How is Prejudice Overcome? (District 9, 2009)

#92-- District 9 (2009)

Wickus has been appointed an important task, which he is thrilled to fulfill.  It means a promotion and higher esteem in the government in which he works.  He and his team must serve eviction notices to the “prawns” who live in the alien—as in aliens from space— refugee camp.  They have been living a sickening, poor existence outside of Johannesburg, and it is time they moved on. 

In the midst of this increasingly complicated task, Wickus is infected with an alien chemical, which makes him terribly sick.  Bit by bit, he was turning into an alien.  He hoped his company would deliver him from his terrible fate of turning into one of these monsterous prawns, but they only used him as an experiment.

The only way to truly overcome oppression is to make the oppressors become that which they despise.  Only the deepest empathy overcomes our instinct to protect “our own” from that which fear.  Wickus only learned to appreciate the prawns after he became one and he lived among them.  Only then could he understand their motivation and their hopes.  

Touching Film: A Review and Meditation of I Am Love (2009)

There are some films that are so sensual that you can touch them.  

Please don’t misunderstand me.  For so many people in our pornography culture, “sensual” means sexual or nakedness.  But the meaning of “sensual” is “of the senses,” and it has the deeper meaning of stirring emotion, especially longing for an ethereal experience that is accomplished through the senses. 

Movies are a sensual medium, in general.  We see and hear and (if we watch with a fantastic sound system) feel the movie in the air.  In the best films, we experience new things, live the lives of others whom we had never met before the beginning of the film.  We see and hear through them, and so obtain a sense of their thought.

But a few films are so sensual, that I can almost use senses that aren’t actually available in a common film.  I can feel the cloth, taste the prawn, caress the face, smell the forest, move my fingertips over the roughness of the bark of the tree.  But more importantly, I can capture the very essence of a character’s emotions in my soul.

I would put I Am Love in that category of film.  It is a short list, frankly:   In the Mood for Love, about the unfulfilled longing for another.   The Double Life of Veronique, about the ethereal versus the corporal life.  The New World, about choosing one’s love or the one who loves you.  Babette’s Feast, about an aesthetic community that experiences the joy of earth.   There are, perhaps, a few others.  Three Colors: Blue,  The Tree of Life.

But like I Am Love, they are lush, focusing on close cinematography, drawing on nature and food in a way that stirs both the senses and the soul.  These are films that expand our experience of reality, even as the finest sensual experiences do—that communicate not only the flesh, but the spirit behind the flesh.  

5/5

Meditation on the Film: What is love?

Love has many faces.  Somehow we know, at its core, it is singular, but it is displayed as many fractured, contradictory personalities.  Love is about the benefit of the other, but also desire for the self.  Love is adoration, but also a mirror displaying the harsh reality.  Love is granting freedom and stirring deep violation.  Love is in the touch, the taste, the sight, the sigh, but love is also the longing, the mourning, the restlessness, the isolation.   Wrap all this together and we have still only stirred the bare surface of the depths of love.  Love is life, and is as complex as life.

Love in the flesh is a glorious thing.  Love is longing, but not knowing for what.  It is the glance that opens one’s eyes, widens the pupils and the object of love is then written in one’s soul.  We are created for this love, for this awakening and rebirth of our very selves, for this unification with the other so the one who we used to be is but a memory, a wisp of the past.  Once we have become a new creation, we build.  We create foundations, give birth, form partnerships, instill values, restore the ancient that has never been seen on earth before.  From love are traditions formed, legacies initiated, knowledge discovered and cities built. 

Creation is not love’s only legacy, however.  All that is built can also be forsaken, rejected, destroyed.  Love is a god that requires sacrifice.  Upon the altar, at one time or another, we must place our marriage, our work, our children, our livelihood, our passions, our hopes, our very souls and the souls of those whom we most deeply care for.  Love is filled with bitter tears, deep resentment and furious anger.  It is the passion that demands us and tears lives into shreds.  Love gives and love shreds, blessed be the name of love.

Yet there is another love.  A love that is not strictly human love, for human love must protect itself and its creation within a bubble of security of its own making.  There is a spiritual love, which calls to the humans, which can be glimpsed, and then it shyly withdraws.   It is the love that always gives, always forgives, always provides, always sustains, always restores, always gives life.  Love that embraces the rejected, heals the broken, rebuilds the destroyed and welcomes the outcast.  Paradoxically, this love requires nothing from the other, yet calls all to sacrifice all for the other.   And the greatest desire of this love is a people that surrenders all desires for the sake of the need.   This love is the ultimate gift without sacrifice and the ultimate sacrifice that demands all.

And this is the love that will change the world.

Beauty in Jane Campion's Bright Star

A thing of beauty is a joy forever

This is one of John Keat's most famous lines, at the beginning of his first epic poem.  And it expresses Keats' obsession with beauty, with an ideal of romance that is pristine, perfect, untouchable and eternal.  It is steadfast, allowing no diminishment, no fault, and no limit.  And it is this perfect ideal that most troubled me about Keats.

I read Keats in school, along with many other great poets.  And I cannot find a single blemish in Keats' wordsmithing, yet compared to others of his ilk--  such as Donne, Pope, and Shakespeare-- Keats seemed conceptually shallow.  Keats is the finest champion of beauty and the romantic ideal, and yet those in and of themselves, I have always found lacking.

Keats, bemused at my complaint

A thing of beauty is NOT a joy forever.  In the real world, beauty is sullied, trampled, eroticised, cheapened.  Beauty is limited to a beholder's eyes and when those eyes die, so does the beauty.  Human beauty changes and fades and while a beauty may be replaced with a new beauty, should it not be ruined by disuse, yet the old beauty, the original beauty is gone forever.  A romantic love cannot last, but must change.  Those who require romance to abide eternally are eternally doomed, for romance is fated to fade.

Is "beauty, truth and truth, beauty"?  Perhaps so, for no one can even agree on what these two terms refer to.  But beauty is even more intangible, more ethereal than truth.  Truth can be a rock to build upon, even if one's truth is not the same as another's.  But what can be build upon beauty?  Beauty, on its own, without the rock of truth, is a phantom, giving the semblance of reality but never the substance.

These have been my problems with Keats from the time I was a teen, and yet Keats seemed to remain perpetually hopeful, perpetually unsullied, forever the youth.  And that is the promise of dying young.  Keats can always be the champion of beauty and romance, because for him, it never became complicated with jealousy or a baby screaming in the night.  Keats is always the perfect lover, the perfect poet.  Death does that.

So I avoided Bright Star, the film by Jane Campion about Keats' deep and unconsummated romance with Fanny Brawn, because I figured it would have the limitations of Keats. (But a friend forced me to watch it.)  And so it does.  It celebrates him as the knight of romance, completely chaste, eternally faithful, speaking praise of beauty and demonstrating it perfectly in his relationship of his one true love, Fanny Brawn.  And yet, in this context, in cinema, Keats is fleshed out and the very beauty with which he sees the world is perfectly realized.

Every frame is ideal.  It is as if Jane Campion determined to make each scene its own romantic poem.  The true essence of love is celebrated.  Although the events are all historical and well-researched, yet between the poet, the writer and the director we are not just given a bio pic, but a distillation of perfect love.

And one cannot say that it is unsullied by life, for real life has its sway in this film, especially by that which warps the most: sickness and death.  Yet here, in this film, sickness does not limit love, but initiate it.  Sickness does not extinguish love, but provide the obstacle that demonstrates loves power.  And here, love is truly stronger than death, and love is found perfect because life can hold it no longer.  Bright Star is not just a film, it is the frame within which Keats is completed.  In this world, all Keats said is true and we can see, if only for a singular moment how beauty and truth may be perfectly entwined.

Beauty is not a joy forever.  Unless that beauty is burned and hammered and forged into a poem.  Or into a film.  Because while complete human lives are sticky and juvenile and weak and petty, within a great poem or within a film under a master director, a singular beauty can endure without end.

4.5/5

The Beauty of Alamar

Alamar ("To the Sea") is a Mexican film of 2009.  It is not a story, but a song:

This is being a father, the best of it.

It is waking together, and eating, and working, and wrestling, and swimming and laughing and sleeping and then doing it together all over again.

It is building a home for the generations.

It is teaching your child your way of life.

It is the fresh smell of the sea, and oil and fish.

It is allowing him to get in your way, making your task harder and feeling the joy of the interruption.

It is seeing your child confidently do what you have done for so many years.

It is the way it’s been done since the old days.

It is letting them experience your life.

It is re-experiencing the wonder of life through a child’s eyes.

It is, in the end, not knowing who taught who.

The Reach, by Dan Fogelberg, which captures the soul, if not the place, of this film:

Please watch Alamar on Netflix Instant or Hulu. You won't regret it.

Thanks to pixote for introducing me to this gift of cinema. 

The Mobsters of 2010

For the most part, I am terribly weary of watching mob movies. I loved the Godfather films (all three) and The Wire is just fantastic, but why should I bother seeing more? Sure, I heard Sopranos was excellent, but that's a lot of Italian mafia to swallow. I saw enough of Scarface to never bother seeing the rest of it. Senseless violence, destructive personalities, assassinations, corrupt cops... it's all the same and if I want to see a half-truth, why should I see such a negative one, filled with evil people "trying" to be good or whatever?

Animal Kingdom (2010)

"Just another day of killing with the family."

See, this is what I'm talking about. Josh's mother dies and he moves in with his grandmother who's boys are all hard core criminals. Josh's narration at the beginning talks about how they all know that they are right on the edge of losing everything. So, we know how the movie's going to pan out, don't we? Pope is one of the more selfishly evil characters I've seen, and frankly, everyone else is only marginally better. No stand out performances, just a lot of senseless killing. There's a lot I might forgive of the film, but almost every character is just stupid.

However, I do think it has the best use of Air Supply of any movie. 2/5


The Prophet (2009)

"It's a lonely business, being the head of a crime syndicate."

But this French film, filled with Corsican and Arabic, reminds me of why I still occasionally watch mob films.

It is smart and mystical and powerful and sad. It is as starkly realistic and as intense as a season of The Wire (although without the award-winning dialogue).

It follows Malik into prison, his home for six years, as he is faced with a Hobson's choice from a Corsican mobster who runs the prison: kill a man or I will kill you. It could be see as a paint by the numbers rags-to-riches criminal story, but Malik remains so boyish, and his friend Ryad is so real and the ghost of his first kill haunts the screen. There is a lot in this movie, and it is worth watching.

(For those who haven't seen the film, skip this next paragraph.) One of the most fascinating aspects of the film is the mystic side of it. Malik is visited regularly by the ghost of his first kill, Reyeb, who is a criminal who will testify against his boss. I think that the development of Reyeb is fascinating, especially after he dies. He is a hash dealer who wants to trade sexual favors for drugs. After he died, he hangs around Malik, with little animosity. By the end of the film, he is giving Makik visions and encouraging him to worship God. So the ghost of Reyeb seems to be pulling Malik one direction, but his criminal reality is leading him, without pause, toward evil. This is a fascinating way to create moral tension, one which I've never seen in a mob movie before. Religion plays a role in Malik's life, but by the end of the film, he seeks out Reyeb, but Reyeb cannot be found.

Yes, it has a lot of violence, much of it seemingly senseless. But this movie is so well acted and conceived and is just original enough that it is worth whatever discomfort it might give you. 4/5

A Guy Ritchie Joint: Sherlock Holmes (2009)

'Splodies? Check. Shirtless fight sequence? Check. Burning man? Check.

I probably went in expecting too much. It starred Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, and it was about Sherlock Holmes. I figured the script would be smart and funny and we'd see some antics, but we'd be heading to a generally good time.

What I got was a stylized action film with House, MD and his sidekick Robert Wilson.

Sherlock Holmes isn't bookish or full of disguises in this film, he is clever, but far more smart about anatomy and how to hit his opponent than he is in solving a case. Dr. Watson is far less proper than his short story counterpart, and more likely to threaten than to heal. And their relationship is almost identical with House and his best friend in the TV show, with Sherlock being manipulative and Watson being sarcastic.

It's a good show. And Guy Ritchie is certainly in control here. The visuals are fantastic, even the final credit sequence is stunning. But I was so disappointed in what I had hoped to watch that the interesting looks couldn't sway me. Perhaps it was the obvious CGI that did me in?

If you are looking for a nineteenth century action/mystery film, with cool visuals this is for you. But if you were hoping for a funny, smart script and a new take on an old set of characters, don't bother. 3/5