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The Metaphysics of Digital Mysticism

Omer M. Mozaffar

The sunglasses, scowls and black leather make it easy to forget that the Wachowski Brothers’ mega-popular “The Matrix” (1999) is a dystopian superhero movie, if that makes any sense. The story is an exciting but familiar origins story. We experience and recognize its Frankenstein mythology telling us that our creations, the machines, have conquered us. We see its Orwell/Kafka environment, sometimes taken straight from Orson Welles’ “The Trial.” And we appreciate its fantastically choreographed martial arts (at least early on, paying homage to video games and Hong Kong movies). And, the philosopher will appreciate the conscious exercise in semiotics. Perhaps, the greatest fun of this movie is the popcorn entertainment. But, for me, even though the movie invests itself so much in its coolness, the overarching appeal of “The Matrix” is its mysticism.

The most memorable verdict

Gerardo Valero

Courtroom dramas count for some of Hollywood’s best movies and, among their finest stands Sidney Lumet’s “The Verdict.”

Even when comparing it to other greats such as his own “Twelve Angry Men” or “To Kill a Mockingbird”, “The Verdict” stands in my opinion as the one with the most memorable, well, verdict, one which I believe to be as fresh, as satisfying and as powerful in your first viewing as it is in your twentieth.

Twins playing a macabre game

When Jeremy Irons won an Oscar for his icy but humorous performance in “Reversal of Fortune” (1990), he thanked David Cronenberg at the end of his acceptance speech. He had a very good reason; in Cronenberg’s unforgettable medical drama “Dead Ringers” (1988), he gave a stunning performance, or a pair of stunning performances, as the peculiar but prodigious twin gynecologists who are threatened by real emotions and then plunged into the self-destructive chaos where the only exit for them may be becoming one again, as they were conceived at first in their mother’s womb.

Before “Airplane!” there were the Airport movies

Gerardo Valero

There’s nothing quite like the movies if you want to learn what people’s hopes and dreams were during the period in which they were made. Take for instance the recent “Up in the Air”. In the present when air travel has turned into something to be endured, George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham showed us how it can become an enticing way of life. The same subject was also portrayed extensively, under a very different light, some forty years as the “Airport” movies dealt with our fears of dying in new and horrible ways, while glamorizing our dreams of flying first-class, surrounded by a movie star in every seat. As the trailer for one of these features once put it: “on board, a collection of the rich and the beautiful!” They also marked the advent of a new genre (the Disaster Film) as well as the “Ark movie” which Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary defines as “mixed bag of characters trapped in a colorful mode of transportation”. How many films can claim to this kind of impact?

A marriage made in Hell

Gerardo Valero

I’ve had to defend myself for loving “The War of the Roses” so much. The majority of people I’ve discussed it with found it too mean-spirited. I realize it deals with an ugly subject but this is a prime example of a movie being great at how it is about its core subject, no matter how touchy. This is one of my all-time favorite films.

A gay kid’s long, barely-repressed sob

Michał Oleszczyk

“The Terence Davies Trilogy” is a work of such profound sadness and despair that watching it has to result in either obliteration or catharsis (unless it provokes a walk-out). Six years in the making, the three black-and-white shorts took their time oozing from Davies’ personal experience and one can see the growing assurance of their director’s hand. “Children” (1976) try out things in a tentative way, “Madonna and Child” (1980) solidify them into a steady mode of expression and “Death and Transfiguration” (1983) present a mature, stunningly poetic cinematic voice. Now that the three movies are only shown spliced together (and became available on a Region 2 DVD released by British Film Institute), one can see the emergence of Davies’ techniques and savor what remains his most direct and devastating work to date.

The rules of Jean Renoir’s “Game”

Long before Luis Bunuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” there was Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game,” a 1939 classic tragicomedy about French upper crust society and its lack of morals. Billed as a “dramatic fantasy,” Renoir’s sharp-eyed satire was far ahead of its time, and took no prisoners, throwing both caution and political correctness to the wind.

Though filmed in beautiful, timeless black and white, “The Rules of the Game”(La Regle Du Jeu) is arguably the most colorful film ever made. It bursts with energy and life. The film is a multifaceted look at the emotional boundaries and battlefields of love and forbidden passions between men and women. The sexes openly hunt each other like prey, discussing their strategies, targets, regrets and longings with each other and amongst themselves. Mr. Renoir crafts a riveting anthropology of these vacant and trifling human creatures. Each is tinged with irony. Few have time for self-awareness or reflection.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

To anyone who wants to watch an offbeat movie for the upcoming holiday season, “Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale” can be a nice mixed bag full of the goodies to be appreciated. The movie is a dark, amusing horror fantasy with Santa Claus as a malevolent supernatural entity far different from the one we are familiar with. He surely knows whether you are naughty or not, but, instead of giving a present to you, he will punish you if he thinks you are naughty, and his punishment will not be merely shoving coal in your stocking. I have no clear idea about what exactly he can do to those poor naughty’children put into sacks, but I guess he is as savage as that murderous Robot Santa in the TV animation series “Futurama,” one of whose memorable lines is “I’m going to tear off your skin like wrapping paper and deck the hall with your guts!”

The boy who played chess with life

In the middle of Boaz Yakin’s “Fresh” (1994), there is the crucial scene that gives us the insight into its hero’s plan. While playing chess with his father, he learns a lesson. And then he applies its logic to the real world for his own purpose. However, in the world case, the game is not a simple matter of win or lose. A small false move can result in not a mere checkmate but a dour outcome for him. And (this is one of the most interesting aspects of the film) he is only a 12-year-old kid. He can do it, and we know that, but can he endure to the end?

“United 93:” What came before “Let’s roll!”

Gerardo Valero

Based on the current trends in Hollywood films, we tend to think of the movie industry as some sort of giant Business Corporation, with board rooms all over town constantly analyzing projection charts and planning the next sequel to another obscure comic-book hero flick (in 3-D). Then five years ago “United 93” came along and defied most of the usual reasons for a film to be produced in the first place. It surely wasn’t made with the idea of losing money but you could anticipate this wasn’t going to be your typical drama/action-adventure movie (or a blockbuster for that matter). It was never even going to help sell great amounts of movie candy (though I can recall attending a screening of “The Passion of the Christ” years ago, and seeing people entering the theater with the usual giant containers of popcorn and soda, so I guess some moviegoers can eat through anything). We knew beforehand that “United 93” would be tackling a difficult subject worthy of scrutinizing, after watching it we come to understand this was one of those few “necessary” films.

Los Angeles Film Festival 2012

Anath White

Los Angeles is a behemoth or, better, an octopus, with tentacles stretching 468.67 square miles, a fact that shocked me when I moved here in 1990. That meant that it was bigger than the distance consumed by driving to and from Chicago from my hometown, Kewanee (150 miles southwest), and back again. I soon realized that one could easily live an entire lifetime in Los Angeles and never see it all. This also meant that so much was always going on, including really desirable events, many of which would most certainly be missed.

You’ve Got Mail

Michał Oleszczyk

“A Letter to Three Wives” (1949) is a terrific triplicate of a melodrama. It won Joe L. Mankiewicz Academy Awards for writing and directing one year before he gave the audiences one bumpy ride in “All About Eve” by suggesting that – at least when it comes to love, sex and ambition – fastening one’s seat belts is for sissies only. The earlier film is tamer than “Eve”‘s non-stop repartee-fest, and its focus is not as pointed. Still, it remains one of my favorite movies ever made: not only for all its brilliant rejoinders (of which Thelma Ritter gets to utter the most hilarious), but for its portrayal of what it means to be anxious about one’s relationship and then to receive reassurance from the person we love. It’s a story of three women envisioning the end of their marriages in the morning and feeling them strengthened by the end of the day. It goes down like an anxiety-glazed donut with a filling of hope.

Is it a curse or a gift?

Gerardo Valero

David Cronenberg’s “The Dead Zone” (1983) is my favorite adaptation of a Stephen King horror novel. Some parts from “The Shawshank Redemption” are terrifying in a different way, and are better classified in other genres. I’m also fond of some of the other films his works have inspired. “Carrie” and “The Shining” were mostly outstanding, but the casting of adults as teens in the first and the absence of an everyman feel to the lead protagonist in the second are the main reasons why I place “The Dead Zone” above them. The latter films were made by exceptional directors (DePalma and Kubrick), but Cronenberg’s taste for the unusual, turned out to be a more adequate fit for King’s material.

Why the Coens tortured poor Larry Gopnik

Olivia Collette

No wonder so many people thought Jesus was a heretic! All this talk of a kind and forgiving God? I mean, did he skip the bit where God asks Abraham to kill his favourite son? Wasn’t flooding the entire world a little rash? Can ordering that hit on Amalekites be classified as reasonable behaviour? Let’s face it, Old-Testament God could use a little anger management.

Lives across a great divide

Gerardo Valero

Lawrence Kasdan’s “Grand Canyon” didn’t make a splash when it opened here in Mexico, and it’s not the kind of feature that’s ever shown on our TV, so hardly anybody I know has even heard about it. It’s not an easy movie to describe. When people ask me about its subject, I say something like “It’s about a group of people from Los Angeles living in despair who end up feeling better when they all get together and visit the Grand Canyon.” Most of them seem to loose interest but the response of those who do see it is mostly overwhelming.

Watching “The Tree of Life” brought “Grand Canyon” to mind. The films couldn’t be more different, but both deal with a search for a deeper meaning in our existence– a sense of helplessness in trying to place ourselves in the grand scheme of things. They also lack defined plots or conventional structures.

“America is not a country, it’s a business.”

Pablo Villaça

So says professional killer Jackie Cogan at one point in Killing Them Softly, the third film by New Zealander Andrew Dominik – and considering the filmmaker’s efforts to establish a connection between the events in the movie and the economic crisis started in the late 2000s thanks to the greed and lack of scruples of Wall Street, it is easy to see Cogan as an ordinary employee of any company complaining about the lack of vision of his bosses and, on the other hand, the big bankers as Armani-dressing versions of the violent mobsters who inhabit the crime section of the newspapers. More than that: fearful due to the financial disaster caused by their colleagues in Wall Street, the bad guys presented by Dominik are miles away from those gangsters who used to throw hundred dollar bills on the ground or distribute tips in exchange of a smile; instead, here they need to haggle prices with professional killers and negotiate with theirs superiors before approving a sum of a thousand dollars for framing someone.

We know what you’ll be doing

Watching Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” (2002) again through Blu-ray made me muse on how much my life with movies has changed during the last 10 years. When I watched it with my father at one of the big movie theaters in my hometown on one summer day of 2002 July, we were not yet familiar with multiplex theaters, and I watched movies mainly through VHS while infrequently going to theaters. DVD was slowly attracting my attention and I eventually bought a DVD-ROM drive for my computer in 2002 October. And I was not particularly interested in downloading movies from Internet; why do I have to watch movies in my small dorm room when I can enjoy them at big theaters?

Salvation by Slugfest

Omer M. Mozaffar

Religion takes you from darkness into light, and David Fincher’s deeply religious “Fight Club” grows darker and darker still. Here, piety is anarchy; anarchy is destruction; self-destruction is ecstasy. It plays whimsical department store music while its broken shark teeth chew at you. Its sound, consistent plot leads straight to an abrasive, perhaps annoying schizophrenia. It is the Bodhisattva, Satyagraha, and the Masnavi mashed up and played backwards with the wrong device. This movie is the anti-movie, and it enjoys every moment of it.