Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category
Life, Reprised
Like their American youth-movie counterparts, the 20-something guy friends of Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s Reprise spend a lot of time whining and clumsily pursuing the fairer sex. Only, unlike the cast of, say, American Pie or Animal House, Trier’s characters are as much (or more) concerned with getting published as getting laid, and as likely to cozy up to a reclusive cult novelist as they are to make a pass at a beautiful girl. Thrashing punk music and heady French philosophy —the more obscure the better, apparently— are their drugs of choice, intellectual one-upmanship their sometimes-violent contact sport.
Reprise, to put it simply, is a poetic and languid film about the relationship between two young men and, as you have probably guessed, with a larger emphasis on the young. It’s a buddy film in the basest sense, stripped of any dishonest cinematic conceits; it’s more Jules et Jim than Bill and Ted. The themes are heavy (mental illness, obsession, love), but in no way they are a pretentious drag. It’s a pastiche of the French New Wave in its literal sense: somber and invigorating, culturally specific and universally resonant. Ultimately, Reprise is not just about the youthful anomie that is present in Oslo, Norway where the film takes place, but the generational anomie that defines all youths, everywhere.
Screwball Conventions: The Comedy of Errors and Courtships
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. In 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 as vigorous as it is now, and that what has led me to write this post in the first place. 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, as I try to elucidate meticulously 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.
On Vanity
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.
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 strings -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.
Aboard the Microcosmic Boat
“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.
Quickies: Stoner – Still Walking – Dead Space: Extraction
- 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.
A Cycle of Human Experience
- 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.
Organized Chaos – The Wonderland of Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird 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.
A Revolutionary Insanity
In the midst of egotism, self-denial, social conformism, and self-made delusions that seem to pervade a large sum of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, the voice of reason seems to lose its echo among all the society’s hypocrisy. Yet, Yates’ commentary manages to be carried out by his characters, even though their selfish acts often overlap their criticism of the American’s suburbia of the 1950s. Frank and April Wheelers, the young and frustrated couple regrettably harbors little affection for each other just as much they dislike their hollowed existence in the estates of Revolution Road. They recognize that their youth is withering away on meaningless and unfulfilling prospects that rarely provide incentive to incite self-worth.
The Urban Intimations of Tokyo!
“Tokyo!”, the omnibus triptych film that is independently envisioned by three distinctive filmmakers can be hardly described as a valentine to the populated Japanese megalopolis. Unlike other collaborated and commemorative anthologies such as “Paris, je t’aime” and “New York, I Love You”, “Tokyo!” is all about the stillness of urbanism. Its allegorical storytelling cunningly stymies anyone’s grasp of the Japanese culture, casting more enigmas than usually expected or conceived. Despite the prevalence of Japanese actors in the film, none of the directors and writers is actually Japanese. While it would be more practical to take this three-course meal at face value and not deem it as an accurate depiction of contemporary Japan, its experimental narrative and occasionally esoteric presentation warrant at least a solicitous assessment.
Quickies: Eleven Kinds of Loneliness – A Boy and His Blob – Treeless Mountain
- Book: Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates
Eleven anecdotes. Eleven fictitious portraits. “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness”. This is simply the premise of Richard Yates’ second novel after he had published his grandeur debut, “Revolutionary Road”. Akin to its herald, the novel galvanizes the artistry and the domestic realism that eloquently pervade Yates’ sparingly paced chapters, creating a hypnotic voice that rims with sentiment but remains shy of sentimentality. His stories may not be a bundle of laughs but his commentary of the world -and the state of mind it creates- is so economically and so persuasively excruciating to the fact it borders the edge of plausibility. Indeed, Yates’ characters are not scandalized by their actions but rather their struggle to find a sense of life and themselves. The zenith of such anthological descriptions of human fragility is a haunting, subtly shaded mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true and just beginning to ring a little hollow. The latter can be attributed to few of the novel’s depictions but the rest is quenched with sublime characterizations. If you want to brush up on your vintage American literature, then think nowhere else than Yates’ oeuvres.
