Far Flungers

Run Silent, Run Deep

The other day I was discussing the physicality of objects with a fellow Far-Flung Correspondent), Grace Wang. We were mourning the death of physical objects. Like me, she shares this preference of actual physical books over e-books, letters over emails, photo albums on a shelf over digitalized photo albums on Facebook. There is something unique about the physicality of them all, something that will always be absent from their digital replacements. Of course recycling these objects goes without saying.

The smell of a book as you turn a soft page, or the excitement of checking the mailbox for snail mail is something many of us will always prefer over clicking a ‘Next Page’ icon in an e-book or checking an inbox full of emails. It’s why the Jimmy Stewart film “Shop Around the Corner” worked better as a romantic comedy than the Tom Hanks remake “You’ve Got Mail”. Yes, both may contain the same content but content has nothing to do with it. I would rather slam a book with anger or crumble a letter than double click a delete button. This need for physical objects is more than just an act of nostalgia; it’s a predilection.

The offer we cannot refuse

Gerardo Valero

Behind every great fortune there is a crime. – Balzac 

So states the prologue of Mario Puzo’s novel, “The Godfather,” a debatable statement that rings true nonetheless. It certainly feels like “the truth” after visiting this world. Does it mean that the Corleone family was completely amoral? Not at all, and that is what separates this material from just about every previous gangster film. This family provided justice and protection to those who couldn’t get it elsewhere. They also gave them gambling, women and liquor–but heck, they did draw a line at drugs. If there is one thing that Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola evidently were clear about, it’s that black or white characters aren’t particularly exciting.

The phenomenal success of the Godfather Trilogy can basically be attributed to the decision on the part of Paramount executives to put their helm in the hands of a master filmmaker at his very peak who also happened to be one of the few raised in a family with the precise sensibilities required to take the material from Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel and make it feel absolutely real.

Days and nights of bottles

In the biochemistry class during my naive undergraduate years, the professor jokingly said the capability of metabolizing alcohol depends on our genetic makeup. Thanks to the variations in the genes, some people can produce more enzymes or more active enzymes to take care of alcohol in their body. They can be heavy drinkers, or the ones less susceptible to the hazards caused by alcoholism than their fellow drunks.

That may explain the existence of Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), the “laureate of American lowlifes” who lived a relatively long life despite many days and nights of bottles and women at the bars. As Stephen King says in his insightful book “On Writing,” writing usually has no business with drinking (“Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do.”). Sometime there are exceptions like Bukowski. Drinking and writing always came together to him, and he had no problem with that.

How much of Pulp is Fiction?

Gerardo Valero

When I reviewed Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” a few months ago, several readers brought up the point that when a filmmaker constantly uses extreme violence in his films, there surely must be something wrong about the director himself. 

 I don’t buy into that theory, but while watching Quentin Tarantino’s films, which I mostly enjoy a lot, I have to admit I have a hard time disassociating my diagnosis of the filmmaker with his own work, especially “Pulp Fiction” which is clearly a film with an amazing understanding of violent criminals, the drug culture and the fine art of original cursing. 

Santa Barbara Film Festival 2012

Anath White

It’s a sunny, unseasonable 80 degrees as the 2012 Santa Barbara International Film Festival kicks in, but all I want is to be indoors. When you peer at a schedule listing nearly 200 films jammed into 10 days, and you just can’t wait, you know you’re an addict. This is my third SBIFF so I recognize the signs.

Suddenly each January, there’s an extra bustle in this appealing, laid-back town. Downtown on lower State Street, trucks appear bearing vivid banners, soon to be festooned overhead. Special lights and rigging go up at 2 central venues – the precisely restored, historic Lobero and Arlington Theatres. Locals watch to see whether Festival Director Roger Durling changes his hair: one year it was spikey, another year purple. This time it’s rather like Heathcliff – longer, romantic.

He’s his mother’s right arm. And her left.

I have a small childhood memory indirectly associated with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Santa Sangre”(1989). I remember well about how it drew the attention of people when it was introduced in South Korea in 1994. One tagline was simple brutal honesty that I still recall with smile: “This is no doubt the cult!” And here is another nice one that makes my eyeballs still roll: “Today, You will be infected by the cult!”They were blatant enough to draw the attention from an 11-year-old boy, but the problems were that (1) I was too young to get the chance to watch it, and (2) my hometown was a local city far from Seoul. However, that was a blessing in disguise. They showed the audiences the butchered version with a considerable amount deleted due to local censorship. In those days, bold, controversial films like “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover” were never introduced to South Korean audiences unless they were heavily chopped. You probably think it is kind of weird considering some uncompromisingly violent South Korean movies made nowadays, but it did happen a lot when I was young.

The Heart is a Lonely Fighter

Omer M. Mozaffar

Thinking about this movie, I had to go to a thesaurus to find any synonyms for “underdog.” Try it. The point is that I had little interest in watching another dark horse movie because they tend to follow the same unique long shot formula to such a degree that there are not many synonyms even for the word that describes them. Further, the admittedly exciting trailer for Gavin O’Connor’s geometrically constructed “Warrior” (2011) seemed to give away all of the film’s secrets, including the most preposterous plot points. More than that, all the villains in these Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) matches seemed too familiar and too cartoonish. But, a few friends recommended the movie; then, my fellow Far Flung Correspondent from Cairo, Wael Khairy, appreciated this movie somewhere in his list of the Best Films of 2011.

The President’s analyst goes crazy

While it is one or two steps behind “Dr. Strangelove,” “The President’s Analyst” (1967) is a very good black comedy sniggering at Cold War paranoid. Maybe it’s not as ruthless as that great comedy, but the movie romps cheerfully on its subjects with a take-no-prisoner attitude. And during this loony joy ride we eventually discover that the movie foretold something very accurate more than 40 years ago.

We have seen many psychiatrist whose lives become more burdensome than usual thanks to their unusual patients in the movies (“Analyze This”) and TV series(“The Sopranos” and “In Treatment”), but I think no one can top our hero Dr. Sidney Schaefer (James Coburn). His new patient is none other than the president of the United States, the most powerful figure in the world who incidentally does not appear on the screen.

“Black Narcissus,” which electrified Scorsese

Post World War II British Cinema was one of the richest periods in film history. Finally free from budget and stylistic constraints saddled during wartime, some of the greatest filmmaking talent the filmdom had arisen. John and Roy Boulting, David Lean, Laurence Olivier, and Carol Reed were just a few of the notables whose directorial prowess had struck the scene. But a pair which was the period’s most prolific was Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; The Archers. 

The Dark Knight Rises, an American genre falls

Omer M. Mozaffar

I love the Dark Knight Trilogy for one simple reason: it gave me the permission that I didn’t know I was looking for to dislike all the rest of the Superhero movies. The high point of my dislike came in the highly ambitious “The Avengers” of this past summer. Don’t get the wrong idea: as far as superhero movies go, it is one of the best, or at least it is one of the biggest. But something was wrong. It suffers from the same thing that the whole genre has suffered from. First and foremost, we are watching a bunch of costumed adults pretending that they’re children in an expensive suburban Daycare. Second, the genre has otherwise exhausted itself to the point of exciting ritual. Third, the movies in the Dark Knight trilogy are solid and smart entertainment (though not without their flaws).

The mysteries upon mysteries of Lisbon

A young boy curious about his birth. A priest with the long past behind him. A countess who gets involved in a doomed affair and then trapped in an unhappy marriage. A count who commits cruelty out of frustrated love. A criminal who accidentally gets the chance of lifetime to change his social status. A vengeful society woman who manipulates others to anger the man she is obsessed with. They might look like the characters randomly selected from several different books, but they are all the denizens of one labyrinthine tale which slowly reveals how their lives are intertwined with each other more than we thought at first.

Michael Clayton: The law firm’s janitor

Gerardo Valero

There’s something fascinating about films with characters who have mastered a unique way of living their lives or professions, no matter how unusual or obscure, and the two best recent examples I can think of both star George Clooney. One of them is his Frequent-Flyer-Mileage-loving-liquidator in “Up in the Air” and the other is the title character of “Michael Clayton”, the subject of this review. 

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.

A lonely day in August

Sometimes movies provide the moments I empathize with even though I am completely different from their characters. I remember how I sympathetically reacted to one particular scene around the end of “The Hurt Locker” (2008) because I would also be at a loss in its hero’s circumstance unless my family or others accompanied me. Several months after watching that movie, I thought about that scene after wandering alone around the aisles of a big supermarket in the suburban area of Des Plaines, Illinois for at least more than 20 minutes until I settled on a loaf of white bread and a bottle of marmalade after lots and lots of hesitation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s a man! It’s an ant! It’s a Mant!

When I went to the Jeonju International Film Festival in this April, I was reminded again that the old theaters at the downtown of my hometown are gone. Most of them are now replaced by a bunch of multiplexes, and I can’t say the old theaters were better than their replacements. While there were the big theaters where I could enjoy movies like “Independence Day” or “Starship Troopers,” I remember too well how shabby several theaters were in early 1990s, compared to the current standard; I am happy with the comfortable seats, nice bathrooms, and agreeable viewing condition in multiplex theaters.

Drinking his way to hell

Spending almost two hours with the relentlessly drunk character is not a pleasant thing at all, and it is also not easy to watch the man who chooses to abandon himself to his own hell. He is almost near at the bottom. All he can do is moving further to the final destination he has been reaching for. He still has some fancy about getting out of his torment, but it only reminds him that he has already crossed the line. He screams out of frustration near the end of the movie, “It’s not possible — not in this world!”

John Huston’s “Under the Volcano”(1984) poignantly looks at one of the bleakest states of mind. This is a sad portrayal of a man struggling with his addiction and the agonizing contradiction resulting from it. As one character in the movie says, no one can live without love, but he cannot accept it even if he has desperately yearned for.

The movie is mainly about one unfortunate day of the former British consul Geoffrey Firmin (Albert Finney) who has been stuck in Cuernavaca, Mexico. According to him, he resigned his post for himself, but that may be not true considering his present state. He is a drunkard going through the final stages of alcoholism where the drinking is necessary for getting “sober.” He says he can deal with his addiction (“Surely you appreciate the fine balance I must strike between, uh, the shake of too little and, uh, the abyss of too much”), but his abstinence is just the brief moment of looking at his glass. His body soon craves for alcohol, he frantically searches for the bottle, and, after satisfying the need, he passes out.