How can we describes the rules and conventions of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers without stuttering at least once, not because of its breathtakingly long title, but more so from our hazy insight of its inscrutable structure? We might also wonder how could a game that has been in development for three years, in one of the industry’s most accomplished game companies no less, to arrive to its audience as a project that has seemingly been hurried due to schedule restrains? Obviously, pondering the game’s hapless state is frivolous at this point, but at least we can look back at it with a slightly approving judgment; Crystal Bearers remains audaciously original next to the contrived creations of late from Square-Enix. The regrettable reality, however, is that its novelty deteriorates just as soon we come to grasp its dubious ideas.

In an effort to make sense of the story in Crystal Bearers, I re-watched the game’s cut scenes (they are commonly available on YouTube), and read its context in several Final Fantasy online encyclopedias, except my research turns out to be nothing but an exercise in navel-gazing. Though, this is not to say that the plot is incomprehensible; it just lacks the consistency that would avert its discursion from quagmire. Characters emerge out of nowhere (they always seem to be ahead of you), and they disappear as soon their role lose purpose in the narrative. There is also a dearth of decent characterization that sets to explain the characters’ actions more persuasively; as far as I know, their comportment and social classification are often correlated to their races: Clavats are discriminately poor and unambitious, the Lilties, on the other hand, are affluent and aristocratic, whereas the Selkies are conniving crooks.

This is unfortunate because Crystal Bearer doesn’t quite recycle the usual generic tragedies of a role-playing game; the narrative just happens to be composed inexplicably, as well as lacking the merits to captivate. The fact that we cannot even converse with the wondering NPCs means it’s impossible to delve deeper besides from what is given to us. Even when the story recuperates during the second arc, the themes don’t live up to its eccentrically constructed world, as they are borrowed transparently from the common reservoir of RPG-tales. Though, it is worth mentioning that the scattered periodicals and the Moogle mail-delivery service do enliven the game with a tangible embodiment.

Still, we get increasingly confounded when we get to meet the game’s protagonist, Layle. The game introduces him so abruptly, and without a passable backstory to absorb his substance in the whole affair. We are told that he is a Crystal Bearer and, by this logic, he’s a menace to the individual and the society, and he should be shunned at all costs. But such incrimination is not efficiently buttressed with specifics; this trifling inclusion of a discrimination case (not to mention class segregation) in the plot scarcely persuades us to understand the danger of Layle’s unique powers. Yet, what aggravate the matter even worse are Layle’s own actions. He’s relatively nonchalant to everything around him, but his sudden fixation to track down the titular antagonist, Amidatelion, whom her race (the Yukes) is said to be extinct, doesn’t bode well to his likeability factor. In fact, we come to feel sorry for the latter, given that she tries to talk things over and explain her ordeals with conviction, but all Layle wants to do is to engage her in a battle of wits and fists.

Strictly speaking, however, Layle doesn’t quite use his fists whenever he’s fancying mischief or a duel. Instead, the eponymous hero harnesses the power of the infused crystal on his right cheek, which devolves him gravity-based telekinetic capabilities. It’s mechanically circumscribed (point, grab, and throw), but its true aptitude flourishes sporadically as we advance through the game’s eccentric locales. These provinces, which are connected by train rails and large fields apt for chocobos to run freely (which we will get to ride one), set off a variety of event-based mini-games upon arrival for the first time (and sometimes during departure), but they also host an optional collection preserved for us to discover. Most of them are derivative and/or ephemerally amusing, but an ample portion manages to withstand mediocrity via nifty execution. In fact, the two introductory events during the prologue are so exhilarating that the subsequent rides can only be buoyed with disappointments and vain opportunities, despite the second event is mired from clumsy controls.

This quandary reoccurs and also protracts dramatically when it comes to battles design. Early on, the game plunges us in an impressive clash with a Bahamut, one of the series most eminent dragons, tasking us ingeniously between QTE-based reflexes and telekinetic strategies to achieve victory. Unfortunately, such a heady experience is seldom repeated, and the regular battles are barely worthwhile, seeing they lack the urgency that we would expect from a Crystal Chronicles game. Indeed, it is possible to romp through the game’s main story without a wavering sense of portent, since the battle encounters are exceedingly procedural and optional; the instances we have to halt our expedition and do battle are accidental and sparse, and if we do, we must be quick about it, as enemies are only presented for a brief window of opportunity before they evaporate into oblivion.

Nonetheless, there’s a lighthearted subtleness to Crystal Bearers, usually dovetailed through exploration and interaction that contradict its inflexible veneer; thus, making the game much more interesting. This is mostly achieved by unlocking a “discovery” or a “reaction”, an in-game achievement system that catalogues different medals based on comical and often fortuitous experimentation, which most of them follow an inane level of logic. They range from simple single actions to esoteric procedures, in-battle reactions to environmental discoveries, pure fun to utter frustration. And yet, despite we don’t receive any tangible rewards for discovering them, the system works splendidly, revealing the level of depth that the developers carelessly decided to conceal away.

Crystal Bearers could also have fared better if the item creation system had been more intricate and redeemable. Hunting for materials, especially the rare ones, is a make-work to prolong the game’s short lifespan. While it is true that synthesizing and equipping accessories mitigate the difficulty of challenging powerful monsters, and curb the unreliable range of the cursor respectably, the time spent on farming them, however, hardly warrants the effort.

On the other hand, the presentation receives a favorable verdict despite the uneven direction. Jagged graphics aside, open areas and expansive meadows are pretty and colorful. The highlight is the artwork of the main characters and the classic Final Fantasy enemies, where each one of them is drawn with a deft impression, but unfortunately lacks the personality that goes along with it. The soundtrack, which is handled by Square-Enix most talented composers, disregards the expectations of what we might have for it, and unexpectedly exceeds them. From jazz serenades, Celtic jigs, to rambunctious frontier-Western strings, Crystal Bearers surprises us every time we emerge to a new corner, delighting our senses with diverse instruments and moods that hardly ever repose.

Ultimately, Crystal Bearers is a game within a game, except emphasis has been placed more on its tiny marrow than the larger peripheries. It is an artifact that could have graced wondrously if Square-Enix worked on it with tact and embellished it with depth. It may have far too many quirks to benefit from, but its penchant to astonish never falters, whether for good or worse. What severely harm Crystal Bearers are high expectations; we should never approach it as if we discovered a valuable treasure, but rather to treat it as a hidden gem that only a selective few would come to appreciate.

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.

The premise of George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story is simply an embodiment of stylish wit and charm, evincing the same concern with class and life decisions as Cukor’s earlier Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn vehicle in Holiday (more on that later). Hepburn plays Tracy Lord, a society heiress with a long history as a tabloid gossip bastion, especially in regards to her marriage to and angry divorce from Grant’s C.K. Dexter Haven (a brilliant high-class name if ever there was one). The opening scene perfectly captures the aversion between these two, in a quick and wordless evocation of the end of their marriage: Hepburn breaks Grant’s golf club over her knee, and Grant palms her face and shoves her backwards, after first feigning a punch. But when Tracy plans to get remarried, to the nouveau-riche George Kittredge (John Howard), Dexter returns into her life, dragging with him a pair of gossip-rag journalists who he plans to introduce as friends of his.

From then on, the film is a game of appearances and realities, with nothing ever quite what it seems. Dexter is seemingly out for revenge by showing up at the wedding and bringing scornful journalists with him, but he actually has more altruistic motives in mind. And the journalists, Connor (James Stewart) and Liz (Ruth Hussey), must maintain their facades while gathering information about the Lord family. Meanwhile, Tracy sees right through her ex’s subterfuge immediately, but is forced to accept the journalists as friends anyway, due to blackmail plot by the tabloid’s editor. It’s only after all the expositions have been established that the first genuine sparkle appears in the film, as Tracy and her sophisticated young sister Dinah (Virginia Weidler, in one of those annoyingly bright little kid roles) playact before the bewildered journalists, hoping to present a super-exaggerated portrait of the society lifestyle for their benefit. This scene is hilarious, and the smooth-talking, constantly quipping Hepburn quickly proves a strangely compelling counterpart for the curt Stewart.

The duo achieves an uneasy rapport almost as soon as they’re onscreen together, totally different from Hepburn’s already established rapport with Grant as her ex. In Grant, Hepburn has a true onscreen equal, someone with a sharp wit to match hers and an ability to trade barbs back and forth with ease. Stewart, in his best self-affecting personality, can be witty too, but his conversations with Hepburn aren’t so much back-and-forth as give-and-take, up-and-down, going from periods of rapid-fire exchanges to more halting moments of withdrawal and uncertainty.

The difference between the two male leads and their complicated connections with Hepburn provides the film’s central spark and tension. It’s telling that, from the very beginning, the prospective husband George is sidelined in favor of not just one, but two other leads. He’s a conventional cipher, a man who pulled himself up from nothing to be a successful businessman, and who has now totally bought into the status and self-importance of his new class. In contrast, both the impoverished Stewart and the born-rich Grant seem much more natural, relaxed in their skins and not overly concerned with appearances or traditions.

As this précis suggests, Cukor’s interest in class is complex and not at all couched in the usual simplistic terms. The Lord family is undoubtedly upper-class, and they accept their privilege with casual ease, while Connor is nearly insolvent, a struggling writer working way beneath his talent just to pay the bills. Connor is understandably resentful of the riches around him at the Lord home, but his resentment cools as he grows to know Tracy better, although their discussions still often have a tinge of class warfare about them. This is especially apparent when Tracy offers Connor the use of a country house for private writing, and he rejects her by saying that the concept of wealthy patronesses has gone out of style. Connor just wants to be his own man, even if it means struggling, and this ultimately is the film’s primary message.

It is palpable that both Connor and Dexter are comfortable with who they are, while George and Tracy aren’t — Tracy, especially, seems uncertain about what direction to go in her life, or even what kind of person she is. She’s repeatedly told, sometimes in insult, sometimes with the best of intentions, that she is a cold, distant, and self-centered goddess, and only Connor seems to see the warmth and intelligence in her.

Cukor deftly juggles this introspective subtext with the romantic interest of the central love triangle (actually complicated into a hexagon by the additional points of George and Liz), and a great deal of humor. The film is at its peak in the scenes between Connor and Tracy, especially a remarkable sequence in which the two of them grow progressively drunker and drunker over the course of a night as they ramble and talk and drink. The scene is a series of back-and-forth movements and gestures, with each of them moving towards each other and then backing off several times.

As expected, Cukor handles this beautifully, subtly increasing the romantic tension in the scene even as the tone of the dialogue largely remains friendly and unsentimental but without excess. When they finally kiss, the music soars and then jolts to a halt, as though pausing to breath, and in the silence between kisses Hepburn simply whispers, “Golly.” It’s a moving, hilarious, wonderful moment, and a perfect movies-kiss no less. Without resorting to typical Hollywood grandstanding or manipulation, Cukor simply evokes the emotional depth of that kiss.

The Philadelphia Story abounds in moments like this, the result of Cukor’s ability to organically combine witty dialogue, emotionally complicated characters (and performances to draw them out), and the subtle use of formal elements to gently nudge the scene towards its meaning. He neatly shifts between light humor, low-key drama, and intellectual ruminations on identity, purpose, and the decisions made at crucial junctures in life. The film never quite settles into any of these modes, but it never quite feels disjointed either. Its story flows seamlessly, and best of all, it doesn’t rely on stock clichés or conventions. Its complex conclusion somewhat defies the logic of Hollywood endings (though it’s definitely a happy one), because it arises from the characters and their actions rather than from any clever twist or concession to audience expectations.

With that being said, it is imperative that we turn to another excellent screwball comedy, Holiday, which the first motion picture to encapsulate the Grant/Hepburn dynamic. Here, the film is a moving, joyous parable about the importance of finding your own place in life. It boasts one of Cary Grant’s best performances, as a free-spirited self-made man who thinks he’s in love with a stuffy society heiress (Doris Nolan) but seems more of a natural match for her fun-loving sister, Hepburn. Every second of screen time between the two reluctant lovers glows and sparkles with the pleasure of seeing two such vivacious performers enjoying one another’s company. It’s obvious from the moment they’re introduced and shake hands with a playful not that they’re the film’s real couple, and Nolan is all but cast aside.

The film is a tribute to remaining youthful, and there’s a childlike spirit to the way Grant and Hepburn play here: riding tricycles, doing somersaults, putting on shows, not to mention the witty verbal banter and playacting of their conversations. The centerpiece of the film is a New Year’s Eve party where Grant and Hepburn retreat to an upstairs room, away from the snobbish society crowd, along with Grant’s friends (Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon) and Hepburn’s drunkard brother (Lew Ayres). This small, intimate party takes place in the only comfortable room in a splendid mansion, the only room with a normal sense of scale.

Hence, throughout the film, Cukor isolates Grant in long shots of rooms that seem to have been built for eight-foot tall giants, emphasizing his discomfort with the luxury and lavishness that seems to await him if he marries into this family. It’s only in the upstairs playroom, with its cozy fireplace and leftover childhood toys, that Grant and Hepburn can relax and be themselves.

Finally, another screwball that I deem it valuable to discuss (assuming you’ve forget the consistency I mentioned previously; it also stars Hepburn and Grant) is Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby. Here, the film dazzlingly employs the successful formula of such prior classic films as Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night and Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, in which madcap heiresses pit their senses of fun, irreverence, and total irresponsibility against the seriousness, logic, and dignity of working class heroes. In such screwball comedies of the mid 1930s, the leading couple’s courtships of verbal battles provide a series of humorous sexual conflicts that are overcome but unresolved in the reconciliation during the “happy endings.” Bringing Up Baby takes the antagonisms and extremes embodied in the screwball comedy a little further than any of the other films of the genre.

Starring Hepburn as the completely doddering heiress and Grant as an overly stuffy, self-important paleontologist, Bringing Up Baby exaggerates the lover-antagonist formula of the screwball comedy for a humorous battle between the sexes in which the stereotypes of sex roles are reversed. Hepburn’s character is the aggressor, and her relentless pursuit of Grant engages him in a series of amusing misadventures that become increasingly foolish as the movie progresses. Grant’s character, which by nature is docile, submissive, and dutiful, has his dignity stripped away layer by layer in the course of Hepburn’s bizarre schemes. But Hawks uses the division of his characters into masculine and feminine stereotypes in order to allow each to have a liberating effect on the other.

This Hawksian formula of sex-role reversals, in one way or another, relies on assertive heroines to peel away the dignity and mock seriousness of bumbling feminized heroes. As each hero’s sense of identity and self-image crumbles, the ensuing confusion provides the comedy and the key to his liberation from a narrow restrictive code of behavior. Hawks pushes his male characters’ sexual confusion to such extremes that they are forced to parade around in women’s clothing.

Ultimately, it is perhaps easy to disclose, and without sounding exceedingly pompous, that screwball comedies are basically romantic comedies for the smarties (though one can say they are parodies of the latter). While it is easy to devour these stories at face value and to deem them as remnants of the past, the screwball is still very much with us (The Hangover, anyone?), as a beacon of the giddy achievement possible within popular entertainment. But the bravado with these classics is that not only they showcased the fragility of human condition so brilliantly on-screen, but also challenged it so gallantly out-screen (i.e. the Great Depression). It’s no wonder that past comedies used to get nominated in multitudes for movie awards, a prospect that is dim and rare for the contemporaries.

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 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.

This timelessness is usually carried out by the turbulent young generation that emerges from the novel, whom are simply the remnants of war that come to frankly reject the outmoded social tenets, as well as the shifting mood of disillusionment and hope instigated by their society. However, along with this youthful opposition is a supercilious sense of identity and selfishness, which appears to be relentless and unwavering to any form of concession at first but, nevertheless, succumbs to the laws of the populace. Amory Blain, the young hero that we want to hate but ultimately come to respect, reinforces this mellow resilience and humble defeat with a proclamation: “I simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation—with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals.”

Even so, the odyssey that has propelled Amory to apprehend such realization is hardly methodical. From the inception of Book One, which is usually referred as “the Princeton years” or the “pre-war years”, we instantly realize that Amory is hardly a conventional young man, and his unconventional philosophies that he set for himself and for others are rather fanatical but rather necessary for his spiritual growth. For example, Amory describes himself as a “slicker”, “a definite element of success”, in which he has a “clever sense of social values, dresses well, pretends that dress is superficial—but knows that it isn’t, goes into such activities as he can shine in, gets to college and is, in a worldly way, successful,” and obviously the condition to sport a slicked hair.

Such desire for self-adaptation to established social systems, not to mention the obsessive analysis of them, carries on with Amory, even when he gets accepted at Princeton University. While Amory underscores (and even flaunts) his egotism around campus, he, nevertheless, remains susceptible to the egocentricities of other Princetonian pupils. Among the very first is Thomas D’Invilliers, wherein the literary friendship that they share unfolds his mind to the social scene within Princeton, which, at the same time, conventionalizes Tom too. Unexpectedly, the metamorphosis of Tom into a social swan inculcates Amory with regret at what he might have done had he not given in to social pressure, even though he seems to emerge unscathed and as elite as ever. This particular flair of him to absorb what is best from people and come out better for it offers further insight into his egotism and adaptability.

Still, regardless of Amory’s sustainability to remain an ideal egotist, his fascination with social grace is prompted when he meets Dick Humbird, who “seemed to Amory a perfect type of aristocrat,” but “could have lunched at Sherry’s with a colored man, yet people would have somehow known that it was all right.” Indeed, it is the fact that Dick does not come from the upper crust of society that puzzles Amory’s valuation to some extent, but only serves to better focus the utmost importance he places on sociability; he simply loves the way that Dick acts and is less concerned about his social credentials. While the escapades of the esteemed Humbird seemingly prove to be the most inspiring, it is actually his death that brings about an imperative realization to Amory’s understanding of reality. The “unaristocratic” demise of his perfect idealist is Amory’s first exposure to the random brevity of life, and the fact that all of Dick’s graces could not shield him from his accidental death tolls a dissuading taste from social idealism.

Another incident that galvanizes Amory’s dejection from the social scene and lost of his vanity at Princeton is his disbarment from the university’s newspaper, not to mention his superficial impression on campus that barely pars the success stories of his colleagues. Of course, his longtime confidant and father figure, Monsignor Darcy, is always available to judiciously rectify the fundaments of “the fundamental Amory”, in which the young egotist strictly set for himself. During their querulous discussion, Darcy highlights that both him and Amory are “personalities, but personages,” vis-à-vis the following definitions:

“Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done. He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.”

This elaborate conception allows for Amory to achieve a sense of success or confidence even in the absence of socially recognized successes. Indeed, he becomes more of a whole person and less of a reputation and, as a result, he ejects himself from the social scene at Princeton. With that in mind, Amory no longer requires “success” to maintain a healthy self-image; he has stripped himself of superfluity for good and that, unfortunately, comes with a great price: a dark conscience guised as a lurking phantasm that seems to hunt and glare at his social misconducts.

However, one can always be dependable (and even grateful) for the mental inquietudes of war in displacing any sense of misery or hopefulness from one’s reality. “The fundamental Amory” is once again reawakened thanks to the pacifist and colleague, Burne Holiday, who, unlike Amory, confronts the social conventions by initially staging a protest against the elite social clubs at Princeton and, inevitably, refusing to fight in the first modern war. With a profound admiration, Amory comes to grasp Burne’s thoughts and opinions and learn a great deal from his ability to empathize with other people while disallowing self-involved apathy. Regrettably, Amory’s adaptability to Burne’s idealism is merely skin-deep; he embraces much of Burne’s persona as a pose, not as a true change, which is later pointed out by his friend, Alec Connage.

Yet, despite his respectful veneration to Burne’s pacifism, Amory apathetically enlists himself in the army, which, in many ways, reveals how much he is still swept into the conventional currents around him. This, nonetheless, receives a great approbation in a written letter from Darcy in that Amory’s enlistment without emotion and out of a sense of duty undermines his search for a passionate outlet; it hints that he has achieved some of the qualities of the ideal gentleman that he had perceived in Dick Humbird.

Unfortunately, Amory’s own letter reveals quite the opposite, particularly when he lethargically cites that the single outcome that will materialize from his mother’s death is the financial problems that will come to follow. This leads him to pensively criticize the predominant American consumerists to earn money and, at the same time, to consider politics as a career by becoming a writer, even though he recognizes that he is not prone to write anything significant.

Furthermore, Book Two of This Side of Paradise, despite being concisely shorter and up to the point, doesn’t quite mitigate the austerities of war, of romance, and of Amory’s economic dispossession; hence Fitzgerald’s congruent theatrical monologues and stage settings, which also warrant the melodrama that spurs between the ex-soldier, Amory Blain, and the titular debutante, Rosalind Connage. With extraordinary psychological perspicacity, no doubt gleaned from the young author’s own experiences, Fitzgerald explores the influence that the dearth of money would have on the relationship, concluding that Rosalind would cease to be the woman that Amory loved if subjected to life without resources. Rosalind’s decision to detach their engagement functions as the most devastating incident for Amory, the one that fuels his clairvoyant understanding of the material world.

It is worth mentioning, however, that the rendering of Rosalind is fairly singular to Amory’s past love interests, and also refreshingly feminist to the era of the novel’s publication. The portrait that Fitzgerald sketched for Rosalind, especially her confession about how many men she both has kissed and plans to kiss, seems wittily incongruous to its time but it is absolutely true. Her mother’s platitudes convey the ways in which a young debutante was supposed to operate, but Rosalind confidently oversteps her bounds in every way in search of fun and some semblance of sexual liberation. This scene, with its blunt depiction of the manners of the young elite, was crucial to establishing This Side of Paradise as the popular success it became.

Now fairly dejected and contemptuous, Amory once again thrusts himself to a new but unsuccessful romance, which is later joined with chronic alcoholism and a boring career, until irony seeks him out and saves him through the hands of Alec Connage, the big brother of the girl that instigated his infliction. But Amory’s salivation ends abruptly when he decides to save Alec’s reputation from a scandalous affair. His clear realization that he lacks familial prestige that is as equal as Alec’s facilitates his decision to relinquish his own, which reveals that the more he loses, the more he is inclined to help another person. Yet, despite his “supercilious sacrifice”, Amory imitates a sense of his own nobility that is out of an impersonal desire to do something for someone else.

Yet, in the midst of the turmoil of the final chapter, we do witness a final culmination of Amory’s understanding of “the fundamental Amory.” He, for the first time, perceives a whole new class of people, the poor, and that he must count himself among them. Amory concludes that he has no more goodness to lose; he has hit rock bottom. Still, he does not want to re-experience his goodness or his youth simply to have the pleasure of losing it again. He does not regret the choices he made; he simply regrets that people he met and the decisions he presumed did not become what he wished them to become. He finally sees his judgment in a true and unsentimental light for the first time, as the faces of the people who influenced him most passes through his mind; his mother, the unconventional Darcy, the conventional Dick Humbird, and his lost lovers.

As Amory continues his pilgrimage to Princeton after he encounters another significant character, in which their meeting ends with a poignant revelation, he surmises that he must embrace his egotism and no longer try to banish it. He knows that he can act unselfishly, but only because these acts are mere expressions of himself and his own selfishness. His final declaration, “I know myself . . . but that is all-,” intimates many realizations are yet to come, but the fact that he finally got to understands himself despite his misfortunate is sufficient enough.

It is here, at the end of the book, we can lastly emerge with clarity that the lens Fitzgerald shone at its brightest zenith – brightness even then slightly clouded – is ultimately chaotic; he courageously depicts the sanguinity and failure that critically mingle in the American dream. While the youthful novel still has the innocence to look ahead, to hope, to dream, it lingers a golden, sparkling moment before the fall, for Amory Blaine, for Fitzgerald, and for America. This implies the limited self-knowledge we ratify with ourselves and that, regardless of our relentless, surreptitious desire for vanity, we still know nothing, or at least anything that is ostensibly assenting.

“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.

From the get-go, the film opens with a brilliant prologue that ingeniously tells us what has happened. We hear and see what appears to be an explosion, and then see the flue of an Allied merchant marine freighter going under the waves. It has just been torpedoed and sunk by a Nazi U-Boat. Then we focus on a lone lifeboat shrouded in fog, as various objects float by: a copy of the New Yorker, playing cards, a chessboard, and a corpse, face down in the water. There is a beautiful, well-dressed, fortysomething woman alone in it, and seemingly without a care in the world. This says much about her, as she is the film’s central character, Constance Powers (Tallulah Bankhead) -a sassy and witty world-wise magazine reporter who has filmed the whole naval gun battle and ship sinking, and believes it is her ticket to journalistic immortality. The first of the other survivors to make it to the lifeboat is one of the sunken ship’s engine crewmembers, John Kovac (John Hodiak), a rough blue-collar guy from Chicago with Communist leanings. He and Connie don’t get along, especially after he accidentally knocks her camera into the sea, losing her shots she felt were worth a million dollars. It is the first of many things Connie will lose over the course of the film’s 96 minutes, as she eventually humanizes from a shrill social butterfly to a real human being. Then, several others make it aboard: there is Gus Smith (William Bendix), a co-worker of Kovac’s, whose leg is severely injured, the beautiful, young brunet nurse Alice MacKenzie (Mary Anderson), who looks like a saintly Judy Garland; a British seaman named Stanley Garrett (Hume Cronyn), who is destined to fall in love with Alice, and Charles D. Rittenhouse (Henry Hull), a wealthy industrialist and war profiteer who goes by the nickname Ritt. The final pair to come aboard are the token black character, George ‘Joe’ Spencer (Canada Lee)- a ship steward who is swimming with a British woman, Mrs. Higley (Heather Angel), whose baby has died- even as she still clutches it.

It doesn’t take too long for us to figure out that the entire film strictly takes place in the lifeboat; thus, creating a claustrophobic situation that gradually distills and exposes far more troubling psychological disturbances that seem to inhibit the colorful survivors. It just happens to be one of the lifeboat’s occupants is the very man who causes their predicament: the German captain of the U-boat whose own submarine torpedoed their vessel. Captain Willy (Walter Slezak) appears, at first, to be the black sheep of this war-era film but Hitchcock has other ideas for him. Instead of being portrayed as the obvious villain of all humanity, Willy essentially proves to be the savior among the bunch, a rather blasphemous portrayal in such a perilous time when the Nazis were anything but that.

Still, while this might give anyone the liberty to hastily accuse Lifeboat as a propaganda fluff, the tapestry of the film’s narrative and motifs conjure enough wind allowing it to sail against such indictment. For Willy, he hardly fits the descriptions of stereotypical goon; he is a capable seaman (where the others are completely incompetent), a skilled surgeon (he performs the amputation on Gus’s leg), a multi-linguist (he surprises everyone with his fluency of the English language), and the only one who keeps his head when a storm threatens to destroy their lifeboat. The very fact that his character seems to be the strongest and smartest of the lifeboat refugees was a fact that caused government censors and critics around the country to criticize the film as not patriotic enough, resulting in a limited run for the film and a lesser box office gross than expected.

Nevertheless, the film still doesn’t deviate completely against the feelings of its time; Willy has his dark side too. Certainly, he feigns not speaking English, hides his compass from the others, pilfers their water and food, keeps food pills for himself and, most devilishly, tampers with Gus’s fragile emotions to effortlessly and convincingly push him overboard. Such rendering surely devolves Willy enough flair for him to become more convincible and dynamic than what we might have initially expected: he oozes malevolence that is both stereotypical of Nazis but very realistically as an individual, such as when he yawns at the pain Mrs. Higley and her dead baby is going through. In this regard, he has much in common with other Hitchcock killers, particularly with Bruno Anthony of Strangers on a Train; he is conceited, self-assured, and underestimates his foes, which ultimately causes his undoing. In spite of that, he is probably the most likable of those sorts of characters that Hitchcock had created.

Though perhaps the most contentious scene is when the other survivors learn about Willy’s villainous exploits, as they precipitate to beat him and toss him overboard (except for Joe), and most surprisingly the first attacker happens to Alice, the self-proclaimed pacifist who earlier in the film said she did not understand why people wanted to kill other people. This potentially elicits some mixed reaction because, according to the survivors, the killing of Willy is not murder of a POW (which is against the morality of war), but the execution of a murderer by a society that will not tolerate murder. The polemics of Hitchcock’s feature exposes how poorly politics can influence ethical censure while it convincingly sketches human reactions and nature in extremis, even as it relies on some of the grossest human caricatures, stereotypes, and is a blatant bit of communist propaganda.

It’s worth mentioning, however, that Lifeboat refuses to tie its neat package with bows and ribbons because not only it luridly asks us a question but also begins its parabolic lesson as soon it finishes. At the finale of the film, when after another German ship is torpedoed by the Allied forces, a second Nazi sailor crawls aboard. He is younger than Willy but carries a gun. He is quickly disarmed, and then frighteningly asks if the survivors will kill him. This gives something for the characters (and for us) to mull over as they wait for their rescuers to sail nearby, and Connie delivers her response, which is more cogitative than the question itself.

• 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.

• Film: Still Walking by Hirokazu Kore-Eda (2008)

Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s obliquely quiet film, Still Walking, binds three family generations with grief and discontent of an improbable sway that hardly enervates their middleclass aspirations. Reunited around a food table and under a confined home that barely fits them together, the members furtively begin to knit the narrative of their lives, concurrently resurrecting the memories of the eldest son who died upon attempting to save a life of a young boy. The departed son, however, still fully inhabits the consciousness of his parents – and by extension the house, which in its peaceful decay has become a physical manifestation of him – that there is little room for anyone else, even for their younger son whose presence is almost ethereal. Though deceivingly simple and symmetrically filmed, Kore-Eda’s domestic drama rarely becomes monotonic with staid moods and emotions; sometimes it is whimsically funny and other times it is riddled with belated anger and well-tended resentment. Although one can extract mournful contempt for the younger generation or sentimental adoration for the old, Kore-Eda settles his characters’ faults and virtues with equal judgment, allowing them to divulge their truthful sentiments when no one is around, or at least when they’re oblivious of their throwaway remarks and glances. The upshot of such sophisticated simplicity is a heartwarming and peerless tale that is conveyed with painstaking pace, scoped with universal concerns, and restrained with florid images. Still Walking surely destines to leave its viewers awestruck with an entrancing spell while swathing them with pensive contemplations and earthly ruminations.

• Game: Dead Space: Extraction by Visceral Games (Nintendo Wii)

It is a truth that universally acknowledged, that the narrative of video games is mechanically progressed through actions and decisions formulated by the player. That the story generally doesn’t culminate completely until the player clears the obstacles first before receiving new information that adds up, or at least allows him or her to move on. This is perhaps most conspicuous in Visceral Games’ Dead Space: Extraction. Here, the player is literally seated inside the narrative vassal, assigned to survive the horrors that preceded the 2008’s original while filling the plot holes regarding Unitology, the game’s scientific cult, and the conspiracies behind it. Though the immersions and scares are diminished aboard the on-rail vantage, the thrills and grotesqueries have hardly been dialed down. Limbs dismemberment and zero gravity missions are still intact and well implemented, endorsing sufficient tools and mechanics that make the game’s episodic rides a little different than the last. Nostalgia also creeps into the scenery, as several settings of the original are revisited but also opened up, exposing nooks and crannies that the former didn’t even dare to go. Supplementing the main scenario is a challenge option ala Gears of War’s horde mode, which is designed to thrust players into the “good stuff” without forcing them to set through minutes of in-game scenes and dialogues. Surprisingly, it’s these scripted monologues and set pieces that ingeniously distinguish Extraction from other games in the genre. By the time the ride reaches its final stop, odds anyone will walk away attached to the main characters and disturbed by the events that have occurred. It is unfortunate that there’s little incentive to go back, seeing that unlockable difficulties and score attacks are mostly arbitrary and superficial. Still, Extraction is certainly a departure from the archaic model of on-rail shooters, and Visceral Games have done a great effort instilling climatic pacing and storytelling in the nexus of a genre that thrives on quick reflexes and constant monitoring.

When it comes to predictability in cinematic storytelling, the revenge variety is perhaps the most stagnant and superficial; the film usually features an afflicted 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.

The star of The Page Turner is a petite and diligently serious Melanie Prouvost (Julie Richalet), the only child of a butcher and his wife, who is seen practicing conscientiously for an audition for tuition-free piano studies. On the big day, a renowned concert pianist Ariane Fouchecourt (Catherine Frot) is on the panel of judges. Melanie proceeds her audition marvelously and perfectly until Ariane stops concentrating on Melanie’s performance to sign an autograph. All distracted and unconfident, Melanie breaks her flawless rhythm, resulting the rest of her performance to become coarse and her acceptance to the school to be rejected. Back home, she puts away her kaput of Beethoven and locks the piano keyboard shut, vowing to her parents that she will never play the piano again.

Forward to several years later, Melanie is now a composed and delicately attractive twentysomething woman (Déborah Francois), arrives for an internship as a file clerk in an impressive Paris law firm lead by famed attorney Jean Fouchecourt (Pascal Greggory). The boss’s secretary tells Melanie her resume stood out because she wrote such a persuasive “letter of motivation.” Melanie is motivated all right: Jean’s wife is Ariane, the same panelist who sabotaged her musical talent and ambition several years ago.

Few months elapse until the loving and hardworking husband and father, Jean, hires Melanie (after she asserts her willingness) as a temporary nanny for his son since his absentminded wife is deeply preparing for an important concert. Smoothly, after Melanie gets settles in the house and acquaints herself with the rest of the family, she slides into the position of the “page turner” for Ariane, the one who sits next to her patron on the bench and turns the leaves of the musical composition. Such partnership requires the two to develop a synchronized rapport, a dependable interpretation of the music. And, of course, we soon become to realize that the more trust is confined the more pain is inflicted after a severe, emotional detachment.

The masterstroke here, however, is that Dercourt rarely treads on obvious conventions and that whatever he and Melanie have in mind is more vicious than what we might have become to anticipate during the most crucial and unnerving scenes. There are many viable opportunities and expected breaks that Melanie could have resorted to execute her revenge, but that would have been uncompromisingly fast on her part, wouldn’t it? Instead, Melanie decides to take the scenic route, slowly culminating her devices one by one, so meticulously and so gently, until she reaches the perfect concerto to let everything loose in a single act.

Yet it is the trip to reach that act that remains exhaustingly thrilling. While reticent and malevolent, Melanie seems to fit with the Ariane and her family more than well. She seemingly enjoys her time living in their sumptuous estate and participating in almost every facet of their life. Thus as spectators, we somehow wish that she would cease her malicious schemes and simply consent to what her heart tells her to follow instead of her head, because we know that she loves and admires Ariane and the latter mutually harbors the same affection. But then again, we would have fallen into our own cynicism, that it is fine to sacrifice one relationship for the sake of another, that it is necessary to terminate one person’s future for the sake of sharing another person’s present.

Perhaps this is what makes Melanie’s plan more devious that we could ever have projected. Indeed, the final piece that brings the whole act together is actually delivered by Ariane herself. Melanie’s vengeful and neat machinery wouldn’t have operated if Ariane concealed her emotions, or at least confessed them in a different way. But no, all Melanie had to do is to use the same distraction that resulted her failure years back and reflect it to the person who failed her. It is an immaculate circle, perhaps too immaculate, but considering how rhythm is the main theme that brought this whole affair in the beginning, it seems it’s necessary to end it this way.

Ultimately, amidst the turmoil that occurs at the end, Dercourt refuses to end his picture in certainty. In the last scene we see Melanie walking away from the destruction that she has inflicted, a smile (or maybe a smirk?) flashes on her face that is just as ambiguous as Mona Lisa’s. Is she really pleased that her plan didn’t share the same flimsy performance as her audition did a decade ago? Or is she more saddened that she had to bring misfortune to the person whom she admires the most, simply to appease her own past misfortunes? The answer is like interpreting a sad melody; we never seem to arrive to a single confluence that is devoid of doubt or shreds of unpleasantness despite its blunt pleasure.

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.

• The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

Written under tyrannical reign of Stalin, this is a wild, throw-the-rulebook-out-the-door tale that manages to weave outrageous satire with eloquent speculation on morality. Bulgakov’s novel confidently navigates between deft, fantastic comedy and touching, emotional drama – without one disregarding the power of the other. While this is a response to the madness of the period of its year of birth, it is also a triumphant individual statement, and an excoriating one at that.

• The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper

If you ever feel like reading a classic, I think you could do worse for yourself than The Last of the Mohicans but you could definitely do better as well. The narrative is at times stiflingly boring and some events seem unlikely despite the era in which the book was written. However, staying-power won’t have been misappropriated if you just stick with it. Hiding in these pages is a truly great adventure, but the greatness – and sometimes the story itself – is obfuscated by the author’s heavy-handed use of language.

• The Hours – Michael Cunningham

The Hours is reminiscent of much of the literature by and/or about women in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, when suicide was a common theme; it seemed any woman who did anything out of the norm was doomed to die. Cunningham does a fine job in some parts of the book mimicking Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing, while recreating apparent everyday life for the three women and shows how society as a whole has become more accepting. Beautifully and lyrically written, this melancholic novel reminds us some still believe suicide is their only choice.

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz

This novel is an epic in the truest sense and in its fat is an endearing hero’s chest that beats a heroic heart. The earnestly openhearted Oscar leads us through his unflagging quest for happiness, while Diaz tumbles us through a century of Dominican history and shows us how the brief life of one lonely boy can epitomize the immigrant experience. Through his wondrous use of language and meticulous pacing, Diaz brings the book alive and makes it tremble in our hands.

• Hard Times – Charles Dickens

Always concerned with issues of class, social injustice, and employment, Dickens shows a broader concern with the philosophies and economic movements that underlie those issues, with three parallel story lines reflect a broad cross-section of society and its thinking. As the story lines overlap and intersect, often with consummate irony, Dickens keeps a light enough hand to prevent the story from becoming a polemic, though his criticism of hypocrisy, corruption, and “progress” at the expense of humanity is always clear.

• Enduring Love – Ian McEwan

The narrative of this contemporary novel feels simply like an intricately written case study, though occasionally punctuated with inconsistently glorious descriptions for an odd psychological disorder that even with all of Ian McEwan’s brilliance is still only mildly interesting. It is metaphysical representation of endurance both thematically and expressively, and those who strive in its pages are bound to deem a hint of love, or equally probable, resentment. Not the best of McEwan’s, and yet not his worst either.

• Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami

This remains as one of the most oddly philosophical and fairly enjoyable novels I have read by Murakami, and perhaps the best exercise to grasp his grace with magical realism. The uncertainty of the main characters can be a little tiring and the storytelling seems predestined for its own good but Murakami manages to tell them quite well with a meticulous stern and a hypnotic quirk.

• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami

It is difficult to think of anything more boring than the daily ruminations and soul-searching of a househusband, yet nothing I have read recently has been more engaging than the travails of Toru Okada, the unemployed protagonist of Haruki Murakami’s greatest opus. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle tells many stories in recounting the strange circumstances that press themselves into Toru’s life. At the heart of all these tales is the mysterious dissolution of his marriage to his wife Kumiko. With a warm, down-to-earth voice and a knack for creating credible characters and spinning a lively yarn, Murakami leavens the arresting philosophical symbolism of modern Japanese fiction that is so capacious and so pervasive on many levels.

• South of the Border, West of the Sun – Haruki Murakami

This is less a story of transcendent passion than a rather bleak look at the fear of disappointment that inhibits most human interaction. Redemption, in Murakami’s hands, is a matter of recognizing the role his main character, Hajime, has played in disappointing others, instead of dwelling on the injustice of his own disappointment. Ultimately, South of the Border, West of the Sun is different from what we have come to expect of Murakami: less surreal and complex, more introspective, less comic, and much closer to our lives.

• In the Miso Soup – Ryu Murakami

Having established a fairly conventional set-up from the get-go, Murakami gradually increases the tension and raises the stakes but furtively sidesteps expectations by slamming his big revelation straight into the middle of the novel. The masterstroke is when Murikami pulls back at just the right point before he makes his novel unreadable. And this is the case of the novel as a whole, it works as a thriller, a page-turner – one not for the weak of stomach – but its attempts at a greater cultural resonance of Japan’s nightlife is minutely labored.

• Piercing – Ryu Murakami

The plotting of the psychological thriller that this novel follows is little short of immaculate. The shortness and the fast-paced of the narrative show up the crafted symmetry of the principal characters: predator/victim, piercer/piercee, mutilator/self-mutilator. It’s a good, rather old-fashioned skill that is executed quite gracefully, but perhaps the most lingering aftermath of this novel is its true representation of how a tragicomedy truly functions. It is a pretty gory and often unpleasant tale but Murakami presents an intersecting picture of Japan’s own disillusionment of duality that comes off quite daunting.

• Anima Farm – George Orwell

This is a very well written critique of how socialist ideals are corrupted by powerful people, how the uneducated masses are taken advantage of, and how the dictator or communist leaders turn into capitalists. Orwell as usual has written a nearly perfect piece of writing, both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works. It’s a classic that brilliantly serves as an excellent exercise in metaphors, analogies and creativity.

• Lullaby – Chuck Palahniuk

Here, Palahniuk flirts with the idea of a world without noise, suggesting that noise distracts us from the important aspects of life. At times, the novel is so obsessed with the idea of stretching social values that eventually the idea itself detracts from the story’s focal point. Nonetheless, the book manages to add its scattered echoes nicely when you reach the last page; it’s not spectacular by any means but it presents a rare chance to study Palahniuk’s unique views on society and reality.

• Snow – Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk once again provides a book about the contemporary difficulties faced by his nation (Turkey) that is being torn between tradition, religion, and modernization. It is a novel of lesser scope than its grand and magical predecessor that is My Name Is Red, and it is certainly more narrowly focused, although it is enriched by the author’s same mesmerizing mixes: cruelty and farce, poetry and violence, and a voice whose timbres range from a storyteller’s playfulness to the dark torment of a lost explorer.

• The Subtle Knife – Philip Pullman

As the middle book of the ambitious His Dark Materials trilogy, it is unsurprising how edgy it dangles on its own. Seeing that Pullman is obviously a fine writer and an intense inventor of concepts and backgrounds for the various creatures he populate in his story, the characterizations he provides remain basic at best with only the two main protagonists showing any real life. The closure is also less satisfying but the ultimate ride has its plunge that propels us to read more fiercely as we go on.

• The Amber Spyglass – Philip Pullman

His Dark Materials is an overwhelming reading experience, brought to a sublime and touching close by The Amber Spyglass. Its myriad twisting and intertwining plots and its emotional roller coaster make it an exhausting yet exhilarating read as its various questions, deceptions, and discoveries challenge readers to grapple with their own ideas of God, religion, life, love, and death. Despite the few overcrowded muddles and ignored, simply plot-driven characters, it is, for the most part, a great and an important contribution in children and young adult literature.

• The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

This Booker Prize winner captures the seemingly inconsequential experiences of how unspoken words and accumulated mistakes can sometimes produce irreversible tragedy. An inspired work of art that is quenched with lyrical prose, intelligent storytelling, and sublime characterizations; undoubtedly, it is destined to survive the test of time.

• A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

Relentlessly silly, improbable, and off the wall, Toole’s Pulitzer wining novel is s simply and insistently a great, perfect comedy of errors and airs, a farce of Olympic proportions. Ignatius Reilly, our contemptuous hypochondriac protagonist, has got to be one of the most off-putting main characters in modern literature, but this hygienically-challenged intellectual oaf has something in common with a soap-opera vixen: you just love to hate him. An unforgettable and a hilarious modern classic to the very core!

• A Special Providence – Richard Yates

This is a dry, acutely sharp perceptive novel, in which Yates displays a pathological relationship or complicated emotion in a few devastating sentences – that makes this book so potent. The lives he describes may be yawningly ordinary and gray, but the plain, uncluttered way he describes them is startlingly, deliciously colorful.

• Disturbing the Peace – Richard Yates

It has been said that Disturbing the Peace is a semi-autobiographical of Yates’ own difficulties as an alcoholic depressant, so it makes sense that there’s a strong purgative element in the narrative here. As if he’s using the book to distance himself from his own experience of madness, Yates pushes it further and further away before retiring it into an institution at the end. The plot of the book is somewhat uneven but it is intricately detailed, coherent, and artful throughout.

• Eleven Kinds of Loneliness – Richard Yates

Originally published in 1962, one year after the release of Revolutionary Road, this sublime collection of short stories stands with Yates’ earlier masterpiece novel at the pinnacle of American postwar fiction. Yates casts his characteristically compassionate eye over eleven unrelenting but flawless portraits of human frailty and resilience; it’s a cult book for an entire generation but for today it seems even more powerful.

• Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates

Revolutionary Road is a novel that readers are likely to think about long after they have finished reading. Yates certainly has a flair of displaying the human angst in its all hideous colors, like the frustrations of not living up to one’s own expectations or facing the terrifying nothingness that one can feel about life. His narrative is combination of gorgeous prose and gruff realism that can leave readers’ heads spinning for many days to follow: a melancholic outcome for reading a beautifully disturbing and excruciatingly painful novel.

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

You can imagine my (subtle) surprise then, when I discovered that Uncharted successfully kept marking off the list of my expectations of what is supposed to offer one by one. Indeed, there are transitional cinematics, duck and cover mechanics, few and far between environmental puzzles, explosive barrels, ethnic enemies, car chases, platforming, QTEs (Quick Time Events) and, just like any supposed grand game of late, an arid final boss battle. However, even with such predictabilities, Uncharted remains to be the exception not the rule, particularly in the field of action-oriented adventure games. Calling it ambitious sounds a little bit embellished on anyone’s assurance, but its effort to nail everything right is commendable. While its success story is largely dwindled on its aspiration, it certainly has its fair share of litany that finely borders the edge of utter frustration.

While there’s nothing frustrating about Nathan Drake, it is quite unsettling to see Naughty Dog’s manifestation of “everyman” is a borderline killer. By the end of his escapade in the Amazon, Drake would have killed hundreds upon hundreds of mercenaries for the sake of finding a lost treasure (which may or may not exist), and for him to act completely remorseless about it (particular in the “Out of the Frying Pan” chapter) doesn’t essentially make him any different than what we have seen before. This is, unfortunately, a common syndrome in videogames that many have already diagnosed it, though as pretentious as it may sound, “Ludonarrative Dissonance”.

Yet it’s still worth mentioning that the persona of our hero Nathan Drake is nicely crafted and agreeably fresh, albeit Naughty Dog clearly sought other mediums as a repository for characterization ideas. But with his “three-quarters-tucked’ t-shirt, sense of wit, and subtle charms, the bedraggled Nathan does look and behave like an “everyman”, at least when there’s no one to gun down. His remarks and quibbles upon facing dangerous situations add a tinge of realism to his literally colorful rendering, and when coupled with the brazen and slightly zany Elena, the dynamic duo effortlessly carries out the game’s narrative without the assistance of twists or plot devices, which they are none, or at least good enough to act as incentives.

However, even if we accepted Drake’s unpredictable transition and disharmony of his acts, and even if we excused Uncharted’s adherence to predictable ideas, the uncompromising path the game treads on is still worthy of “wag of the finger”. Almost every enemy, action set piece, and environmental hazard is activated upon a certain shift (whether time, place, or both), leaving few gaps for creativity and large ones for redundancy. The choreography of enemies’ movements and ambushes is so seamless that if you are aware of where and when they spawn, and your marksmanship skills are manageably sharpened, then chances you can sail right through the game’s twenty-two chapters in a record time.

This rigged design is also perceived in the game’s overall levels structure, as only one road can lead to Rome and none other. If there were something that Uncharted didn’t borrow from Snake Eater, Tomb Raider, and Gears of War, it would be the unrestricted approaches to take on a certain task, or at least the illusion to do so.

With that begin said, the game definitely embraces impetuous moments, but sadly in the wrong places. They are certain action set pieces in the game where, at the middle of them, plunge you to death simply because you couldn’t perceive what has happened or what button or action you are supposed to press next. Also when you are finishing off enemies as you gradually move forward in certain clearings, others unexpectedly storm behind you and shoot you dead before you have the chance to duck to safety, especially if you playing in harder difficulty settings where enemies’ fire is more damaging. Fortunately, the game’s checkpoints are merciful most of the time, and you can rewind and resume the challenges until you get them right, but through such continuous replays, trial-and-error would easily creep into the game’s structure, and brief instants of frustration would become something of a norm.

But spaced out from these ugly obstructions is a beautiful game, a visual narrative really, that isn’t shy to breathe life on every corner and spur wondrous spectacles on every action. The verdant, prodigious forests and the thirst inducing crystalline waters are absolute mesh of technological marvel and extraordinary art design. The dingy caverns and old catacombs, while somber, they never look the same on every corridor. The aged ruins and chapels are never too old to flaunt their striking architectures to wondering interlopers. Indeed, for a game that roughly exhausts a quarter of the PlayStation 3’s graphical prowess, it’s remarkable how humidity and wetness can be diffused even during the coldest nights of playtime.

Facial expressions and body movements are also authentically and commonly human: every contortion, grimace, smirk, and irritation, and every stumble, exhaustion, twist, and contraction is believably rendered. Who knew that a male videogame character such as Nathan Drake can engender such subtle and graceful gesticulations as it is seen here (no sexism intended). This recherché presentation and the likewise breathtaking adventure both add a motion and an impression that main performers of a videogame don’t need to look too eccentric and/or blown up, and the setting don’t need to be too fantastical (though the game has its own version of zombie monsters) to win admirations from its spectators. After all, “keeping it real” is not an easy feat to pull off, but when it is done and played right it’s laudably applauded and readily committed to memory.

Surmise to say, not only Uncharted is a safe game to recommend, but also an impossible game to dislike. Its ideas are no longer novel, though its cohesive and tight managements of its wild rides are worth imitating and yes, even replicating. The narrative might have been taken from a lousy B-rated movie, but the pacing and the ingredients of what makes it a great game are worthy for an Oscar nomination, or the equivalent of that in video games world.

It would be fair to confess that my adulation for Revolutionary Road had galvanized my impulses to purchase the rest of Richard Yates’s oeuvres, possibly as a self-conceivable mean to prop up his forgotten works even by the tinniest margins. I am fixated on reading them sequentially by their years of publication, simply to get a sense of Yates’s 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.

Perhaps, if some of us place Revolutionary Road higher than the aforementioned novels is because Yates’s kept his characters in the dark far too much for us to discern and far too cynical for us to like. Frank and April Wheeler, the protagonists of his first masterpiece, were essentially just that, but their disparagement seemed necessary for their own survival. On the contrary, Robert and Alice Prentice, the son and mother in A Special Providence, were so caught up with their own strife to be distinguished that they have completely overlooked their shortcomings. That, if they have stopped pleasing their selfish desires and the desires of others they would probably have rectified their future before it is too late.

But this is the beauty of Yates’s spare, deadpan prose and narrative structure, which morbidly match the severity and sullenness of war and its aftermath. The cruel, unflinching fact that Robert’s coltish enthusiasm is not enough to win him popularity and heroism in battle or among his comrades. The unspectacular gritty reality that there’s so little waiting for him back home to persevere, whether it’s in his subpar academic accomplishments or the fallacies of his histrionic mother. And that, for once, Yates’s trademark murkiness does not seem out of place or excessively pervasive.

Indeed, the deft sketches of Prentice’s colleagues of war burgeon an element of humanity to a sordid and merciless theme; not to mention the bullies and power-freaks whom are quite complex in their rendering, such as John Quint, the articulate intellectual who Prentice idolizes, and Lieutenant Covely, whose down-to-earth camaraderie and desire to be liked barely mask a fear others of his rank rarely display publicly.

Of course it is the single mother of Robert, Alice Prentice, who filches our attention so persistently just as much as she does in her life. At the beginning, when her son is practically gritting his teeth to stop himself from snapping at her, she seems almost comical; a theatrical woman with delusions of an extravagant nature, to be able to persuade herself that her big break as a baroque sculptor is just around the corner. Yates’s description of her pitifully melodramatic outbursts of breast-clutching, vociferous sobbing and falling to the ground kicking her feet is gleefully, wickedly amusing. But as he reveals more of her past, her selfishness is tinged with poignancy.

Such perceptive and sympathetic emotions are scarcely analogous to what we may reflect in Disturbing the Peace: a semi-biographical and a tale of alcoholism starring a pathetic and intriguing man named John Wilder. As a successful advertising agent and a crippling survivor of the society, Wilder descends and overcomes his fantasies and madness in fluctuation, depending on the amount of purgatives and the company of his young mistress. It’s a story about a self-absorbed man who we want him to better his own inadequacies, even though we still find it hard to root for his success; a rather predictable outcome, considering that Yates has created Wilder as a vessel for his own disgrace, and his excruciatingly harrowing experiences as a chronic drinker. Writing Disturbing the Peace is also his way of admitting defeat and that regardless of his own convictions he wasn’t immune from the postmodern meta-fictions that dominated the 60s and 70s.

Evidently, the portrait of John Wilder is well drafted, and his downward spiral to psychotic addiction is gut-wrenchingly dreamlike, despite Yates’s concise and unfussy writing. They are many moments where we feel embarrassed for his idiotic slurs, but we are so driven by our own empathy that we wish him a safe and quick recovery. Really, it is up to us whether we moralize or debase Wilder’s actions and weaknesses, and it is up to us to ponder his infidelity and childish ventures as necessary means of his survival. Most certainly, however, is that Wilder isn’t superficial, and perhaps he’s more relevant than we might think he is. His story is an intimation that providence can be sometimes more disturbing than it’s wishfully preconceived.

In summation, it would be also fair to admit that these novels have entertained me quite a lot, in spite of their somber and depressing depreciations on human vulnerability. Yates skillfully managed to testify how much in American culture has faded in 20th century, and how much from that odd times remain lively in the current, moral imaginations. He effortlessly situates in the contemporary, new computer age, and able to chronicle his early fascinations and disappointments with empty communication, which has led many Americans to self-absorption, narcissism, megalomania, and dejection. Undoubtedly, this is an amazing feat for an author whom the time seems to have forgotten him.

• 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.

Spring

The description of first season in the film, “Spring”, sees the untroubled consciousness of childhood getting awry when it is stained by blood and death of the innocents. The child Buddhist apprentice (Jong-ho Kim), after he goes out to the nearby woods to pick up herbs as a mean of daily exercise, begins to torment three forest creatures (a fish, a frog, and a snake) by tying them up with a small rock and then giggling impassively to their struggles. Meanwhile, the child’s master (Yeong-su Oh) observes intently and quietly behind the scenes to the absurdity of his humor, and waits until he’s asleep during the night and ties him with a rock in a similar fashion. All perplexed and ashamed, the child monk receives a severe and brief scolding from his master in the morning, and that he should return to the woods and unburdens the animals he harmed while the he carries the load of rock on his back. Of course, even the physical impediment doesn’t outweigh the consciousness of guilt, as the master warns the child monk that if any of the creatures dies he will “carry the stone in his heart forever”. And indeed he does, after he discovers that the snake didn’t survive his childlike cruelty, the child sops heartily due to his committed crime against the innocent of nature.

It is here that Kim, the storyteller of this affectionate tale, paints a familiar picture of discipline, which also remains to be unlike anything we have seen before. He conveys that even when humankind is closely surrounded with nature (the boy and his master lives on a floating monastery in the middle of a crystalline lake, surrounded by lavish green forest) he is still a being of destruction, regardless of the triviality of his conducts. The spiritual punishments, which the older monk distills into a set of lessons throughout the course of the film, are self-evident and enigmatic. While they are severely constructed, they embody the obdurate notion of responsibility. They also reflect aspects of Buddhism not always amply appreciated in the West: often witty and occasionally austere.

Summer

This lesson continues to be carried out in the next cycle of ten seasons or so, when “Summer” and its licentious freedom drifts on the monastery, and when a beautiful young girl (Yeo-jin Ha) joins the master monk and his adolescent apprentice (Jae-kyeong Seo) in their solitary confinement to seek a treatment from a nameless, feverish illness. Aroused and infatuated, the young apprentice, while fighting his own sexual impulses, caresses the breasts of the young girl while sleeping in front of a Buddha statue, which she wakes up and slaps him for his indiscretion. In a guilty panic, the mortified monk beings to pray ceaselessly, something his master notes as strange. The girl quickly forgives him however; and no sooner they let their sexual desires overwhelm them completely. The master is perspicacious of course, and catches them sleeping and floating atop of the boat after they have committed their act. Rather than a physical admonishment, the master portends his apprentice that “lust leads to desire for possession, and possession leads to murder”, and orders the girl to leave. The young monk consequentially reacts, and driven by his youthful emotions, runs away from the monastery at night in pursuit of the girl, taking the monastery’s Buddha statue with him.

While it is easy for anyone to accuse Mr. Kim of being antisexual, or to nauseate at the Buddhists’ adherence to celibacy, in actuality, he is simply reiterating the same principles from the first segment: that straying from the path of spiritual commitment might produce terrible consequences to those who don’t comprehend the functions of the real world. After all, the young monk isn’t yet acquainted with the material world the young girl belongs to, nor he has mastered the mystical competence and maturity obtained through the practices of traditional Buddhism. In fact, by taking the Buddha statue upon his escape, the sexually submerged apprentice deludes himself that he is capable of achieving spirituality without the necessity of incarceration. Either that or he is so ashamed that he took the only witness that caught him on his intrusion with the young girl.

Fall

Thus, one can imagine the harsh reality a person would face, who has lived in a spiritual confinement for many years, when he is suddenly plunged onto the material world so unexpectedly. Indeed, after a decade or more cycles, the prophecy that the master has foretold his disciple becomes true, and now the latter (Young-min Kim) is a wanted fugitive who has murdered his wife due to her infidelity. The master, even after he learns about the warrant arrest on his former student, allows him to stay in the monastery and even prevents him from committing a ritual suicide. Then, he instructs him to carve the Chinese characters of the Heart Sutra tradition after he paints them on the upside deck of the monastery using a cat’s tail dipped in black ink. Soon enough, as the former apprentice continues to carve and the master paints, two detectives arrive at the monastery and try to arrest him, but the master asks them to let him finish his task first. Seemingly influenced by the soothing presence of the master, the detectives help the old monk paint his apprentice’s carvings in orange, green, blue and purple. After the job is done, the detectives take the ex-student away. After they leave, the master, knowing he is at the end cycle of his life, builds a pyre in the rowboat. He seals his ears, eyes, nose and mouth with paper in the same suicide ritual and meditates, as he suffocates and burns to death, leaving behind traces of his tears in the paper seals as flames engulf him.

Conceptually, “Fall” usually represents decay and rebirth, a season where nature sheds its colors and past existence and reawakened anew, and also invites the emergent, younger forms of life to take their place and pass down their credos. Such imagery, perhaps, represents the precise implication that Kim is trying to convey in his visual narrative. Atonement, after all, is liberally accessible to anyone who wishes to endure it and then to emerge from it as pristine as human resolves can reach, a privilege that Kim consents to the former apprentice to undertake after his heinous crime. The master thereby acknowledges and respects the tenacity of his student, and the matter of taking his own life while leaving his belongings behind is his own way of showing this realization. He knows that he has nothing more to teach and that the time has come for his student to become a master of his own and of somebody else’s.

Winter

The apprentice, now middle-aged and wiser (played by Kim Ki Duk himself), returns to his former home atop the frozen lake, which has been drifting uninhabited for years. He finds his master’s clothes lay out just before his death, and digs his master’s remains out of the frozen rowboat, setting them to rest in the Buddha statue under a waterfall. It is here that the story completes its cycle of seasons, with the introduction of a baby abandoned by a mother to his care. The circumstances of this abandonment are horrific, and yet its beauty stands out amidst the stillness of “Winter”. In a similar fashion to his punishment when he was a young kid, the apprentice ties the monastery’s large, circular stone to his body and climbs to the summit of the tallest surrounding mountain holding another statue, which he places there.

The last strenuous trials of the graduating student represent his distinctiveness and emergence from the shadows of the former master. His acceptance to nurture a child signifies the transition of responsibility, marking off his duties as an apprentice to a full-fledged teacher. The portrayal of different human emotions and convictions thorough the four seasons is now complete, and the cycle of human circumstance beings anew thought not quite different.

…And Spring

Certainly, as the new master now lives in the monastery with the discarded baby (his apprentice), the boy is shown to torment a tortoise and, wandering into the rocky hills, echoes his predecessor, forcing stones into the mouths of a fish, frog and snake. The cycle of nature and human experience continue…

Ultimately, all of the elements in Kim’s film comes together and work with perfect synchronicity, and even if it must be said that this is never the most ambitious or original of pictures, the film’s sheer devotion to its story and images is stirring. Indeed, the film simply could have gone very wrong, whether by tipping into the maudlin or inflating into abstraction, but Kim’s artful and unfaltering imagery maintain an unfamiliar scrutiny of spirituality that evokes both curiosity and veneration. It is a work of transcendental experience and beauty that even the exquisite temple itself is a character, as well as a metaphor for the idyllic escape from weltering humanity everyone must crave at one time or another.