Category Archives: Film Reviews

Review of Scott Hicks’ “Glass” by Tom Savage

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About The Omnipresent Phillip Glass

Glass: A Portrait in Twelve Parts, a film produced and directed by Scott Hicks
By Tom Savage

This excellent documentary/interview film with and about Phillip Glass starts with him going down the Astroland roller coaster in Coney Island with a smile on his face. All those years of involvement with Buddhism and other spiritual traditions would seem to have paid off. But why subject one’s life to danger gratuitously? The question is neither asked nor answered. Glass claims not to be a Buddhist. Nevertheless he has a Buddhist teacher named Gelek Rinpoche and is on the boards of numerous Buddhist organizations including Tibet House and a magazine I get four times per year about Buddhist topics called Tricycle. The film features Chuck Close, the famous artist who paints portraits mostly in black dots that look like blown up photographs. Close has known Glass for many years, since they were young and unknown, and has painted many portraits of him. The gallery at the Metropolitan Opera was given over this spring to these portraits. I don’t remember how many there were but they filled the small gallery. In the film, Joanne Akalaitis, the director, is interviewed. She was once married to Phillip Glass. Glass is quoted as saying “a new language requires a new technique.” When he was young, Glass made his living as a cabdriver. He talks about his early concerts in lofts. It so happens I went to one of those over thirty years ago. His music at first seemed loud, repetitive, and boring. I didn’t get the point then, as many people still don’t now. It so happens I love Glass’s many operas, a good number of which I have seen over the years, but find his Symphonies boring. Close and Glass say they like negative reviews. They must be kidding. Still, I suppose the early non-comprehenders contributed to their fame. Asked about fame through “vilification”, Glass says “it helped.”

This is a good film but has some drawbacks as a movie. A lot of talking heads. I couldn’t help wondering if this film will be shown eventually on the public television series American Masters? It looks and sounds very much like one of those programs which is okay, I suppose, but this is supposed to be a movie I’m seeing in a movie theater. Glass inherited money, after which he bought a home in the country, in Nova Scotia. He hasn’t driven a taxi in a long, long time.

What is music “about” anyway? Glass is shown working with the conductor Dennis Russell Davies, a champion of many new music composers, on a piece called “Waiting For The Barbarians”, a piece not based on the great Cavafy poem of that name. Glass cites Ginsberg as an influence and a friend. Allen never wrote a poem of that name.

Glass’s father knew and liked classical music. Glass was the youngest student at the Peabody Conservatory and then moved to Juilliard. A dead wife is mentioned briefly named “Candy.” His current wife is interviewed at length. Glass claims to be open to suggestions from his co-workers and collaborators, also filmmakers. Glass has scored many films in recent years including at least one by Woody Allen. Glass calls himself an “impersonator” and an “impostor” then laughs. Erroll Morris and Godfrey Reggio, filmmakers are interviewed. Also Martin Scorsese who made Kundun, about the Dalai Lama. Although influenced a great deal by Ravi Shankar’s music, Glass also studied with Nadia Boulanger, the great French teacher who taught most of the important American and French composers who have emerged since the 1930’s. Glass says he was afraid of her although she, somehow, gave him self-confidence. But to him Shankar is as important a teacher as was Boulanger. Although to many of us the music of Ravi Shankar seems like a dated fad now, if one listens to it again, one can see that there is a relationship possible between it an Glass’ music. Some of this film, however, is about Glass as a person. He does the Chinese meditative exercise practice chi gong every morning. This Taoist practice brings us to Glass’s other spiritual interests, including a Mexican Toltec shaman.

Also, it turns out that Waiting For The Barbarians is a novel by the well-known South African novelist J.M. Coetze. Finally, Glass comes off as a truly unpretentious and even humble man. He still seems surprised by the good luck that brought him fame after his opera Einstein on the Beach was produced and directed by Robert Wilson years ago. Although he is certainly now the best-known American composer of his generation, it is not one hundred percent certain that his music, outside his operas, will last. It’s initial hypnotic effect has given way to official acceptance, in that his twenty year old opera Satyagraha about Gandhi was done this year by the Metropolitan Opera company itself, which had never produced one of his opera before. Although done at the building which houses the Metropolitan Opera during a period when the company was not in residence, Einstein on the Beach was actually produced independently.

Although the film was informative, it added little to my understanding of Glass, as I’ve been listening to his music with pleasure for nearly thirty years.

Hero: A Visually Stunning Old-Fashioned Crowd- and Government-Pleaser – by Susanne Lee

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Hero, Zhang Yimou’s foray into wuxia, martial arts, marks a departure from both his earlier period dramas depicting feudal China, Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern, and his contemporary urban stories, To Live and The Story of Qiu Jiu. Zhang takes a familiar tale, previously explored by his former fellow Fifth Generation director Chen Kaige in The Emperor and the Assassin (a huge commercial disaster), and adds his own imprint by assembling a cast of Hong Kong’s biggest stars and letting cinematographer Christopher Doyle loose in China’s glorious deserts.

Jet Li plays Nameless, a black-clad assassin and minor official whose parents and family were killed by the Qin, and who has been summoned to the austere Qin court where he sits before the Emperor (Chen DaoMing). He presents the sovereign weapons of the three legendary assassins he has vanquished, Flying Snow, Broken Sword and Sky. It is the period of the Warring States and the Qin emperor seeks to unite the country by quashing all dissent.

Zhang directs Christopher Doyle, the greatest cinematographer working today, to go color mad in Hero. Doyle creates an elaborate scheme where each character gets a lush, saturated color to depict his story. The production design is so complete, every article of clothing and every architectural detail is consistent with the character’s palette.

In a initial sequence, Nameless confronts Sky (Donnie Yen) and interrupts his chess game. Their duel in a rain-drenched courtyard is played out in their minds as a blind musician plays. With each kill, Nameless is permitted to move ten steps closer to the Emperor and when he gets close enough, he will assassinate him

Shifting to the vermilion, Nameless rides to a calligraphy academy, where Broken Sword (Tony Leung chiu-wai) and Falling Snow (Maggie Cheung) perfect the nineteen ways of writing the character sword. The Emperor’s army mounts a spectacular horseback attack, something like Kurosawa’s Ran on ‘roids; the dedicated students do calligraphy, impervious to the CGI arrows filling the sky, as Snow and Nameless fend off the storm in an impressive, effects-heavy sequence.

Nameless recounts a message from Sky, who the viewer suddenly learns was Falling Snow’s ex-lover. In a jealous rage, Sword seduces his assistant and disciple, feisty Moon (Zhang Ziyi), creating a fatal rift between him and Snow, who kills Broken Sword. Autumn scarlets set up the background for the clash between the two women. In a rare bit of humor, Snow says in classic 70s Shaw Brothers Martialese to Moon, “You ask to die. I will help you.”

In what becomes increasingly an exploration of style over content, Zhang squanders the talents of his gifted actors. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung movingly conveyed their longing for each other as would-be lovers in Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love and Ashes of Time. In Hero, the audience gets a lingering view of an actor’s eye and is left wondering, what for?

The Emperor does not believe believes Nameless’ tales and their conversation continues, leading to the inevitable Rashomon comparison with multiple versions of a single story, but Hero lacks a sense of gravity and the distinct points of view. In the next version, Nameless asks Snow and Sword to help him. Zhang and Doyle concoct one stunning sequence after another; another Zen battle of the minds between Nameless and Sword in a lake surrounding an open air pavilion. Swords pierce the surface of the water; Sword meets his maker and Nameless earns ten more steps.

In a white version, Sword cannot bring himself to kill the emperor; the enraged Snow kills him. By now, the Rashomon connection is tenuous, this is repetitious pretty stuff, little below the sheen of an exquisite veneer. Moon mourns Sword and Nameless kills Snow.

In the green segment, it is revealed that Snow is the daughter of a Zhao general killed by the Qin regime and seeks revenge. In an idyllic rather giddy interlude, Snow and Sword write calligraphy together, before they dramatically storm the palace. Sword battles the emperor eloquently amid verdant sheets of fabric, but when Sword has the chance to assassinate him, he hesitates. The sympathetic emperor sheds tears when he hears this version of the saga. Nameless continues to offers layers of truth and falsehood and the appearance of reality in his story.

The scholar swordsman Sword writes a message in the sand for Nameless, “All under heaven.” Finally, Snow tracks down Sword and kills him for the betrayal and in a moment of grief commits suicide. The theme of uniting the warring states suggests an uncomfortably imperialistic pro-China subtext.

The emperor’s role is the best drawn in contrast to the other actors who are given little to do in sketchily drawn roles. The real hero is the benevolent ruler, who unravels Nameless’s stories and when his courtiers demand “permission to execute,” he reluctantly assents, knowingly that he must protect “all under heaven.” Rah China.

Comparisons to the flawed Crouching Tiger are inevitable with the extensive wirework, CGI, even down to a similar-sounding Tan Dun score featuring Itzak Perlman instead of Tiger’s Yoyo Ma. In Tiger  Ang Lee got evocative if somewhat overheated performances out of his actors. Zhang, usually a fine director of actors, forgets his previous work with Gong Li and Jiang Wen, and lets close ups, wind and flowing swathes of fabric replace dialog and acting.

The action sequences are hardly memorable, and despite the work of Ching Siu tung (the listed director of such films as Swordsman II and a classic Hong Kong martial arts choreographer), the martial arts choreography is not first rate. Jet Li and Donnie Yen fought superior battles in Once Upon a Time in China.

Doyle seemed to have replayed Ashes of Time on a large budget. His usual freewheeling experimentation seems restrained by the Ran-like spectacle. With dialog consisting of a few lines and the cool symbolism, it is hard to attach any emotion to the characters who all, it must be admitted, make beautiful hangers for their monochrome outfits and die exquisitely.

Hero is a mediation on the nature of power, loyalty and sacrifice, but Zhang’s exploration simply skims the surface of these issues, since he has chosen to trade plot and drama for visual pyrotechnics. More troubling is Hero‘s glorification of the Qin emperor, compassionate even as he gives the difficult order, in his duty and ultimate quest to unify a divided land. Has Zhang made a Faustian bargain with the Chinese government not to censor any more of his work? It appears so. Hero is an old fashioned big-budget crowd and government pleaser.

Zhang sacrifices both plot and emotional content to gorgeous cinematography and design. Hero is eye candy that brings fleeting pleasure and leaves a lingering sense of emptiness.

American Skin, 8 Mile, and the death of racial misconceptions

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      “American Skin”

      written by Ely Wynton

      published by Crown Publishing

 

      “8 Mile”

      directed by Curtis Hanson

      produced by Universal Studios/Dreamworks

 

American Skin, 8 Mile, and the death of racial misconceptions

 

review by Okore Okirike

 

If Ely Wynton was wrapping up his cultural thesis American Skin during the first Oscar rush of the 2002-2003 season, he might’ve appended a chapter on the next big step by a major industry that brings a heel down on slices of whte-bread american life. The industry is Hollywood. The milestone is the film”8 mile”. The occasion is the first true showcase of the white-american sub-minority. That is, Caucasian-Americans youth feeling burdened of their whiteness where hip-hop and it’s preeminent blackness actually are the status quo. The”streets” of Detroit are one such place. The modern media’s concept of”cool” is another, if only figuratively.

 

In his book, Wynton asserts that media and big business are the cauldron and bonfire stewing up the freshest batches of melting-pot americans. He unwisely diminishes the effects of sexual attraction, and of aesthetic attraction for one another’s cultural affects, music, foods, dances etc. Lately, however, it does seem to be big-business’ desire to capitalize on it’s best kept secret that has the pot bubbling. The secret is our natural attraction for each-other with only conditioned regard for the fabricated”do-not-cross” lines of race. Big-busness perpetuates that this is strange and exotic, in order to further one of it’s more prominent interests: The preservation of the white-american majority. This paradox is where the greed of capitalism begins to eat it’s own tail. Historically, it has been the greediest of corporations–example: Coca-cola–that first gives in and sets out to cash in on our underlying desire to love one-another. Example: Coca-cola’s Mean Joe Green ad campaign in the early 1980s. Wynton pinpoints this as the first major turnng point.

 

In the commercial, Mean Joe–scourge/all star of the NFL at the time– is offered a coke by a cute little white kid. Dramatc tension; he takes it. Dramatic tension; he drinks it. Release, and the angels sing. Then Joe, the media painted paragon of scary blackness, returns the favor by tossing the kid his sweaty but valuable game jersey. Millions of white parents who hadn’t really wanted to believe that Joe would maul their little angels given half the chance, breathed sighs of relief and bought coke by the barrlel-full. The climax of”8 mile” pesents a similar such catharsis. The protagonist Rabbit–a white lyricist–is embraced by an overwhelmingly black audience that seemed posed and ready to boo him off stage. 8 mile road is the long stretch that seperates the suburbs of Detroit from the Detroit shouted out when emcees take a moment to represent. Heard more frequently since the preceeding rise of the movie’s star and driving force: Detroit lyricist Eminem. The protagonist Rabbit’s life eerily mirrors Eminem’s own, though stopping short of the of the whirl-wind tour, media mud-slinging, and eventual acceptance as Elvis reincarnated. The next “White Negro” Wynton addresses the”white negro” concept in American skin. It involves a white figure gaining popularity for the parts of his shtick assimilated from black artists. Davy Crockett may have been the first, with his fiddle playing and boot-stomping Tim Pang Alley style back in that era. The snide tone of this view may be appropriate for the shamelessly self-aggrandizing Crockett, and for the cowardly and dishonest”King of Rock and Roll”, but it looses weight with Eminem, who is earnest in homage to his black contemporaries and predecessors. In the film, Rabbit actually finds himself struggling for respect amidst their shadows.

 

His saving grace, and the moral of the movie, is to embrace and explore his own identity. This has been a basic pillar of hip-hop as an artform from the very beginning. Thus aroze the mistaken notion that succesful hip-hop would always be about the ghetto, thug-life, and being oppressed but dreaming big. Rabbit meets success with flows about the trailer park, domestic squabbles, and being oppressed but dreaming big. The audience at the on-screen emcee competition eats it up. The same crowd might’ve booed off the stage a white emcee who tried to jump on the thug-life wagon. As Rabbit pens his show-stopping lyrics, his little sister is accross from him drawing with crayon a picture of her house and her family. A subtle refrence to the embracing of identity that is second nature to a child when creating art. The succes of 8 mile was a wake up call to hundereds of square Hollywood executives. Suddenly they realized they could draw their white-youth demographic, and black-youth demographic in to see the same film. Wynton mentions Make-up manufacturers having a similar epihanie when Cover-Girl had the sense to include it’s new darker shades in it’s regular line, rather than launching black-woman lines like it’s competitors. Suddenly the company’s popularity almost doubled.

 

Big business seems to be the king of overlooking the obvious. But Wynton makes a similar mistake in perpetuating the melting-pot concept. The pot is more of a bowl. And the stew is more of a salad where no two vegetables are the same, and new variations with new unique tastes are constantly being formed. When identity is embraced by each ingredient, and the identity of other ingredients is as well respected, the result is a truly vibrant and ever-changing human salad.

 

I like Stories with Bitches as Characters

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I like Stories with Bitches as Characters

 

Lourdes Vázquez

Translation by Enriqueta Carrington

 

 

True bitches:  the one who desires her progeny

the one who abandons it

the one who guards it jealously

the one who despises it

the one who kills the puppies

 

the pack of mongrel bitches

who wander

around my mother’s neighborhood

without anything being done about it

howling + bloody +

destroying their pieces

for the sake of carnal odors,

of she-animal fights.

 

My sister and her love for bitches.

My father declaring his yard a burial ground for bitches.

 

My neighbor’s dog, small, white, furry.  She carries her around in her purse with the  little dancing head looking out at everybody in the train, which she has taken at West 4th  station.  People smile when they see the little furry one.  At 14th Street a cop pushes through.  He tries to board the train in the middle of the crowd and PAFFFFFF! the cudgel sets loose and whacks the animal.

Has anything been left of the poor thing?

The islands of Sicily and Tortola have the same climate.  Everything that grows in Sicily grows in Tortola.  I have lived on both islands and when I would finish a poem such as this one, I’d put it into an envelope and give it to any fisherman who was about to go out to high sea.  Fishermen always travel to larger lands to sell their catch.   The fishermen give the envelope to a pilot and the pilot delivers it at the other side of the sea, to be published and read.  We’ve seen so many bitches on these islands.  They arrive with the fishermen, pups, old ones + they go off to the mangrove swamps and the hills where they reproduce, feeding on everything that moves around them.

 

 

Dog = “mammal, carnivorous, domestic, of very variable size, shape and fur according to the breed.  A sharp sense of smell and some intelligence.  Profoundly loyal.” = Reads the dictionary.

 

 

Dulce,

 

 

That freckled bitch.

 

 

WAS HOT!!!}

Was hot!!!

 

 

That is to say, all the males went after her.  One night four dogs ambushed her.  We tried to get the males off her.  How?  One throws boiling water at the male’s member. Note that the member is red, burning with blood.  One strikes the male’s back with a cane as many times as may be necessary.  One must strike hard, until the pain in the bones is stronger than lust.

 

I’ve never had Dulce’s good fortune, or rather that intensity and I don’t know whether these days I love Dulce or I hate her.

 

 

 

A bitch was watching Mariana hemming the \italic{puertorriqueña} flag.  Mariana was sitting in a soft easy chair.  Two cushions against the back-rest. The easy chair was placed in front of her window, over there in the Bronx, to be precise.  It was winter and Mariana preferred natural light to yellow irregular candlelight, that’s why she was in front of that window.

 

Here is Mariana hemming our flag.  The black, golden-spotted bitch  climbed onto the window-sill.  Mariana has decided to open the window.   — Get outta here, you’re blocking my view!.

 

Voilà!!!

 

 

The bitch was frightened, she took a false step, plunging down five stories.  She’s fallen with a wallop on the sidewalk, her skull opened in a thousand smithereens.  A woman in scanty clothing, her blouse loaded with brooches, hoops in her earlobes, gold bracelets + rings, stopped beside the corpse only for a few moments and went on her way.

The Colossus of New York: A City In Thirteen Parts

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“The Colossus of New York:

A City In Thirteen Parts”

 

by Colson Whitehead,

published by Doubleday,

A Division of Random House, Inc.,

2003, New York. 161 pp.,

© 2003 by Colson Whitehead (b. 1961).

 

 

Gotham Tales

 

review by Norman Douglas

 

“To you, O Sun, the people of Dorian Rhodes set up this bronze statue reaching to Olympus when they had pacified the waves of war and crowned their city with the spoils taken from the enemy. Not only over the seas but also on land did they kindle the lovely torch of freedom.”

– Dedicatory inscription of the Colossus

 

 

“There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

 

– Narrator Mark Hellinger from The Naked City postscript

 

 

 

Thus ended each episode of the ancient ABC-TV series, its “gritty” slice of life tales emulating the location-based 1948 Mark Hellinger production of HUAC-blacklisted film noir auteur Jules Dassin’s Hollywood hit of the same name. This resonant tagline became a motto for Eisenhower America‘s crime docudrama faithful, a genre rife with predictable twists and flimsy subplots that reverberate up to the present day on shows like Law and Order and The Wire.

 

Since moving to New York City in 1981, I’ve had a few encounters with the forces of law and order myself. Luckily, none of these run-ins lasted more than twenty-four hours, nor did they approach such media-milled headline fodder as say, the Larry Davis stand-off or the Abner Louima debacle. However, my first-hand experiences with the banality of police bungling revealed for me the quotidian slack displayed by the very men and women whose lack of insight and personal drive (unless we mean driving around and around with a determination not to exit their vehicles before absolutely necessary) in a crisis has become notorious among critics from left, right and center. The boredom of the average beat cop’s hurry-up-and-wait work shift, the carcinogenic weight of their insufferably repetitive routine probably differs little from most of our lives (although they probably find themselves in the midst of scores of domestic disputes other than those of their own making). Of course, none of the petty crooks with whom I shared these brief periods of detention — substance abusers and boosters, as well as a stick-up kid and a Harlem bookmaker who called Howard Beach home — do not exactly fit the profile of the diabolically misanthropic mastermind (emotional, physical or spiritual) cripple bent on world domination. Mostly, they are kids nabbed out on the corner smoking a blunt, partygoers caught in the act of stocking up on illicit party favors, diehards netted while hanging around for too long at the bash… Everyone of them ends his (men and women are still held separately, despite gains made by women in other realms) story of capture in more or less the same way: “I knew I should’ve took my butt home,” or “I told myself not to go to that spot no more,” and the all-too-common denial of a nagging, metaphysical hunch, “I felt like some bad shit was gonna go down all day…” In a vast, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-consuming metropolis like New York City, hindsight is not only clarity, it’s everything.

 

 

Colson Whitehead’s Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts is full of the visionary inconsequence of New York. With his pen focused principally on Manhattan, Whitehead Ð a native born in the city and now a Brooklynite Ð delves into that city-island-within-The-City which, for most people living on Planet Earth, is the only New York that counts. For commuters and tourists, jobbers and visitors, Manhattan is the axis around which the rest of the metropolis revolves; for Manhattanites, the entire world spins around our thirty-five square mile chunk of solid bedrock (as depicted over twenty years ago on a now infamous New Yorker magazine cover). Whitehead’s impressions bring this island’s atmosphere to life, building upon and taking creative license with an abundant literary convention that harkens all the way back to Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language. (Begun in 1747 and completed in 1755, Johnson’s lexicon included over 40,000 definitions, an undertaking that remained without rival until James Murray started to compile the Oxford English Dictionary in 1884 Ð that project was finished in 1928, thirteen years after Murray’s death.)

 

In this, Whitehead’s third book (after 2001′s John Henry Days and 1999′s The Intuitionist), the author assembles a baker’s dozen of entries reflecting a city that he acknowledges is his own only inasmuch as it belongs to us all. He does this by improvising on a form that has attracted literature’s more learned practitioners since the onset of modernism: the lexicon permits the writer an opportunity to not only reorder a theme or subject of interest, it becomes a verbal repository into which one may unleash a portion of the bedeviling glut of information churning unbridled through one’s brain. For some writers, that surfeit may be one of facts, for others, it encompasses other literatures; index card after index card of citations fill Roland Barthes’ Fragments of A Lover’s Discourse, for example. For Whitehead, this verbal overflow is more immediate, becoming palpable not so much because the reader has lived in the city for a quarter of a century Ð nor because he or she may have diligently studied its texts for just as long, or longer. Rather, Whitehead’s uncanny, ludic illustrations achieve their startlingly tactile quality because he has followed a simple, yet laudably complete approach. By choosing to listen to the city as it is, as it lives and alters itself around us, the writer has returned us to literature’s primal source: “In the beginning was the Word,” word as voice, voice as word. There are no footnotes in The Colossus of New York because Whitehead has referenced no texts. For this reason Ð and without compromising the mellifluous lyricism that colors the flow of his poetic prose Ð he maintains a wholly human context from start to finish. His vignettes derive from the same “sourcebook” that The Naked City postscript pretended to draw from, although that text was pure fiction. Where history books and news reports Ð along with far too many purveyors of ostensibly creative fictions Ð scour the darkest aspects of the human drama for adrenaline-charged spectacle, distilling the official record into so many kilos of mass-mediated opiates, it’s a rare Ð and courageous Ð storyteller who can reflect upon the reality of our more mundane experiences and infuse them with an honest, kinetic and ever vital perspective. Without adhering to the straightforward approach employed in oral history milestones like the omnibus works of Harry Smith, the Lomax family, Studs Terkel, and others, Whitehead has clearly enjoyed the process of stumbling on citizens who bend his ear, of transforming this aural bounty into an accurate and exhilarating text, a verbal portrait of our unofficial Empire’s unofficial capital.

 

While Whitehead’s “project” is pleasantly free of the crime and violence that make our newspapers worth skimming and Fox-TV worth mocking, his is not exactly a rosy rendering of this aging urban colossus. In fact, he opens the first chapter, “City Limits,” by reminding us that New York changes and ages in lockstep with each and every personae that lives here. The endless parade of urban renewals, he suggests, may strike us as an uneasy, somewhat disconcerting reminder of our own transitory Ð hence, botched Ð efforts at revitalizing ourselves. “…[B]efore the internet cafŽ plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

 

“You start rebuilding your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it… Somewhere in that fantastic, glorious mess was the address on the piece of paper, your first home here. Maybe your parents dragged you here for a vacation when you were a kid and towed you up and down the gigantic avenues to shop for Christmas gifts [this reviewer's own experience]… Freeze it there: that instant is the first brick in your city.” [pp. 3-4]

 

 

Having determined how one may lay claim to an authentic citizenship in this imperial capital, Whitehead goes on to document the arrival by bus at “Port Authority,” where “It may be day or night outside, or sunny or rainy outside, but inside the terminal light is always the same queasy, green rays.” We enter this Colossus as equals, waiting “for so long to see the famous skyline but wake at the arrival gate and with a final lurch are delivered into dinginess.”

 

In the next chapter, each “Morning,” we do battle with the shabby infrastructure that plagues our Colossus from apartment to sidewalk. Instead of roosters, “hydraulics crow… Emptied trash cans skid to anchor corners. Shopkeepers retract metal grates that repel burglars from merchandise unworthy of theft. All this metal grinding, this is the machine of morning reaching out through cogs and gears to claim and wake us.” Punching snooze buttons, dancing through slush and snow, suffering the TV set’s morning shows, we find ourselves “Out of coffee. Out of milk. Out of luck. Late again. Call in sick, or don’t… The name of his cologne is Hamper, Recommended by Four Out of Five Whiffs.” Apart from all the empty greetings, the dog shit under melting snow, there are glimmers of dashed hopes: “Time it right to see your secret crush at the bus stop. Moved away two weeks ago without telling you but keep the fire burning, my faithful.” Spring leads us to “Central Park” and the dilemma of where to sit, broken glass, joggers, Popsicles, bird guano… We ride the “Subway” and abide its platform culture, the choice of cars, wading out against the crush of new riders, the elevated, the protracted and unsettling, unscheduled and unexplained stop between stations. We dance through “Rain,” losing umbrellas, avoiding the points lest a stranger poke our eyes out, navigating the rivers that spring up at corners, trying to wait it out under shallow doorways, awestruck by the tough guys who strut past as if the sun were shining on them alone. We head down “Broadway,” take a trip to the grim, stinking multitude that haunts “Coney Island” and its littered sand. We stroll over our favorite span, “Brooklyn Bridge” with its flaking paint, shrinking before the Manhattan skyline, our spirit still empty and unchanged at the far end. We dive into the dread “Rush Hour,” the escape from Midtown. We enjoy the horrorshow of a night “Downtown,” happy hour, reaching the wrong address where we’ve planned a rendezvous, surrounded by hipsters, deafened by stentorian music and loud shirts, menaced by the lunatics out on the full moon, suffering not only through last call but the fight for the cab ride home. Then, after paying a visit to the new and improved “Times Square,” it’s time to go. “Everything’s packed. All the necessary documentation is secure in pockets and pouches. The time passed so quickly.” We depart through “JFK,” leaving the city behind, maybe to return to a changed metropolis, perhaps to remember it as an affair of youth, or a dream: Looking out the window, “over the gray wing the city explodes into view with all its miles and spires and inscrutable hustle and as you try to comprehend this sight you realize that you were never really there at all.”

 

That I use the first person plural Ð the not-so-royal “we” Ð to sketch the book’s trajectory is the effect of Whitehead’s deft employ of pronouns throughout. Rarely availing himself of the first person, he applies a constructive balance between the second and third persons Ð “you,” “he,” “she” Ð so that they underscore the sense of personal anecdote that lures a reader in, that drives one on, imbuing these baroque jibes and narrative inventories with a colloquial tone that fixes the work in the voices of the living, and without resort to the fantasy realm of celebrity and wealth. These New Yorkers are most of us and, if Whitehead sometimes sounds a mite pessimistic or heavy-handed, it’s only because these are the bona fide reverberations of real New Yorkers. Our cynicism, our affinity for irony, our blunt opinions and firsthand knowledge of everything that’s worth knowing is legendary.

 

If there is another text that comes close to offering such a complex capital as New York its truth through simplicity, it might be veteran rocker Lou Reed’s early 90′s anthem, New York. Beyond Ð and including Ð the ironic ire that poisons that disc’s every lyric, the musical comparison is key. I first heard Colson Whitehead reading this book’s penultimate chapter “Downtown” at a Bowery Ballroom benefit for the literary journals McSweeney’s, Open City, and Fence. The freewheeling rhythm of the text Ð delivered at a relentless, near breakneck pace by the author Ð was (for me and for notable New York literary mentor Steve Cannon) the highlight of the night, despite featured acts by rock stars Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, and David Byrne. Colossus is finally an engagingly musical text, owing its rhythmic cadence more to the beat of everyday life than to the historically brief lifespan of what passes for “spoken word.” Should one pick up Whitehead’s book, you would do well to share it aloud with a friend. Its command of the tone used by New Yorkers, its celebration and expansion of the anecdotes we love to hear and repeat among friends and strangers Ð especially those whom the Colossus has yet to welcome Ð is without any real parallel.

 

Such an endeavor as Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York is bound to suffer from omissions. The agility with which he mirrors New Yorkers’ darker humours cuts across dialects, accents, and ethnicities. Science has long established these distinctions to be fictions, and Whitehead effectively uses New Yorkers and New York as proof for our universally shared truths. Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York and its imitator, Luc SantŽ’s Low Life, will serve to plumb the well-charted hollows of more common and antagonistic platitudes. Here, Whitehead offers a contemporary account of the Empire City without its Great Men of History, a veritable depiction of the eight million, not exactly anonymous flesh and blood lives that worship the Colossus as imperial portal, everyday entities who Ð like their Creator Ð must remain unnameable, whose inspired grasp of paradox may not make this place Paradise, but whose shared incongruities and ability to turn visionary hindsight into legendary fable ritualistically feed the titanic angel as it nurtures them; entire families of orphans and runaways revising their shelters as they vow to keep the Apple sheltered from its divisive parasites Ð internal and external. Like squirrels spinning the loco-motivated caged-wheels in an engine primed by Our Gang after the Grand Street designs of their Bowery forbears, these beings populate Whitehead’s catalog of the eight million all-too-human stories that watch the ever-watchful, Olympus-bound sentinel in its fixed reach for the sun. Like the slogan reminds us on a recently devised poster of Marilyn Monroe created and disseminated by some secret claimants of the collective consciousness working overtime, we will never be rock stars. And yet, as Whitehead reveals with pointed insight and a tangible consistency akin to the hoary dictates of our inner child’s innately incantatory call and response mechanism, we inhabit an unlimited free space replete with quiet surprise, not-so-low adventure, rollercoaster romances that follow no scripts and feature no stars, and barely tragic victories after unspectacular defeats. Here, the writer has imagined the private glories of the real, unnumbered souls that keep the mechanized modernity of the metropolis running right on time if just a few minutes behind schedule, whose every immeasurable breath quite clearly keeps the Colossus vigorous, resurrected on its regularly remerging ruins, reincarnated by and for its unmartyred minions, singularly sentient, impossibly and impermissibly, most graciously alive.

 

Thank you, Colson Whitehead, for this urban book of prayer. You are all, I would imagine we would agree, very welcome.

 

New York, New York, Monday, November 27, 2003

 

Review of “Chaos”

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“Chaos”

Directed and written by Coline Serreau

(in French, with English subtitles)

 

Director of photography, Jean-Franois Robin

Edited by Catherine Renault

Music by Ludovic Navarre

Production designer, Michle Abbe

Produced by Alain Sarde

Released by New Yorker Films

Running time: 108 minutes. This film is not rated.

 

Cast: Catherine Frot (HŽlne), Vincent Lindon (Paul), Rachida Brakni (NoŽmie/Malika), Line Renaud (Mamie), AurŽlien Wiik (Fabrice) and Ivan Franek (Touki).

 

Not A Whore’s Life

 

review by Norman Douglas

 

“It was a dark and stormy night…”

{ –Snoopy }

 

 

Knowing at least that this film promises to deliver some kind of feministic slant, I spend Friday afternoon and evening trying to get a female to see it with me, but I strike out. The five women I manage to ask have other plans: one needs prior notice, so it’s too late to ask her; another has to work in her theater, and will only be through at midnight; a third only wants to get wasted and bother some guy friend of hers; the fourth is sick in bed and has to work early the next morning; the fifth lives in Jersey City and doesn’t want to be in the city on Friday night. I phone three others, but two never return my call after I leave a message, while the third has given me her business card with a bogus phone number (a rather elaborate foil for would-be cranks, I might add). Thus, I enter the Angelika round midnight alone, and when I ask the cashier for a press kit, she has to call the manager because she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “What’s that?” she asks the other ticket-girl with a look as puzzled as it is annoyed. “I’on’know,” comes the sneered reply, cutting her pretty, made-up eyes at me, the next in a long line of way-too-nerdy-assed filmgoers she’s learned not to deal with. The manager arrives to tell me they have nothing (a subversive comment?), so I suck down a Chesterfield cigarette on the steps outside, then descend the steps inside – the down escalator’s broken – to await the screening. During previews, the light on the projector cuts, so I’m screaming at the empty booth while the other members of the audience try to decide whether or not they should fear my cries of “Give up the light or gimme my money back!” After two entire previews, he responds (I see him through the window), and I sit through six more previews, each one terrifyingly unappealing, all selling the same film with six different titles. At least, that’s the way it seems.

 

Finally, Chaos starts, its opening shot positioned behind the principle actress in a brown evening gown, her alabaster shoulders bare as she looks in the mirror, primping herself. Despite this patently nineteenth century opening, Chaos is shot in France during the year before 9/11, and presumably takes place somewhere during the three to five years before that political milestone. Within thirty seconds, the milky flesh of Helene is draped in a wrap, and her husband, Paul, races to an “important” dinner with Helene in the passenger seat of their de rigeur European compact (at least one can never blame European films for promoting SUV-chic). Through the windshield, we see a desperate young woman wearing the black garb of the night hurtle down the street toward the auto, a trio of enervated riff raff hot on her heels. None too keen on “getting involved,” Paul acts decisively. “Lock the doors!” he orders his not so decisive woman. Dithering, she obeys, her eyes racked with guilt and shame, biting her lip. The montage is relentless, abrupt – and will remain so for the rest of the film – cutting to the windshield as stop, the young brown-skinned woman’s face slammed into it, thrust down by a snarling, black leather-clad punk’s gruesome power, blood spattering like a slice of steaming hot pizza dumped on the linoleum. “Help!” chokes the wretched, scantily clad slut as the pimp yanks her hair and her already mangled snout jerks up, only to be cast down under the horizon of the hood, at which point the other two thugs commence the familiar spasms of the upper body that suggest the act of kicking. The pimp leans at Helene’s window as Paul presses the button to raise it, “She’s crazy,” the procurer grins. He then turns to the unseen woman and cries, “Shut up!” Sirens are heard and Paul screams at his wife, “The police!” and throws his car in gear. He worries about the blood on the windshield and explains in his agitated roar, “We must find a car wash.”

 

Cut to the car wash as the credits roll through the names of the main cast and crew to the director, and then cut to the TGV (the high-speed train) station, as an old woman, Paul’s mum, Mamie (pronounced mom-EE), debarks. Now cut to the apartment as Helene and Paul dress for the day. Paul’s mum arrives, he hides, Helene lies for him, mum leaves, Paul leaves, mum hides under the stairs and sees him. The next scene repeats this deception, as Helene visits her son, Fabrice, who lives with Florence, his girlfriend. The principal characters introduced, Helene visits the hospital where the whore is comatose in the ICU.

 

More than a Greek tragedy, Chaos reads like a botched send-up of expressionist drama, which hardly means it owes a great deal to that expressionist tradition. In a sense, its creators have managed to ape the rhythms and style of expressionist narrative, while turning that spirit on its head. In the end, Chaos is not an assault on the absurdity of established order, though it makes this pretense. Veteran film critic Stephen Holden of the New York Times calls Chaos “a gripping, feminist fable with a savage comic edge,” which will undoubtedly color other peoples’ opinions, but this isn’t the kind of feminism I’m schooled in, though I suppose it takes all kinds. I’m not sure which men should feel “momentarily ashamed of their gender,” though I’m probably biased, and missed the “film’s unrelenting contempt for male ego.” Even if those are feminist goals, I believe the film had other, darker motives.

 

Ultimately, Chaos is a Horatio Alger myth disguised as social satire, but then, that myth is absurd in itself; expressionist plays like Durenmatt’s The Visit and von Kleist’s Broken Jug – among others – argue that, if only implicitly. A rags to riches thing, a CanalPlus (the French Miramax and cable network) affair, a modern Cinderella story in French – not unlike Leonardo as Romeo – Chaos follows this brutalized woman to recovery, then tops it off with every prostitute’s revenge fantasy come true, if prostitution is the oldest profession with every other job modeled after it.

 

Indeed, Helene is the vehicle for the audience’s identification, with her Married with Children menfolk, Paul and Fabrice, bungling their way through domestic “anarchy,” the film presumes that a middle class and white perspective is a universal. In one of its many simplistic potshots at contemporary lifestyles, a scene peopled with the “real-life” adolescent mŽnage – Fabrice, Florence, Charlotte – presents TV in the background airing a sitcom with the kids’ garish “familiars” in clownish make-up. By contrast, Helene is not the Mrs. Al Bundy of that seminal Fox offering, but rather the slack-jawed, self-effacing cousin of Colista Flockhart’s Ally McBeal character, that is, whenever she’s not biting her lip. A kind of saint who is through serving the devil’s brood, Helene discovers an avenging angel in the battered whore with two names, Noemie, Mikaila. Thoroughly uniting her darkest powers with her creative force, this angel Mikaila is a fighter since youth, rejecting first her commodification as a woman by her father, ultimately surmounting and getting even with all the tormentors of her past, including the recent past: Noemie even manages to get back at Paul and Fabrice for her new pal, Helene, who observes the process with her usual vapid mugging, switching between frowned overbite and slack-mouthed grin, poor thing. What doubtless keeps one watching Chaos is its rapid cutting, its dialogue simple and clean. But these technical feats degenerate into symbols in a fantasy reward-a-thon that movies tend to perpetuate, making Chaos no more than a slick Pretty Woman, which certainly has its boosters.

 

For my money, an illiterate junkie whore who learns the stock market after a lucky tip from a trick, and fucks a half billion bucks out of a Swiss banker, and arranges for the whole ring of pimps she worked for to get busted – the most evil one shot by cops – and helps out another streetwalker we never meet, and frees her little sister at the last minute from arranged sale into marriage, and takes Helene and Mamie (Paul’s mum) and her own little sister to her new beach house, well… That may seem feminist to a guy at the Times who has to watch stupid movies for a living, but to these eyes it looked like a riff on some neoliberal moral tale/revenge thriller, the beating having purified Noemie for her transcendent defiance of the gravity that surrounds prostitution and all the other forms of capitalist, state, and religious terror, i.e. work. Call it patriarchy, if you must, no one can argue against the fact that we can do fine without that. Maybe my inclination to see the film with a woman was well-advised, after all, as I’m clearly missing the “feminist” point. However, that same weekend Penny Arcade hosted A Whore’s Life at Tribes, featuring a reading and two original videos. While their tales of survival as addicted street workers covered all the violence Chaos revels in, along with a whole lot of sex the film explicitly avoids, neither of these two women from Vancouver – Leslie Bull and Ariel Lightningchild, a good ten or fifteen years apart – felt compelled to frame their experience in the lotto-driven terms of suddenly merited billions. At the end of the day, stylized conceit condemns this technically-contrived and narrative-thin conventional fable to a mere insult to the intelligence of anyone whose notions of gritty reality are not framed by the sale of soap to clean it up, but rather, by the fingernails we sharpen and cut to dig in beneath appearances and the surface of things.

Film Review of Caché

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Film Review

by Norman Douglas

 

 

 

Caché

Directed by:   Michael Haneke

Screenplay:   Michael Haneke

Cinematography:   Christian Berger

2005

 

 

 

“What people do officially is nothing compared with what they do in secret. People usually associate creativity with works of art, but what are works of art alongside the creative energy displayed by everyone a thousand times a day: seething unsatisfied desires, daydreams in search of a foothold in reality, feelings at once confused and luminously clear, ideas and gestures presaging nameless upheavals.”

 

{– Raoul Vaneigem, {The Revolution of Everyday Life}, 1967}

 

The other night, two workers from my local bookstore strong-armed a few of us into watching Mike Mills’ adaptation of Walter Kirn’s 1999 novel, Thumbsucker. A couple of months ago, I went to see Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers as soon as it opened in Rhinebeck, NY. Around the same time, I bought Gus Van Sant’s Last Days on DVD. What do these films — and a lot of indie films I’ve seen lately — have in common with Michael Haneke’s direction of Caché, from a script he wrote himself? It seems like there’s a bandwagon storming through the souls of filmmakers these days, and the driver of this wagon is busily touting the notion that silence is the new dialogue, in the same way — as I once heard an artist quip — that painting is the new drawing. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate a film without cops and sociopaths as much as anybody who tears tickets at places like Film Forum (as I did, back when it was on Watts Street). But I’m not convinced that the absence of words ably reproduces the everyday lives of we who exist outside the constructs of those who would project images ostensibly designed for our reflection. On the other hand, despite what I perceived as unrealistic flaws in a film that tackles the way we define the Real, Caché makes silence its subject, so that even what gets spoken echoes with silence.

Silence seems rare in the lives of my peers, colleagues, and acquaintances. During moments of catharsis and transformation, most of us find ourselves wishing we had either said what was said better than we said it or, had simply kept our mouths shut. The silence in Caché is amplified by the static cinematography. Beginning with a shot of a Parisian town house that lasts for the three or four minutes of a credit sequence unraveled line-by-line, like the screen read-out of a speed typist, Austrian director Haneke relies on cinematograher   Christian Berger to ensure that one never forget that we are engaged in the act of watching. As the credits end and an unseen speaker reveals that she’s watching the same image as the audience, we’re reminded that listening goes hand in hand with watching. A male voice responds. An “off-screen” voice, out of the frame, hidden, caché. The camera pulls away, enlarging our perspective to reveal that Georges (  Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliet Binoche), husband and wife, have been watching the same static video image of their home as the movie audience. “It goes on for two hours this way,” Anne tells Georges, in the filmmaker’s wry wink to the audience.

Menaced by a series of camcorder-grade surveillance tapes delivered anonymously to their home, Georges and Anne contact the police, who refuse to act until someone commits an actual crime. Like all good film characters, this official apathy launches Georges into detective mode. Though his command of cinematic device and artifice — of silence and visual stillness — impose an atmosphere of suspense on the viewer that some critics compare favorably with Hitchcock, Haneke clearly has no interest in delivering the kind of standard entertainment for which Hitchcock became “notorious.” Repeatedly maintaining his duty to protect wife and child, Georges seems more driven by the need to protect himself. As the videotapes show up on their doorstep, accompanied by childlike black and white drawings of caricatures that spout red blood — red crayon applied so violently to paper that it has the look of a stain such as the Pontius Pilate could not wash out — these images reel Georges in ever deeper, returning him to his childhood home and its memories, memories that haunt his dreams. Discounting the possibility that their thirteen year old son, Pierrot (  Lester Makedonsky), is playing a nasty prank, Georges privately suspects someone from his past, someone he believes he has forgotten. This someone is Majid (Maurice Bénichou), the son of their Algerian caretakers. Georges’ parents tried to adopt Majid when Majid’s parents fell victim to the police massacre of Algerian protestors in Paris on October 17, 1961.

Essentially built around the characters’ memories of that day, when police, headed by the Vichy collaborator  –  – , brutally murdered as many as two hundred people, dumping scores of bodies into the River Seine, Haneke sees no reason to revisit the topological scene of the crime. Because French authorities viciously and effectively censored news of the massacre from the press, the public, and the international community, most of France denied the murders ever took place. Even among Algerians (which nation then stood on the verge of winning a particularly bloody war of colonial independence that would end the following March), an accurate account of the dead continues unresolved. What Haneke addresses with Caché has to do with the way that personal memory colors perception — just as perception shapes memory — creating an illusion out of the reality known as the present, here and now — to say nothing of the past.

Real life is terrorized by the sensation of survival that everyday events take on in our collective striving for history; learned needs lurk in the shadows of every choice, squashing the persistent desire for peace and love. Today, despite the empirical fact that we continue to enact history, the vast majority experiences that history while watching it occur, as if history could pass us by; we notice every little thing and, taking note, choose every little effect upon the self. Although great catastrophes and upheavals are beamed almost instantly around the world, the ability to connect and disconnect has more to do with one’s willingness to do so than anything else. Like highway rubbernecking, electronic rubbernecking depends on one’s inner state of mind, not the degree of mayhem and carnage present in the wreck at which one gawks. Stuck in traffic on the way to work with no more sick days and only AM lite music differs from being stuck in that same traffic in a VW van with a handful of friends making a cross country trip; neither case compares to riding through that gridlock as the parent or child of a person in that same crash. Disaster television, like all TV and, by extension, all of daily life (little of which we can imagine becoming history) only impresses us to the extent that we have prepared ourselves for particular impressions of peculiar events; memory colors perception. Haneke does not critique the media: he investigates our actions and inaction as a whole, using media and media personalities to remind us of the reality behind the curtain, a reality towards which we tend to pay no attention.

Georges, as host of a “public” television show devoted to literature (modeled after the commercially successful, Apostrophe, where I saw Charles Bukowski lionize his host: “You guys are great! I’ve never been on TV in America! And I love all the wine! And the women!” a memory that colors my perception of the film…), depends financially on this video version of life’s events

Review of “Love and Diane”

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“Love and Diane”

a film directed by Jennifer Dworkin

 

loveanddiane.jpg


reviewed by Mike Lee

 

Jennifer Dworkin’s prize-winning documentary is an honest and touching portrayal of three generations of a family that, to be sadly blunt, live in a place two steps beyond redemption. Without a real sense of obtrusiveness, the cameras follow Diane Hazzard, a recovering crack addict who has, through blind faith and an indefatigable will struggles to rebuild the family her own drug addiction destroyed. As the documentary unfolds one realizes that Hazzard’s determination is never enough, however-there is just too much damage wrought already. Not to say that Dworkin’s subjects inexorably face a baleful fate, it is just that these people do not in inhabit a Touched by an Angel pop culture television environment where problem resolution serves as a pre-commercial interruption. Also, Dworkin avoids the exploitative trap of jaded voyeurism; while Dworkin in uncompromising and intensely detailed in documenting the daily lives of her subjects, she succeeds achieving the viewer to have an unstinting fondness for them. You root for Hazzard throughout, even though one realizes early on that small victories become sandwiched between stark, brutal defeats.

 

 

This is a story told in almost epic terms: At the beginning a new generation has arrived, Donyaeh, the son of Diane’s daughter Love, an emotionally disturbed young woman, embittered over her own earlier abandonment by Diane years before during the latter’s addiction. This conflict continues throughout the film, particularly when Diane must decide about what to do when her daughter’s emotional outbursts physically threaten Donyaeh. The risky choices she makes on a daily basis are heartbreaking, when one knows the outcome of these decisions means separation and possible homelessness.

 

 

This film is pure storytelling. At times Love and Diane are so dramatically riveting one forgets that it is a documentary. It does not judge, either. Everyone is all too human: from the often-deflated, though sympathetic social service bureaucrats to the struggling Hazards. Dworkin achieves, with her sensitive eye and judgment, a documentary that precisely manages to portray one family’s personal struggle against poverty and depravation without resorting to sentimental strings or strident speeches. All Diane Hazzard likely wanted in this documentary was telling it like it truly is. With that in mind, Jennifer Dworkin therefore then has accomplished a rare project of creative genius.

 

Review of “Divine Intervention”

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“Divine Intervention”

a film by Elia Suleiman

reviewed by Mike Lee

A surreal, depressing look into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, told from a militant, overly intellectualized Palestinian perspective using wildly sardonic humor, brutally honest irony within a disjointed plot that at times is somewhat maddening but always surprising.

“Divine Intervention” opens with a sequence interpreted in a myriad of ways, depending on one’s ideology: in a blatantly Bunuelistic turn a group of feralized children hunt down and murder Santa Claus on a hill overlooking Nazareth; a man unapologetically dumps his garbage into his neighbor’s yard whilst in another scene a pleasant old man happily waves at passers-by as he mumbles hilarious obscene commentary regarding them. Another individual decides to battle the local cops, tossing bottles from his roof in a desperate chaos. This sequence reminded me of what my grandfather used to say about not crying when the dog you’ve been beating bites the hell out of you-and in Suleiman’s film, there’s no group of dogs ornerier than West Bank Palestinians, obviously.

The main plot concerns a relatively young man (played by Suleiman himself) visiting his father and later spending an afternoon with his girlfriend, who due to Israeli Army restrictions and roadblocks are able only to pass the time together in his car, parked at a vacant lot, holding hands with the passion of unhappy school children. Here, “Divine Intervention” becomes a story of love physically denied, and the extremes to which romantic desire and nationalist politics become intertwined in a time of an unyielding conflict. However, Suleiman fails to follow this up, instead tying this plot strand to video game fantasy, hopelessly exhausting an opportunity to tell a story. This film also conveys a stultifying claustrophobia; one gets the impression the entire West Bank is a Southern backwoods steel cage match with barbed wire wrapped about the ring and flaming pillars. While this approach is often heavy-handedly sententious, “Divine Intervention” makes no excuses for its point of view or attempts any pretensions in compromising its radical Palestinian nationalist viewpoint. However, there seems to be an unintended consequence in the process of viewing “Divine Intervention”: while the Israelis portrayed are cartoon baddies, the Palestinian characters are hardly developed beyond cut-outs and plot devices. This slight makes it hard to like anyone in the film.

A Review of Palindromes, or “TODD SOLONDZ WANTS TO MAKE MY EYES BLEED!”

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Todd Solondz’s fourth film, Palindromes, tells the story of Aviva, a 13-year-old girl whose only desire in the world is to have

Matthew Koff

 

 

 

A Review of Palindromes, or “TODD SOLONDZ WANTS TO MAKE MY EYES BLEED!”

 

“Palindromes”

Directed by Todd Solondz

2004


By Matt Koff

palindromes1.jpg

Todd Solondz’s fourth film, Palindromes, is a success. Well, it is a success in that I left the theater feeling sick and hating everything. But, since this film takes place in a world where all humans are weak, awful creatures incapable of growth or change, I can only assume that nauseating the audience was among the director’s stated objectives. So, good job, Mr. Solondz!

 

The film tells the story of Aviva, a 13-year-old love-starved adolescent girl whose only desire in the world is to have lots and lots of babies. After an agonizingly awkward sexual encounter with the son of family friends leaves her pregnant, Aviva’s distraught parents demand, against her wishes, that she get an abortion. Due to complications, the doctor must perform a hysterectomy during the abortion, rendering Aviva incapable of ever having children. Oblivious to the mishap, the single-minded Aviva continues to pursue her doomed dream of becoming a mother. She runs away from home and gets involved with a pedophile trucker. She also meets a conservative Christian couple that adopts disabled children. Et cetera, et cetera.

 

I could go on with the synopsis, but I wouldn’t want to ruin this horrible movie for you. There are many reasons why this film does not work, but here is the most important one: it is impossible to sympathize with Aviva. Why? Well, for one, she is a moron. In the first half of the film, she falls in love with a trucker. They have sex and then he abandons her, leaving her stranded at the motel room the next morning. This, we think, might just be common naiveté. But later in the film, she continues to pursue this same trucker. At this point, she becomes less a figure of tragic innocence than one of aggravating stupidity. 

 

This stupidity is strikingly similar to that of Dawn Weiner, the young protagonist of Solondz’s first film,Welcome to the Dollhouse. This character also searches for love in the worst possible places. But that filmed worked, largely because of Heather Matarazzo’s sweet, sad, and humorous portrayal of Dawn. In Palindromes, the main character is played by eight different actresses of varying ethnicities, body sizes, and ages. The film is divided into chapters, and with each new chapter, Aviva shifts bodily incarnations. By doing this, Solondz is attempting to show the, uh, universality of, uh, the spirit of the … female … somethingorother — okay, I don’t know what the hell he’s trying to say, but the point is, the constant parade of actresses hurts the film drastically. Solondz is trying so hard to make a multileveled film that he forgets what it takes for a film to work on its most basic level: a real protagonist that we can relate to. Aviva’s constantly altering form doesn’t expand Aviva into a universal everywoman. It relegates her to the realm of an idea. In order for the audience to suspend its disbelief, it needs to believe that it is taking a journey with an actual, flesh-and-blood character. The film’s shifting betrays that. Ultimately, Todd Solondz never lets us forget that we are watching a Todd Solondz film.

 

There are plenty of other things in the film which the director probably views as challenging, but which come off instead as cynical and gratuitous. For example, there is a sequence in which handicapped children sing and dance in a Christian Rock band. Solondz is clearly portraying the children in a comedic light. He is trying to “challenge” the audience by making us laugh, and at the same time make us feel guilty for laughing. Why is this necessary? I have no idea. Solondz needs to learn the difference between challenging viewers and needlessly punishing them.

 

Another way in which the film attempts to challenge is by presenting both sides of the abortion issue. We meet selfish, scary, liberal parents (played by Ellen Barkin and Richard Masur) who force their daughter into getting an abortion she doesn’t want, and also right-wing lunatics who murder abortion doctors. The entire time, the audience is wondering what side of the issue the filmmaker is on. I’m not one to advocate telling the audience what to think, but by the time the film is over, there is nothing left to think except, “Everyone is bad, and everything is going to hell.”  

 

If I had never seen a Todd Solondz film before, I might have loved this movie. But this is the fourth one I’ve seen, and after a while his trademark cynicism becomes transparent and thin. 

 

The film’s essential message is voiced by the character Mark Weiner: “No one ever changes. They may think they do, but they don’t.” This is the kind of blanket generalization you’d expect to find in the diary of a fifteen-year-old. Solondz is clearly a talented filmmaker. It is a shame he can’t use his talent to say something more interesting. 

Frank Gonzales of “Manito”

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Frank Gonzales of “Manito”

 

A Star is Born in A Brilliant and Gritty Film

 

…Infinite Loop

 

Review and Interview by Melanie Maria Goodreaux

 

Frank Gonzales, otherwise known as”Frankie G.,” heats up a seat at the House of Tribes Theatre, a small black box on the Lower East Side of New York City. With a quiet confidence and intense gaze that could melt Alaska, he sits inside the red theatre seat in a black jumpsuit and sneakers, donning a chiseled jaw, gracious humility, and the smoldering eyes of a rising star. He looks like”Junior,” his touching role as the foxy and dutiful big brother in Eric Eason’s Manito, but assures me that he’s not.”I never experienced Junior’s story, but I had a friend that did, and I drew from that,” says Gonzales, his voice thickened with a Brooklyn accent.”Acting is going into someone else’s mind- jumping into their spirit, their body,” says Frankie G., who recalls drawing upon his grandmother’s death to fuel his performance as Junior in Manito.”I couldn’t stop crying,” says a remembering Gonzales,”I felt Junior.”

 

Junior, the character posed as Eason’s”big brother” in Manito,(which means”little brother” in Latin slang), is a hard working, married man, who did a prison sentence because of his involvement with his father’s drug ring. He served as the spy for the cops on the corner in front of the bodega where his father sold sandwiches, candy, beer and drugs to pull off living in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan. Junior took the rap, did the time, and never sold out his father. Once out of prison, Junior works hard as a contractor, who hustles gigs without a license to make ends meet and to throw a big high school graduation party for his”manito,” the scrawny and yet brainy brother of promise who has plans to go to college. A frighteningly believable twist of fate happens on the subway as Junior’s little brother Manny is traveling home from the party with his girlfriend and a wad of cash that the community has given him to send him successfully into the future to fulfill his dreams and theirs. Then the plot twists and the subway turns—two men harass the couple, they flee, his girlfriend gives him a gun, and then our”manito of promise” ends up killing the gangsters and having to do time. His future is now dimmed by this twist, all the hard work and hopes of the family are slammed into yet another jail cell-and Junior can’t do anything to raise the money to get his little brother out of prison besides asking his father.

 

Eason creates a thick distance and tension between Junior and his estranged father. In the early moments of the film we see papi preparing a huge hoagie big enough to feed the entire guest list at his youngest son’s graduation party. He prepares the sandwich graciously enough to feed a king- but once Junior sees the huge hoagie at the dance hall before the party starts, he grabs it, throws it in a van and speeds through Washington Heights only to throw the sandwich out the window. It lands as a demolished heap of bread, meat, lettuce and tomatoes in front of his father’s bodega. Later, while giving a tearful toast to his younger brother at the party, he eyes his father at the door and rushes through the crowd to beat him down and send him on his way. Obviously dad’s affection and attention comes uninvited and a little too late for a Junior that is bitter and angry about doing time for a man that has no genuine love for his family, a man that never visited Junior in prison. When Junior is forced to go to his father to ask for the cash to bail out his little brother, cash that Junior’s pride kept him from asking for in the first place, cash that Junior is well aware that his father has–his father still refuses. The impassioned Junior, hurt by hopelessness and his father’s cold display of heartlessness ends up strangling him to death after he is beaten with a bat. We catch each blow of the bat, we hear every desperate suck for life as he is strangled beneath a hand held camera that makes the viewer feel like it has just caught a domestic violence episode ending in death on a home video. The film ends with a repetitive shot of Junior running frantically from the scene of the crime. All hope is snatched away and there is no one to blame but the rugged, ragged, random monster of chance. This is what closes in on these characters, this is what makes Junior run. Manito’s characters are twisted into a fate of recycled hopelessness and trouble.”A lot was going on in Junior’s head,” says Frankie G. of his character,” he was running away from everything, running away from his problems-he didn’t want to go back to prison.”

 

Even though Frankie G. was just doing his job as an actor by”jumping into the spirit” of Junior in Manito, doesn’t mean that he and Junior haven’t faced some similar salt. He says that playing Junior made him think of his own family’s struggle as working class folks from Brooklyn.”I thought of my family and their suffering, what they went through. My father worked hard so that we could move out of the troubles of the time.

 

When I told Frankie G. that some of the Latinos at the Julio Burgos Center in East Harlem argued that the film played up negative stereotypes of his people, he strongly shrugged it off saying,”This film was not just for Hispanics and Blacks. They’re upset cause they feel the realness of it. It was a reality check. It’s just a story, but it felt real– like a documentary. These people were trying to make a life for themselves, that’s life, period. How can someone think the film was just about drug deals?” Who am I to play the devil’s advocate with Frankie G.? He’s an actor who is sitting in obvious support of fellow Puerto Rican director Lou Torres, who also served as actor and producer of Manito. The two are part of the theater happenings at the House of Tribes this weekend. Torres is directing one of Juan Shamsul Alam’s plays and Frankie G. is coming to hear the work and watch the spirits do their jumping.

 

Gonzales’ magical delving into his character, the brilliance of Eason’s strong and gritty script, and its true to the times camera work, make Manito a classical addition to film history. Eason brought Washington Heights to film, and Washington Heights Manito style is as gritty as the city itself. Manito’s hand held camera shots make it come across as a documentary while actually delivering a great story built thick with suspense, a story that Frankie G. calls”soo good.” Rugged, raw, and real, Manito makes you feel a moment away from ordering yucca at the Cuchifrito, and a spot away from the little things in life blowing up into big drama. It documents what is both charming and mundane about neighborhood living in New York City. This juxtaposition is exactly where the style of filming matches the story. Manito masks its edgy story within a”reality television” style. Eason brings brilliance to a style that received lots of attention years ago with the disappointing Blair Witch Project. The audience witnesses intimate and unseen moments of”real life” in Washington Heights. The impromptu conversations of neighborhood Latino teenagers rapping about the comings and goings of their high school scene, being taken inside of a Washington Heights apartment with sexy prostitutes adorned with hot tops and big tits, skirts with slits, pale blue eye shadow and lip gloss, and the toasts of all the folks at the graduation party who feel like family, dancing and swaying, wishing Manny well through champagne, tears, and sweet Spanish Music in the background are just a few examples of scenes that are cut to look uncut. The viewer is in awe of the familiar, without being suspect of Eason’s brilliant storytelling. As a society, we have become numb to taking a movie camera into the privacy of our lives. We look in on first dates, on high priced dare devil reality game shows, and are dazed by watching hours of shows like”The Real World.” What may make audiences feel uncomfortable about Manito’s drama is that it could easily be anyone’s drama.

 

Gonzales’ humble brilliance as an actor matches the edgy, raw, rugged, and realistic vision of Eason’s masterpiece, a masterpiece that has already won awards at Sundance, Urbanworld, Gotham, and the Miami Film Festival, just to name a few. Yes, Frankie is all that and a bag of chips, as they say. He’s got the edge, he’s got the bomb of a first big gig, he’s coming with talent and good looks, AND he’s just finished working with Dustin Hoffman in Confidence? The intimate space of the House of Tribes Theater sets the stage for a moment that starts to get even smaller- I realize that Frankie G., the handsome and humble talent sitting across from me- is about to”blow up” or already has. And although our new star might not have ever faced the same hopeless brick wall as Junior, he certainly has had people around him trying to bring him down and keep him down.”When I first started acting, I didn’t tell anyone. At one time I was going to give up because of all the negative feedback. I had a lot of my own people telling me that I couldn’t do it, telling me that they knew that I wasn’t going to make it. They had such negative vibes. I had to prove myself. I had to believe in myself. Now I can tell them,’I told YOU so.’”

 

Frankie finishes up our talk by assuring me his visits to Hollywood are just that– he plans on staying in New York He offers a bit of hope to any young talent that may come behind him,”Believe in yourself. Don’t listen to people with negative vibes. The ones with positive vibes will lead you to your path.” It’s time for the play at the House of Tribes Theater to begin. The lights go down on Frankie G. and our conversation. The actors jump into the spirits of Juan Shamsul Alam’s characters on stage. This time, Frank Gonzales, a new star with new hope, will just sit back and watch.

 

Contaminated Water

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“Mystic River”

Director: Clint Eastwood

 

Contaminated Water

review by Latif Zaman

 

A generation before Mystic River, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns introduced Clint Eastwood as a cultural icon, the enigmatic and dangerous “man with no name.” Previous westerns showed a good-humored and colorful time, where bloodless gunplay represented a righteous machismo, namely a defense of family and honor. Leone and Eastwood’s collaborations painted a bleaker picture, with no delineation between good and evil, and no need for honor. In their barren western landscapes, self-interest and greed became the only motivations, and bloodshed was nothing more than the logical means to those ends. Eastwood’s series of “man with no name” characters juxtaposed caustic humor and irreverence with startling, but emotionless violence.

 

From the stately, somber score, to a moody gray aesthetic, Eastwood saturates Mystic River with a dark, unrelenting pressure. If the stark featureless deserts of Leone’s films reflected the moral emptiness of his characters, Mystic River’s protagonists are perpetually gathering storms of trauma and scars. The camera, in fact, often views events from above, a silent omniscient. While some may classify the film as a murder mystery, most startling is the oppressing feeling of inevitability. The film starts with the young Jimmy, Sean, and Dave whose basic characters are already defined. Jimmy is strong and aggressive, Sean is a cautious and watches Jimmy’s example, while Dave is soft and awkward, teased by friends. Primordial evil, in the form of a pair of child molesters, raises the blinds on their relative innocence and seals their fates. The rage that simmers inside the grown Jimmy is palpable. Sean, the police officer, is drawn to evil as an observer, and Dave’s every gesture seems to answer to his has victimization. Jimmy has committed unspeakable evil, Sean witnessed such evil, and Dave feels it everyday of his life. These roles trap them, and only they cannot see the unwavering propulsion of tragedy of their Sisyphean struggle to escape.

 

In the spaghetti westerns violence is a rational choice for an immoral, seemingly godless world. There is no tragedy because life has little meaning. A more malevolent deity inhabits Mystic River. Dave obsesses over vampires at one point in the film. Like vampires, the molesters seemingly infect the boys with evil. This becomes their cross and they are already doomed. Tragedy ensues as the fates punish them further for trying to escape. Dave is branded as a victim but kills a child molester, ostensibly to save a young boy. His actions are violently against character and represent a desperate attempt to destroy, to erase the crime perpetrated upon him. His destiny in more than any single set of actions, and as in all tragedy he cannot escape destiny. He is punished for his hubris by being blamed for the murder of Jimmy’s young daughter and eventually being killed by Jimmy.

 

After time in prison. Jimmy tries, uneasily, to fit back into society. The death of his daughters propels him back into the life he desperately tried to leave. Years ago, after his first murder, he tries to appease his guilt and do penance for his crime by supporting the widow and children of man he killed. One of the boys ends up senselessly murdering Jimmy’s daughter. Jimmy ends the film knowing that his penance ended in his daughters senseless murder, and his search for justice ended in his friends equally senseless murder. Jimmy learns that he brings death and the only question can be who and when.

 

Violence and crime started long before these friends, and long before the molesters. A river is symbol of movement and change. To Eastwood, however, humanity is a contaminated river and everyone who drinks of it is infected. From Dave to Jimmy, the only differences are the symptoms. Only Sean physically leaves his neighborhood, but looks back through the window of being a cop. The violence and atrocities of humanity becomes his career. His wife doesn’t want to bring a child into this cycle and leaves him while she is pregnant. While he is the only character who physically escape the neighborhood he never tries to escape the human infection of evil. Being on the police force he is forced to bear witness. Only when the film ends and his wife returns with their child is the viewer left to wonder if Sean too will continue his friends struggles and try to transcend the cycle of human evil that engulfed them.