I just got back from seeing Inception. Okay, if you’ve seen it, please check the comments. I don’t want to ruin it for anyone, so I won’t raise my questions here. The comments will have spoilers, so be warned!
In this short commentary, I’m not going to describe the plot of the film – it’s too convoluted, but there are plenty of reviews out there that attempt to explain what it’s about. I really wanted some escapism this evening and that’s exactly what I got with this film, so I’m a happy customer. It’s a fun summer popcorn movie. From my POV, it’s entertainment and nothing more. I didn’t find it profound, nor do I think it has any deep meaning. To me, it’s a just a sci-fi action flick not worthy of analysis, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. I know others disagree with this assessment and find it meaningful, but I didn’t. As for the film experience itself, the plot lurches along in places; in fact, the first 45 – 50 minutes are very slow and even boring in places. (The guys sitting near me were playing games on their Blackberries.) Some of the film is silly and sentimental and I felt that the story could have been much better, but overall I enjoyed it. The effects were interesting, particularly when the streets of Paris folded up (as seen in the photo above) and there were enough questions raised that I wanted answered. I think this film has tremendous hype attached to it, which is an interesting phenomenon to behold. This summer has been pretty dismal for films so far (at least in my view), so perhaps that’s one reason Inception is doing well. It fills a void for those of us who want something fun, but not completely brainless and stupid or kid-friendly.
The one thing I wasn’t looking forward to was Leo DiCaprio, since I’ve never liked him (except in Gilbert Grape). To me, he’s always seemed like a 17-year-old boy in perpetuity, but in this film, I have to give him some credit. He has really matured and seems like a believable grown-up now. He finally has a bit of gravitas. I like Ellen Page too and it’s refreshing to have an actress in a leading role who seems like a normal young woman and not a brainless sexpot. Before this film I’d never seen Tom Hardy…but he is mighty fine!
To close, I want to include this section from A.O. Scott’s NYT review, which sort of sums up my view of the film. Those who have seen the film – don’t forget to check the comments!
The accomplishments of “Inception” are mainly technical, which is faint praise only if you insist on expecting something more from commercial entertainment. That audiences do — and should — expect more is partly, I suspect, what has inspired some of the feverish early notices hailing “Inception” as a masterpiece, just as the desire for a certifiably great superhero movie led to the wild overrating of “The Dark Knight.” In both cases Mr. Nolan’s virtuosity as a conjurer of brilliant scenes and stunning set pieces, along with his ability to invest grandeur and novelty into conventional themes, have fostered the illusion that he is some kind of visionary.
But though there is a lot to see in “Inception,” there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears. If Mr. Nolan can’t quite reach this place, that may be because his access is blocked by the very medium he deploys with such skill.
And the limitations of “Inception” may suggest the limits not only of this very talented director, but also of his chosen art form at this moment in its history. Our dreams feed the movies. The movies feed our dreams. But somehow, our imaginations are still hungry.
This is Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s first feature film. It’s playing at a few of the art-house cinemas in London, which is where I saw it recently, but it may be out on DVD soon. Neshat lives in New York now and this film is banned in Iran, as is the novel by Shahrnush Parsipur upon which it’s based. I don’t have time to write a proper review, but see the links at the bottom for more info and the trailer above. Women Without Men is visually a very beautiful film, with magical realist elements. It is the story of four women in Tehran in 1953, a politically turbulent year, thanks in no small part to the actions of the British and Americans. The film links the narratives of four women, who find their way to a house in an orchard outside Tehran, taking refuge from the men in their lives. I found the characters Munis and Zarin to be the most interesting. Munis doesn’t want marriage and yearns to be politically active, but lives under the control of her brother. Zarin is an anorexic prostitute whose story is particularly harrowing and unforgettable. While this is an excellent film that I recommend seeing, I felt towards the end the director lost control of the narrative somewhat; the film became a bit too abstract and symbolic, I think, but this didn’t detract from the overall experience.
Women Without Men is a feminist film, which makes it worth seeing for that alone. How refreshing to see a film that deals with the lives of women in a bold, honest, creative and unforgiving way. While this film is about Iranian women in the 1950s, it is universal in its themes. To find contemporary feminist narratives, I have to search outside the Anglophone world and outside Europe to a large extent, though there are certainly more feminist and politically engaged novels and films coming from mainland Europe than the US and the UK. There seems to be a rich tradition of feminist writing from Iran – or at least Iranians in exile. There is more urgency in these stories, perhaps because complacency is a luxury the authors don’t have. Parsipur’s novel Women Without Men has gone to the top of my reading list.
Last night I was feeling stir crazy and desperately needed to get out. [I feel this way nearly everyday now. Sigh.] A friend recommended The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza), an Argentine film directed by Lucrecia Martel, so I went to see it. An escape to Argentina sounded perfect. This film just opened in London, but I think it was playing in NYC late last summer, so it might be on DVD in the States. What a fascinating film! It reminded me of one of my favorite films, Michael Haneke’s Hidden (Caché), in terms of theme and style (no soundtrack, long stretches of silence). And afterwards, people argue about what happened and what it all meant. I was in the ladies room after and it was funny to listen to the debates. It’s just one of those films you have to discuss. I don’t have time to review it, but here’s the Guardian review and the NYT review. I’m excited to have discovered a new female filmmaker who is interested in telling women’s stories from women’s perspectives. I will definitely try to find Martel’s previous films.
The difference between my generation and the young ones today? We had The Lost Boys. They have Twilight.
RIP Corey Haim. The 80s icons are dropping fast. Makes me feel old before my time.
Anglofille said @ 10:48 am | film | Permalink | Comments are off
26 January, 2010 | Comments are off
It’s that time again – I must dust off the academic portion of my dissertation and begin working on it again. Chapter 1: Fight Club. You all know I love Fight Club. It’s a brilliant indictment of capitalist-patriarchy and the damage it does to men. That’s not the dominant interpretation of the film, but that’s how I read it. All of the issues in Fight Club are relevant to women as well, even if on the surface it’s very ‘male.’ Anyway, the next month will be spent writing the novel and finishing this chapter on Fight Club. How I’m going to do all of this work on top of teaching remains to be seen.
Perhaps in related news, my novel is becoming increasingly violent. It’s always had shootings and bombings, but you can distance yourself while writing about that kind of violence. Now I have beatings and torture, which is very up-close-and-personal. At first I found it difficult to write about such things because I was disturbed that these ideas and images existed in my mind, but now I sort of enjoy it. The people being beaten and tortured are really vile, so they deserve what they get (think Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’). Because of that, it’s sort of cathartic. I’m not sure how I’ll reconcile the feminist ideals of my novel with the violence, except to say: Why should women have to play nice? It certainly hasn’t gotten us very far.
I finally went to see it tonight. Awesome, totally awesome! This summer has been terrible for movies, at least in my view, but Inglourious Basterds is spectacular. The best movie I’ve seen in a long time. I loved every second of it. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, obviously – it’s extremely violent (I covered my eyes during the scalpings) and the rewriting of Jewish history may be offensive to some (as in this piece by Daniel Mendelsohn from Newsweek), but I really felt the film and its ideas were exhilarating, particularly in a year that provided us with that Nazi sob story otherwise known as The Reader. I thought Brad Pitt would be in the whole film, but he was maybe in a third of it. My favorite thread in the film was the Jewish woman living in Paris who owned the cinema. That part was great.
I couldn’t possibly write a review of it now – there’s too much to process and think about – but I wanted to post this because the film has gotten some bad reviews, including one from that dope at the Guardian who gave it one star. One star! What movie did this guy watch? Don’t let bad and mixed reviews scare you off. If you like Tarantino films and if you’re in the mood for a WWII Jewish revenge fantasy with lots of subtitles, then you won’t regret going.
Anglofille said @ 1:07 am | film | Permalink | Comments are off
I went to see The Time Traveler’s Wife tonight. What I really wanted to see was Inglorious Basterds, but I didn’t feel like hanging around Leicester Square for nearly two hours waiting for it to start. I thought since Eric Bana is in The Time Traveler’s Wife I’d enjoy it, even if it were cheesy, but I was wrong. In this horrific movie, even the talented and beauteous Eric Bana comes off dull, charmless and without any sex appeal. Who thought that was possible? He even spends a lot of time naked, but I still almost fell asleep at least twice. The guy who directed this film should be banned from Hollywood forever.
Bana and Rachel McAdams have zero chemistry in this film. McAdams just isn’t a leading lady in my view. She has no star quality at all. I can imagine her on television, but she can’t carry a film. The casting isn’t the only problem though. The story’s premise is just ridiculous. I’m perfectly willing to buy into time travel within a story, but it makes no sense here and has no internal logic within the story. Back to the Future was nutty but it made sense as a story. This doesn’t.
“His name is Blane? That’s a major appliance, not a name.”
Our 80s icons are dying – first Michael Jackson, now John Hughes. Does this mean I’m getting old? If you weren’t a teenager in America in the 1980s, then you can’t possibly understand the significance of John Hughes’s movies for so many of my generation. I wasn’t allowed to see Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club when they first came out. Were they rated R? Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Some Kind of Wonderful were movies I went to see repeatedly. So many of us girls wanted to be like Andie in Pretty in Pink. I still listen to that soundtrack. The Some Kind of Wonderful soundtrack is excellent as well – a real favorite. It was like a Golden Age of teen movies – nothing in the 1990s or 2000s can compare. And female stars like Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy actually looked like real girls, not the peroxide plastic Barbie dolls of today.
Tonight in the Times I read a story about the murder in Pakistan of a well-known singer, Ayman Udas. She was murdered by her brothers, apparently for bringing disgrace upon her family by divorcing, remarrying and singing on television. [Here is a clip of her singing on YouTube.] This murder happened in Peshawar, an area that is increasingly being taken over by the Taliban. According to Radio Free Europe, “In January, a dancer’s bullet-ridden body was left in the center of Swat Valley’s capital of Mingora — not far from where Udas grew up — with a note warning locals that “un-Islamic voices” will no longer be tolerated.” The article also states that other female performers are being threatened.
While this story is yet further proof of the troubling situation in Pakistan, it also puts so-called “honor killings” back in the news, since Ayman Udas was murdered by her brothers for disgracing the family’s honor. I’ve written many times before about honor killings, yet no matter how many of these stories I read, I still cannot understand the psychology behind this practice. While it’s obvious that human beings are capable of the most horrific acts, it seems to go against human nature to murder your own family members. Sure, anywhere in the world you’ll find parents killing their children, children killing their parents, siblings killing each other, etc. But these crimes are aberrations, not part of a persistent cultural practice like “honor killings,” where teenage girls and adult women are murdered by male family members. I just cannot fathom the hatred and dehumanization of women that has to exist in order for two brothers to shoot their sister in the chest three times – which is what happened to Ayman Udas. And she’s not alone.
In doing some research for this post, I came across a story about 16-year-old Naile Erdas, who was raped and became pregnant. After she gave birth, she returned home from the hospital and was shot dead by her brother. In January, a Turkish court sentenced her entire family to life imprisonment for participating in this act, which is one of the harshest punishments ever for an “honor killing.” The average sentence for an “honor killing” is normally six months, so I hope this case sets a precedent.
Very sad news about Natasha Richardson’s death. When I heard the news I couldn’t help but think about my trip to the theatre last October to see her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, perform in The Year of Magical Thinking. That play, a searing one-woman show, had Redgrave portraying a mother struggling with grief over her adult daughter’s death (based on the life of Joan Didion). Now the same exact thing has happened to Redgrave in real life. The similarities are striking.
I never saw Richardson on the stage, though I remember liking Widow’s Peak, which also starred Mia Farrow and is a nice light-hearted Irish film from the early nineties. Worth checking out.
Since it’s the Oscars tonight, I thought I’d post a link to this article “Don’t Give an Oscar to The Reader.” The author makes a number of strong points. I didn’t completely dislike The Reader, but there are many things about it that are disturbing in terms of how it handles the Holocaust. The article I linked to places The Reader into a genre of “Holocaust revisionism,” which is along the same continuum as Holocaust denial. Very disturbing.
I know someone who is from a cultural background that’s, well, let’s just say hostile to Jewish people. This person saw The Reader and told me that he didn’t understand what the big deal is about the Holocaust. He said that anyone who participated in the Holocaust was just doing their duty for their country, even if it was wrong, and that they shouldn’t be blamed for it now. This person thought The Reader was just a nice romantic film. This encounter I had really highlighted the danger of a film like The Reader, which I think is irresponsible in so many ways. And I’ve had more than one debate with people about whether Kate Winslet’s character in the film was a Nazi. **Spoiler** She says in the film that she joined the SS and then took a job as a prison camp guard. She’s a Nazi! Why is it hard for so many people who see the film to admit this? She built relationships with Jewish women in the camp, then sent them to their deaths at Auschwitz. Plus she let 300 innocent women and children burn to death inside of a church. There is no way to rationalize these actions. There just isn’t. Many years later she felt no guilt about this whatsoever. She’s a monstrous person.
I went to see The Reader this weekend. I don’t feel like writing a review, but during one of the *many* scenes where Kate Winslet appears semi-nude, the woman sitting behind me whispered to her husband: “Look, she has stretch marks!”
I have a long day of writing ahead of me and I really needed to laugh this morning. Voila! The Christian Bale rant that I wrote about yesterday has been turned into a dance mix. As the Guardian says, “It’s the expletive-strewn nervous breakdown you can dance to!” OMG, it’s hilarious! Be warned about the language…
I hereby retract my crush on Christian Bale. What a complete psycho! Listen to this audio tape of him going absolutely crazy on the set of “Terminator Salvation.” [Be warned this is laced with mega profanity.] The person he’s screaming at is the cinematographer, who screwed up a shot. Apparently, this happened just days before Bale was accused of assaulting his mother and sister – a charge I didn’t believe at the time, but now I do.
If anyone I worked with talked to me like that, I’d walk out and never return. Sure glad I don’t work in Hollywood with these a**holes.
Matt Damon is going to be appearing in a 4th Bourne movie. Yay! And once again, he’s trashing James Bond:
“They could never make a James Bond movie like any of the Bourne films because Bond is an imperialist, misogynist sociopath who goes around bedding women and swilling martinis and killing people…He’s repulsive.”
Oh Matt, when you talk like that you make my heart swoon!
Since I’ve been thinking a lot about American power this week – the reality of it, not speeches filled with lovely rhetoric – I decided to watch Syriana, a movie I quite like. I’ve included the trailer below. If you haven’t seen this film, I highly recommend it. It might be a nice counter-balance to what’s in the news this week. [BTW, not to be completely shallow, but I normally do not find George Clooney attractive at all. But put 30 pounds on him and give him a beard et voila...that's a George I can appreciate!]
I have been a bit stressed out lately, what with having four jobs and working full-time on the PhD. [After this week, I'll only have three jobs. Hurrah!] Still, I think breaks are important, so on Sunday I took a break to see The Baaeder-Meinhof Complex. A two-and-a half-hour blood-soaked German movie about terrorism might not be the ideal way to spend Sunday afternoon, but I have a particular interest in the themes of this film, given what my novel is about.
Well, what an amazing film! I had never heard of the Baader Meinhof Group or Red Army Faction, a left-wing “urban guerrilla” group that committed terrorist acts (bombings, assassinations, kidnappings) and bank robberies in West Germany primarily throughout the 1970s. The group was formed by student radicals amidst the political turmoil of the late 60s, who were against the Vietnam war, Western imperialism, capitalism, etc, etc. They were an extremely violent bunch — from the film, it didn’t seem that peaceful protest à la Martin Luther King was even considered as an option. It was all about guns and bombs.
There are some who worry that this film glamorizes the Baader-Meinhof group and thus terrorism itself, while others in Germany have said this is the first film that actually hasn’t glamorized the Baader-Meinhof group and shows them as heartless, savage killers. Since I don’t know the history or context of all this, I can only say that to me, it did glamorize them to an extent (there can be no doubt about that), but this is balanced by horribly graphic scenes of the group machine gunning people to death and shooting them in the head. Only an extremely sick person would find that glamorous or appealing.
On a sort of related note, after doing some research into this film, I am now acquainted with the term Prada Meinhof, which refers to the way left-wing figures (Che Guevera, the Baader-Meinhof gang) have become “chic,” with their images emblazoned on t-shirts and worn by morons who are slaves to capitalist consumer culture yet think they’re somehow revolutionary. [See this Guardian article from 1999: Come the Revolution, We'll All Be in Combats.]
Part of what makes this film both fascinating and disturbing is that some of the views of the group are appealing, at least to those of a liberal persuasion. [And for the record, a great many of their views, not to mention their actions, are morally repugnant and indefensible.] During the 70s, the group had widespread support in West Germany. I found myself agreeing with some of their views – the anger they felt resonated with me on some level. This was more at the beginning of the film, before they murdered innocent people and started robbing banks to fund themselves. Much of what they were so angry about are issues that are extremely relevant right now — war, Western imperialism, capitalism, globalization, etc. It’s interesting to juxtapose the reaction of people in the late sixties/early seventies to these issues (anger, passion, protest, action) with the reaction of Americans and Europeans to the same issues today (complacency, apathy, ignorance and insane adoration for middle-of-the-road Barack Obama, who is heralded as a “left-wing” hero and savior). It’s sad how far we haven’t come.
In this edition: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Blindness, Revolutionary Road
I don’t always write enough about books on this site, which is strange, given how obsessed I am with all things literary. I think I feel that if I write about books, I have to provide insightful commentary and a proper review. That’s too much pressure and too much work. I’m doing a lit PhD, so literary analysis is indeed work for me. Also, and perhaps more importantly, I just have no interest in writing book reviews. I’m not sure why. I like reviewing films and plays, but not books. Perhaps books are too personal to me. I would rather write about my response to a book, rather than reviewing the book itself, if that makes sense. So I will just write about books in a different way and see if that works.
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I have just started reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I was inspired by the recent article in the Times, Ten Things You Need to Know about Haruki Murakami, who they label “the coolest writer in the world today.” I was in the mood for some good lit in translation, since I feel like being transported to a foreign locale right now. I want to see the world through eyes that are far different from mine. I’ve read the first chapter so far and I’m hooked, though we’ll see if the whole 600 pages sustain my interest. (I am hopelessly picky about books.) The only Japanese fiction I’ve ever read is a few books by Banana Yoshimoto, who was quite trendy and popular when I was younger. If I remember correctly, it was her book Kitchen that I read and perhaps something else. So I’m excited to explore a bit of the Japanese literary landscape.
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One of my favorite novels of all time is Blindness by José Saramago. When I heard recently that this book had been made into a film, I felt disappointed. This book cannot be translated to film. This is a dark, twisted book filled with depravity. In an unnamed country, one by one all of the citizens begin to go blind. Eventually, everyone is blind and society descends into anarchy and chaos. It is highly allegorical and surreal. It’s extremely difficult to read not just because of the writing style, but because of the subject matter. You can take the bare bones of the narrative and create a screenplay from that, but the soul of the book would be lost. This book does not belong on the screen, it belongs in the mind of the reader. Saramago refused to sell the rights for years. The LA Times quotes him as saying, “Cinema destroys imagination.” Unfortunately, he changed his mind. The director of the film “reports that he softened the film’s disturbing (but not graphic) scenes of sexual violence after ‘the audiences didn’t react well at the first test screening; some people even walked out.’” Yeah, well, that’s not surprising.
I went to see this film, which is the true story of Barbara Daly Baekeland, who married the heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune. The morally bankrupt American socialite’s big claim to fame was having an incestuous relationship with her homosexual son and then being murdered by him. I’m pretty sure the subtitle of this film is, “Be grateful your family isn’t this crazy.”
I think that about covers it. I mean, come on. What the heck was that all about? While I admire the skills of the actors and filmmakers, I think it was a deeply flawed film overall. More specifically, it featured a deeply flawed narrative. Actually, I would describe it as an anti-narrative. This review from the Washington Post is one of the only negative reviews out there (and I think it’s right on). I don’t understand the universal acclaim for this film at all. I could write more about it, but the whole experience has drained me and I’d just rather forget about it. One thing is for sure — tonight I will have nightmares about this face (and haircut):
Anglofille is an American living in London, finishing up a novel and a PhD, taking photos, and blogging about expat life, books, feminism and perpetual angst.
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