Screwball Conventions: The Comedy of Errors and Courtships

February 6th, 2010 § 0

Screwball [pronounced skrue’bol] is a noun that means unbalanced, erratic, irrational, and unconventional, in which became a popular slang word in the 1930s. It was applied to films where everything was a juxtaposition: educated and uneducated, rich and poor, intelligent and stupid, honest and dishonest, and most of all male and female. When two people fell in love, they did not simply surrender to their feelings, they battled it out. They lied to one another, often assuming indifferent personas toward each other. They often employed hideous tricks on each other, until finally after running out of inventions, fall into each other’s arms. It was fossilized comedy, physical and often painful, but mixed with the highest level of wit and sophistication, depending wholly on elegant and inventive writing. ~ via Modern Times

My introduction to such subgenre of comedy is very recent, and for someone who openly discloses his affection for romantic comedies, it is indeed a blissful discovery. The last two weeks I have seen more films that I usually do in a single month, and my enamored admiration for the classics has never been intensified as it is now. Truth to be told, however, is that I have had to truncate my original draft in order to make my exposition more concise and piercingly focused. You should grasp the matter of consistency that pervades the films that I have selected for my discussion below, in which I also meticulously elucidate (I presume) their differences as well as their similarities. The bigger portion of the discussion will be reserved to what I believe is the quintessential screwball comedy, and that is The Philadelphia Story.

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On Vanity

January 29th, 2010 § 0

Perhaps the best approach to gloss over the context of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel is by introducing this snippet from “Fitzgerald’s Radiant World,” a critical piece written by Thomas Flanagan of The New York Reviews of Books:

This Side of Paradise had had a success, which was almost freakish, capturing the aspirations of a generation and especially of those within that generation who, like its author, aspired to be great writers. Reading it today, one blanches at its emotional and rhetorical excesses, and yet, as Matthew Bruccoli says, it was received as “an iconoclastic social document—even as a testament of revolt. Surprisingly, it was regarded as an experimental or innovative narrative because of the mixture of styles and the inclusion of plays and verse.” It was the autobiographical first novel of a very young writer who took himself very seriously, and who had not provided for his hero those escape hatches of irony . . . But it was not, by any stretch, the work of a man who planned a career as a writer of commercial fiction.

Indeed, even after more than ninety years of its publication, This Side of Paradise doesn’t quite exude a nostalgic archaism of narrative prose as one might generally expect, nor it purposefully exercises an ambition in creative writing or a contract to a lucrative career. While the novel might have laid the groundwork for Fitzgerald’s repute as a lyrical and clever innovator, the very stylistic elements he deplores -episodic narrative, wavering point of view, stream-of-consciousness, the almost mystified mixture of prose, verse, and dramatic writings – are defiantly and consistently original for anyone who just started reading his oeuvres. His ostensibly experimental narrative, paired with a keen study of American contemporary in adolescence and young manhood, certainly cements This Side of Paradise as a perpetual classic of whenever and wherever.

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Aboard the Microcosmic Boat

January 20th, 2010 § 1

“You’re only thinking of yourselves,” cries the devious, hulking Nazi to the others passengers of the lifeboat during a vertiginous typhoon sequence, “you’re not thinking of the boat.”

That line best highlights Lifeboat’s maxim, Alfred Hitchcock’s World War II film, which points to the cause for all of the dangers to follow. That the “enemy” utters that line made it particularly indignant in 1944 (when critics lashed out at Hitchcock for his unpatriotic portrayal of Brits and Americans), and perhaps it still resonates today: we (as in anyone who’s not a Nazi) may have rallied together, expressed our contempt after the many hours of history lessons, and deservingly ridiculed the Nazi regime to great measures but, since then, we’ve certainly become more petulant, materialistic, and egotistical than ever.

The funny question in all of this is who would’ve pegged Hitchcock for a moral humanist? Certainly not me, I would like to believe that my universal humanism is more intricate to be correlated with a man whose métier was the psychological horrors that distort the glam of the American/British bourgeoisie. But I digress, though I’d like to acquiesce with the the selective consensus that, despite the film’s lack of technical excellence, this is probably the most characters-driven film within the director’s voluminous canon.

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Quickies: Stoner – Still Walking – Dead Space: Extraction

January 14th, 2010 § 0

  • Book: Stoner by John Williams

John Williams’s Stoner is simply a novel about literature, those who love it, and those who spend most of their lifetime living on its nourishment. William Stoner, whose the book is dedicated to, had spent his childhood and few of his adult years in a most banal of bucolic lifestyles, until unexpected circumstances sought him to the University of Missouri to pursue the academics of agriculture, where he discovered the uncharted love “of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and of the heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print.” With a deadpan prose and a discreet evasion from sentimentality, Williams unfolds Stoner’s trials and tribulations in many arresting, though despondent, instances: his marriage miserably fails, his daughter’s life is dishearteningly sheltered, and his career as a professor is hindered and ravaged by discomfited conflict. Still, Williams makes sure to distill Stoner’s daily life with enough reciprocated love and beauty to cope with such miseries, whether through the leaves of literary books or occasional friendships and love affairs. What emerges from the novel’s unhurried chapters is a burdened college professor, whose life is dovetailed with a stern observation on humanity, and how absurd, confounding, beautiful, mundane, and poignant it can be. Stoner is both a celebration of life and an elegy of reality, told with an honest overtone, delicate structure, and profound respect to the minimalism of everyday existence.

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Turning Over an Old Leaf

January 4th, 2010 § 0

When it comes to predictability in cinematic storytelling, the revenge variety is perhaps the most stagnant and superficial; the film usually features a damaged protagonist (or a group of individuals) who has been robbed of something quite precious, leaving him (or her) devastated for quite some time until he musters the conviction (or seizes an opportunity) to take matters into his own hands. As an audience we might not relate to such extreme measures, but our delight from watching a couple of hours of blood gushing out of the screen (because killing is almost inventible) is often tasty despite the tasteless execution. However, in Denis Dercourt’s aptly titled The Page Turner (“La tourneuse de pages” in French) the retribution doesn’t proceed as generally expected, the journey doesn’t dwindle on grotesque executions, and the avenger doesn’t necessarily evoke our sympathy, but the aftermath, regardless, remains permanently destructive.

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A Year in Reading – 2009 Edition

January 1st, 2010 § 2

For me, 2009 was a great year as an avid reader despite the dark times and despaired thoughts that engulfed me in the bulk of it (an experience that I rarely share with anyone). I think the reason I was able to survive my own dejections is due to the great journeys these books have embarked me along the way. It was a form of escapism that I was able to receive something out of it at the end, and it was quite profound, quite personal. Of course, not every book listed here is bound to fit your literary flavor, but I must say that I don’t regret anything I have read so far, except perhaps a book or two. For now, you’ll also have to accept two or three sentences condensing my thoughts regarding each book, as I really don’t have the time to discuss all of them in detail. I hope that I’ll continue building a better library as this year goes by and I hope that you do too.

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Uncharted, Unabashed

December 31st, 2009 § 2

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune was released in North America on November 20th, 2007, and two years later, I got to play it for the first time…

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Disturbing Providence

December 24th, 2009 § 0

It would be fair to confess that my adulation for Revolutionary Road had galvanized my impulses to purchase the rest of Richard Yates’ oeuvres, possibly as a self-conceivable mean to prop up his forgotten works even by the tinniest margins. I was also so fixed (though still am) on reading them sequentially by their years of publication, simply to get a sense of Yates’ ruminations and intents after he went through each of his stories, and to observe whether he would do anything to circumvent his myopic endeavors and low sales. After a collection of short stories and two novels later, it seems hardly the case, so far, that he lost his domestic realism in favor of maintaining a lucrative career in writing. He might have lost some of his sensibility in A Special Providence and Disturbing the Peace, his stories, however, shrewdly remain as vehement and uninhibited as they come.

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A Cycle of Human Experience

December 19th, 2009 § 3

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring

  • This post is dedicated to my cousin, who has graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in film production from SIU this Saturday.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring, is pretty much a film about the forces of nature as it is a depiction of human’s frailty, and the consequences that follow when childhood innocence gets tainted with the lust of adulthood. Renowned South Korean film director and extraordinaire, Kim Ki Duk, has masterfully guised his meditative picture with a Buddhist’s stern scrutiny; it is not quite loquacious in judgment, though subtle in wisdom, harsh in discipline, and profuse with quaint imageries. Despite his hypnotic, naturally visualized storytelling, Kim’s message in his feature is critical, intense, and rather pervasive. While it is easy to conclude that the film is an elaborative domino effect (and possibly it is), the themes and the intricate progression of human’s growth are doubtlessly successive.

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Organized Chaos – The Wonderland of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

December 14th, 2009 § 0

The Wind-Up Chronicle

It has been almost three months since I finished Haruki Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”, a modern tale of magical realism that echoes a comparable stupefaction to “Alice in the Wonderland”. Though, unlike Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, Chronicle evokes both delightful musings of an ordinary man and sometimes a grotesque depiction of a sympathetic nature of Japan’s involvement during World War II. What started as a mundane detective tale becomes something far extraordinary, but Murakami is by no means a sensationalist in his writing, rather a tranquil surrealist who lets his readers to freely wonder in his imagination. While the book is relatively fragmented, the chaos that engulfs Murakami’s work is orderly and constructed, and even though it leaves too many unanswered questions to ponder, Chronicle manages to linger a sense of completion and satisfaction behind.

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