishin' I was somebody else instead.
Down the highway, down the tracks, down the road to ecstasy,
I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory
And all your ragin' glory.

I been double-crossed now for the very last time and now I'm finally free,
I kissed goodbye the howling beast on the borderline which separated you from me.
You'll never know the hurt I suffered nor the pain I rise above,
And I'll never know the same about you, your holiness or your kind of love,
And it makes me feel so sorry.

This is a hell of a transition, to say the least. Leaving the narrative frame (priests, fire, season changes) we find ourselves radically abased, unworthy of love. After all, how angry can you be if you can quote their "holiness?" This is superb writing here, capturing perfectly the disconnect with a relationship that doesn't communicate. Dylan sings an unbridgeable gulf that cannot be crossed by mutual esteem.

"Sara," on the other hand, is a plea: "don't ever leave me, don't ever go."

I laid on a dune, I looked at the sky,
When the children were babies and played on the beach.
You came up behind me, I saw you go by,
You were always so close and still within reach.

...[chorus]...

I can still see them playin' with their pails in the sand,
They run to the water their buckets to fill.
I can still see the shells fallin' out of their hands
As they follow each other back up the hill.

Simply put, the song is an appeal to shared memory, to common history, and to parenthood. This isn't, I'm afraid, the kind of music we'd be wanting to listen to, if we were looking for a soundtrack of transformative romantic love. This is the kind of song that plays in our heads if we consider old flames, the wisdom of reuniting with exes, the calculation of whether it is better to move on or keep on keeping on. This is, I think adult music, and lacking in the kind of youthful fervor that we see in the unadulterated joy of Amelie.

Real joy, I think, is hard won, hewen from life through suffering. You've got a live a little to write a plea, and mean it. You just have to be in the first blush of emotion to be unreservedly joyful.



Something, perhaps, to ponder. Growing older means, I'm convinced, coming to terms with complex emotions:

I'm sick of love; I wish I'd never met you
I'm sick of love; I'm trying to forget you

Just don't know what to do
I'd give anything to
Be with you