EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - I guess I lucked out this semester in that by Wednesday---when I turned in a bound copy of my thesis to Dean Nazario over at Livingston College---my semester was pretty much over. None of my classes had final exams during the exam week that's currently going on; all my finals were either papers or articles or a big fat thesis.
Thus, I have the upcoming week for all the relaxation in the world before I venture off to Temple University for my two-week copy editing internship training session. So what do I do this weekend instead of relaxing? I pretty much spend my weekend working my ass off at the State Theatre.
Let's see: I had the displeasure of witnessing one of the rowdier (not to mention drunker) audiences I've ever seen at the theater boo two opening acts for the headlining comedian off the stage---not even giving either of them a chance---before hearing the headliner essentially put the audience in their place, however subtly, before going on with his show. The headlining comedian, by the way, was Andrew Dice Clay. Enough said; I guess Clay's unreservedly vulgar, lowlife comedy inspires that kind of behavior in general.
And Saturday and Sunday I worked two double shifts. Saturday, I worked two performances of Jesus Christ Superstar, with Ted Neeley, the Jesus of Norman Jewison's 1973 movie version, giving what sounded like a farewell tour of sorts, according to the ads of the two performances I've seen. And today, I had to usher two marathon dance recitals. It's that time of the State Theatre season, I guess; dance schools all over the state have to put on their end-of-year revues for the parents to fawn over. I worked a bunch of them last season; some were vastly more organized than others. Today's two three-hour marathons were, at the very least, efficient, moving quickly from one dance number to another with a minimum of fuss. And I encountered very little trouble from the patrons this time around.
In short, five shifts in three days. Well, I did say I'd be available all three days, so the house manager used that information accordingly when scheduling me. It's okay, really: as long as I'm getting paid, fine by me. But I won't be surprised if, a couple of days down the line, my legs start to feel all sore from all the standing and straining I did on them these past couple of days.
One thing I notably missed in wasting my legs away at the State Theatre: Spider-Man 3. Apparently it set some kind of record on opening day. I liked the first two Spider-Man films quite a bit, so I'm hoping I'll be able to see it before I leave for Temple University next Sunday. The early reviews have been disappointing, though: many of them suggest that this is an uninspired, lackluster, and overstuffed continuation of the touching, resonant Peter Parker saga. I was afraid of that; Spider-Man 2 seemed to already complete the saga rather beautifully, and so maybe this third film can't help but seem like a greedy money grab, however much Sam Raimi and company try to infuse it with self-importance and soul. Well, I'll reserve judgment until I see it for myself.
Boy, it feels like it's been ages since I've been inside a movie theater. Maybe I've just become more choosy with the films I see. Either I'm just becoming a pretentious shit, or I'm just becoming overly money- and/or time-conscious. (For me here in East Brunswick, it's such a pain to travel to and from the city---not to mention a minor financial burden, unless I'm getting reimbursed somehow for my travels.) Whatever the case may be...I already skipped 300 out of total lack of interest; I'll probably skip Pirates of the Caribbean 3 for the same reason. (I might have skipped Grindhouse, too, if I didn't feel a senior thesis-inspired obligation to see it just to see what Quentin Tarantino had in store for all of us in his Death Proof. Turns out he had something much more interesting---heck, almost Godardian, I'd say---to offer than I expected; the unexpectedly excellent Death Proof is definitely something I'd like to write about in a future entry.) Besides, all the genuinely interesting stuff seems to be almost exclusively in New York City anyway---The Host, for instance, or Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new Thai film Syndromes and a Century. I've heard a lot of good stuff about Julie Christie in that new Sarah Polley film Away From Her; maybe that'll come to Princeton soon, because the film---dealing in part with both the nature of love and Alzheimer's---looks quite stimulating.
Anyway, I will hopefully be back soon with a longer, deeper post on things semester- and/or arts-related.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Monday, April 30, 2007
A Series of Fortunate Events
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - This Saturday was my big thesis presentation day. Every year, the Livingston College Honors Program sponsors a day in which all the seniors must go up in front of a crowd of fellow honors students and faculty and present essentially a summary of the thesis they wrote this year. So, for 10 minutes, I had to basically speak about Jean-Luc Godard and Quentin Tarantino and summarize my thesis regarding them both, in which I basically tried to show, by delving not only into a comparative discussion of their respective films but also comparing personal backgrounds and the historical and social contexts in which their work was created and received. In other words: they're both interesting and important in their own ways. (That's certainly a rather different proposition from the one I initially started out with in undertaking this thesis project, one that I'd like to think has come from a lot of careful consideration.)
I have a pretty checkered history with public oral presentations. I don't think I'm bad at them; give me something to read and I could probably deliver it in a fairly dynamic and engaging manner even with every word written out. But I've always been distrustful of my ability to think on my feet as I'm speaking in public without faltering or stuttering. So my impulse in the past has almost always been to write everything out so I could read it smoothly up there on the podium. It's an impulse I somewhat tried to curb this time. No, the speech paper I brought up with me on both Friday---when I rehearsed my presentation for a few of my honors peers as well as the scholar-in-residence who monitored our thesis progress this year---wasn't a model of economy: I used bullet points, but I still wrote portions of it out as a guide for whenever I felt lost on-stage. (I had actually had an entire speech written out word-for-word, but when I tried to read it to myself a couple of days before my big presentation day, I was startled to realized that I actually felt uncomfortable with simply reading something verbatim, that it didn't really sound like me at all.)
A bigger enemy of mine is Q & A. Now, I know that I'm supposed to know my material like the back of my hand by the time a public presentation like this comes bout. I know I'm supposed to be able to anticipate questions that might be asked me if I have to answer them from audience members after a speech. Hasn't helped for me all that much in the past: if I get asked a question on a public stage that I don't know how to respond to, in the past I've often automatically tensed up and barely stammered out an incoherent, pathetic excuse for a response. Often extreme self-consciousness has contributed to this: I don't have much of a response if a fact or opinion of mine I've expressed in a speech is challenged, but somehow I'd rather try to come up with something to say instead of just honestly admitting, "I don't know how to respond to that," or else I'll risk sounding like I don't know what I'm talking about after all. Of course, if I knew what I'm talking about, maybe I wouldn't have so much trouble answering this particular damn question I was just asked... Anyway, so I've had some nasty experiences with Q & A in the past, and in general, sometimes I feel I do an infinitely better job defending myself in print---when I have time to think of a response to something---than in person, when I often have to think of a response on my feet.
All those concerns seemingly disappeared on Saturday. I was able to get my speech in just under the 10-minute limit (my original speech ran about 8 minutes over the day before, so I skipped rainy, indoor Rutgersfest on Friday---not that I was really planning to go in the first place---to work on cutting it down), and, most importantly, I was actually able to answer the question I was asked! Yeah, I rambled an answer that probably barely answered the question, but hey, at least I felt confident in responding to it, like I actually knew what I was saying.
So I'm quite satisfied with how my presentation went on Saturday, and I seemed to get good response from not only my peers and the scholar-in-residence (he asked me the question), but also from one of the most critical of audience members: my parents. Yes, they were there, and while obviously my opinion on the success of my presentation doesn't live or die by what they think, I was pleased to hear my mother compliment me later that day at home.
My actual written thesis is pretty much finished; I just need a signature from my thesis advisor, and I'm done! (I got it strip bound by Kinko's today, complete with clear plastic cover in the front and black leather cover at the back; I'm tempted to spend a bit more to get a copy bound for myself.) Semester over---though, as my previous blog entry explained, undergraduate college career not quite over. (I finally told my parents about my situation on Sunday over dinner, and thankfully my mother didn't throw any kind of fit as I half-feared she would.)
Anyone interested in reading my senior thesis? I'll be glad to send an electronic copy of it to anyone who wants to read what I have concluded about Godard and Tarantino. Drop me a line at kenjfuj@gmail.com and I'll send it to you.
**********
Other good stuff that happened these past few days:
I didn't think it would happen, but after a State Theatre shift Wednesday evening, I found out that the house manager decided that I did a superior-enough job that he selected me as Usher of the Month for March. "I was a little hesitant to hire this person," the house manager began as he was trying to build suspense as to who it was, "but he's become a valuable part of the staff, and I'm glad to have him around."
Is it ungrateful of me that my initial thought when I find out he's talking about me is to wonder what he thought about me at first that made him hesitant to hire me?
No matter. I got a $100 gift certificate to Sapporo's for my, uh, value as a staff member, and I used it to celebrate my thesis presentation success yesterday. It's probably been the first time the family---sans our poor dog Dusty, of course, who we left restless and panting at home---went to an actual restaurant---as opposed to the cheaper buffet places we usually frequent---since...oh, I'd say, that eventually-disastrous Maine trip. But the salmon teriyaki dinner, the sushi and the red bean ice cream I had was worth it.
Also: on Thursday evening, the whole Desktop Publishing class went to a printing press up in Wall Township to see our AlumKnights newsletter get printed. It was actually a pretty fascinating trip. I've never seen a printing press in action before, so it was interesting to discover, for instance, that the press actually has to waste a whole slew of printed copies in the beginning of the process in order to allow the color balances to adjust. Believe it, it takes a while before the colors are balanced out.
I took a couple of pictures of the printing press in action on my cell phone, but I still have to figure out how to upload them on my computer, if possible. (I disabled my text-messaging ability on my phone because some asshole kept sending me weird text messages saying "Go get laid" or "Get a life" and leaving callback numbers that were disconnected or never picked up by anyone when I tried them.) If I figure it out, I'll post them in a future entry.
Now I have 10 fresh copies of the upcoming issue of AlumKnights! One of my professors insisted that we send complimentary copies to our interview subjects. Being that I had five of them for my one story---which, if you recall, made it to the front page of the newsletter---obviously I have to send five issues to five different addresses. I really hope I didn't fuck anything up facts-wise!
I have a pretty checkered history with public oral presentations. I don't think I'm bad at them; give me something to read and I could probably deliver it in a fairly dynamic and engaging manner even with every word written out. But I've always been distrustful of my ability to think on my feet as I'm speaking in public without faltering or stuttering. So my impulse in the past has almost always been to write everything out so I could read it smoothly up there on the podium. It's an impulse I somewhat tried to curb this time. No, the speech paper I brought up with me on both Friday---when I rehearsed my presentation for a few of my honors peers as well as the scholar-in-residence who monitored our thesis progress this year---wasn't a model of economy: I used bullet points, but I still wrote portions of it out as a guide for whenever I felt lost on-stage. (I had actually had an entire speech written out word-for-word, but when I tried to read it to myself a couple of days before my big presentation day, I was startled to realized that I actually felt uncomfortable with simply reading something verbatim, that it didn't really sound like me at all.)
A bigger enemy of mine is Q & A. Now, I know that I'm supposed to know my material like the back of my hand by the time a public presentation like this comes bout. I know I'm supposed to be able to anticipate questions that might be asked me if I have to answer them from audience members after a speech. Hasn't helped for me all that much in the past: if I get asked a question on a public stage that I don't know how to respond to, in the past I've often automatically tensed up and barely stammered out an incoherent, pathetic excuse for a response. Often extreme self-consciousness has contributed to this: I don't have much of a response if a fact or opinion of mine I've expressed in a speech is challenged, but somehow I'd rather try to come up with something to say instead of just honestly admitting, "I don't know how to respond to that," or else I'll risk sounding like I don't know what I'm talking about after all. Of course, if I knew what I'm talking about, maybe I wouldn't have so much trouble answering this particular damn question I was just asked... Anyway, so I've had some nasty experiences with Q & A in the past, and in general, sometimes I feel I do an infinitely better job defending myself in print---when I have time to think of a response to something---than in person, when I often have to think of a response on my feet.
All those concerns seemingly disappeared on Saturday. I was able to get my speech in just under the 10-minute limit (my original speech ran about 8 minutes over the day before, so I skipped rainy, indoor Rutgersfest on Friday---not that I was really planning to go in the first place---to work on cutting it down), and, most importantly, I was actually able to answer the question I was asked! Yeah, I rambled an answer that probably barely answered the question, but hey, at least I felt confident in responding to it, like I actually knew what I was saying.
So I'm quite satisfied with how my presentation went on Saturday, and I seemed to get good response from not only my peers and the scholar-in-residence (he asked me the question), but also from one of the most critical of audience members: my parents. Yes, they were there, and while obviously my opinion on the success of my presentation doesn't live or die by what they think, I was pleased to hear my mother compliment me later that day at home.
My actual written thesis is pretty much finished; I just need a signature from my thesis advisor, and I'm done! (I got it strip bound by Kinko's today, complete with clear plastic cover in the front and black leather cover at the back; I'm tempted to spend a bit more to get a copy bound for myself.) Semester over---though, as my previous blog entry explained, undergraduate college career not quite over. (I finally told my parents about my situation on Sunday over dinner, and thankfully my mother didn't throw any kind of fit as I half-feared she would.)
Anyone interested in reading my senior thesis? I'll be glad to send an electronic copy of it to anyone who wants to read what I have concluded about Godard and Tarantino. Drop me a line at kenjfuj@gmail.com and I'll send it to you.
Other good stuff that happened these past few days:
I didn't think it would happen, but after a State Theatre shift Wednesday evening, I found out that the house manager decided that I did a superior-enough job that he selected me as Usher of the Month for March. "I was a little hesitant to hire this person," the house manager began as he was trying to build suspense as to who it was, "but he's become a valuable part of the staff, and I'm glad to have him around."
Is it ungrateful of me that my initial thought when I find out he's talking about me is to wonder what he thought about me at first that made him hesitant to hire me?
No matter. I got a $100 gift certificate to Sapporo's for my, uh, value as a staff member, and I used it to celebrate my thesis presentation success yesterday. It's probably been the first time the family---sans our poor dog Dusty, of course, who we left restless and panting at home---went to an actual restaurant---as opposed to the cheaper buffet places we usually frequent---since...oh, I'd say, that eventually-disastrous Maine trip. But the salmon teriyaki dinner, the sushi and the red bean ice cream I had was worth it.
Also: on Thursday evening, the whole Desktop Publishing class went to a printing press up in Wall Township to see our AlumKnights newsletter get printed. It was actually a pretty fascinating trip. I've never seen a printing press in action before, so it was interesting to discover, for instance, that the press actually has to waste a whole slew of printed copies in the beginning of the process in order to allow the color balances to adjust. Believe it, it takes a while before the colors are balanced out.
I took a couple of pictures of the printing press in action on my cell phone, but I still have to figure out how to upload them on my computer, if possible. (I disabled my text-messaging ability on my phone because some asshole kept sending me weird text messages saying "Go get laid" or "Get a life" and leaving callback numbers that were disconnected or never picked up by anyone when I tried them.) If I figure it out, I'll post them in a future entry.
Now I have 10 fresh copies of the upcoming issue of AlumKnights! One of my professors insisted that we send complimentary copies to our interview subjects. Being that I had five of them for my one story---which, if you recall, made it to the front page of the newsletter---obviously I have to send five issues to five different addresses. I really hope I didn't fuck anything up facts-wise!
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
A Big Oops
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - So a couple of days ago I just found out something that throws a sizable dent into my plans to graduate after this summer's Wall Street Journal internship. Turns out, I can't do it for credit as I thought I would.
I was planning to make this WSJ thing my 6-credit internship to complete my journalism major here at Rutgers. But---stupid me---I only decided to ask the internship coordinator about the possibility of doing it for credit a couple of days ago when I should have asked, like, say, in December, when I decided to take the internship in the first place? <> And here I am telling everyone I'm going to be graduating after this summer internship is over.
Chalk up another highlight in the Kenji Fujishima Wall of Shame---or, to put it more optimistically, Wall of Stupid Mistakes to Learn From In the Future.
Thus, it looks like I'm going to be a student here for about a semester longer than I had anticipated. Those 6 credits are all I really need, though. I'm thinking about whether I'd want another internship for the fall, or simply to take two more classes to finish it up. The journalism department here at Rutgers doesn't absolutely require a credit internship; the department strongly recommends it, but it isn't technically required. Frankly, though, I'd rather try to get more real-world experience through an internship, paid or unpaid, than sit through more dull lectures and stuff. But then I'd have to try to find that fall internship in the first place. It's just like a finding a job. I guess that's a good thing.
I'm trying not to get too hysterical over this as I probably would have if I were the Kenji of, say, two years ago, when this kind of temporary setback might have depressed me for days. In the past, I might have dwelt on things that I should have done or didn't do. This time, I try to say to myself: Hey, I made a dumb mistake. No use dwelling on it now, because what's done is done. Move on.
One thing, though: obviously this is my fault, and I take full responsibility for it. But why didn't anyone tell me that usually paid internships usually mean internships that aren't for credit? When I told people that I was hoping to get credit out of this, no one said to me, Are you sure you can do that? Because, from my experience, most paid internships don't allow you to get college credit out of it. Now I hear this is the trend? The obvious response to that is, I should have done my research. But still...
I haven't told my parents yet, by the way.
I was planning to make this WSJ thing my 6-credit internship to complete my journalism major here at Rutgers. But---stupid me---I only decided to ask the internship coordinator about the possibility of doing it for credit a couple of days ago when I should have asked, like, say, in December, when I decided to take the internship in the first place? <
Chalk up another highlight in the Kenji Fujishima Wall of Shame---or, to put it more optimistically, Wall of Stupid Mistakes to Learn From In the Future.
Thus, it looks like I'm going to be a student here for about a semester longer than I had anticipated. Those 6 credits are all I really need, though. I'm thinking about whether I'd want another internship for the fall, or simply to take two more classes to finish it up. The journalism department here at Rutgers doesn't absolutely require a credit internship; the department strongly recommends it, but it isn't technically required. Frankly, though, I'd rather try to get more real-world experience through an internship, paid or unpaid, than sit through more dull lectures and stuff. But then I'd have to try to find that fall internship in the first place. It's just like a finding a job. I guess that's a good thing.
I'm trying not to get too hysterical over this as I probably would have if I were the Kenji of, say, two years ago, when this kind of temporary setback might have depressed me for days. In the past, I might have dwelt on things that I should have done or didn't do. This time, I try to say to myself: Hey, I made a dumb mistake. No use dwelling on it now, because what's done is done. Move on.
One thing, though: obviously this is my fault, and I take full responsibility for it. But why didn't anyone tell me that usually paid internships usually mean internships that aren't for credit? When I told people that I was hoping to get credit out of this, no one said to me, Are you sure you can do that? Because, from my experience, most paid internships don't allow you to get college credit out of it. Now I hear this is the trend? The obvious response to that is, I should have done my research. But still...
I haven't told my parents yet, by the way.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Threnody for the Victims of Virginia Tech
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - I want to express my deepest condolences to everyone who was affected by Cho Seung-hui's violent rampage at Virginia Tech this past Monday, when he gunned down 32 victims before turning the gun on himself. I won't pretend to totally understand how it feels to be part of a community that has been rocked by this kind of tragedy; I can only imagine the feelings of grief and devastation that must have hit the campus full-force after Monday morning's tragic events.
I've been meaning to blog a little bit about the Virginia Tech incident, because, I mean, college students got killed---as a college student myself, this kind of thing hits close to home at least a little bit. But I haven't really been sure of what to say that hasn't already been said by various journalists and pundits already. Pointing fingers at the ridiculously easy access Cho had to guns? Check. Reviving the debate over the Second Amendment? Check. (Not sure where I stand on that issue, although it seems to me that something deeper needs to be done instead of simply banning civilians from owning firearms.) The backlash against Koreans and Korean-Americans across the country and in Korea? Disturbing (as was the backlash against Arabs after Sept. 11), but check. Criticizing the media for exploiting tragedy in various ways? Check. (I'm still a little iffy on NBC's airing of Cho's videos and pictures, since that'd be giving him the publicity he clearly wants; but if it gives us in the audience a slightly better understanding of what drove him to coldblooded murder, then maybe it was worth something.) Blaming movies like Chanwook Park's Oldboy (a movie I love very much, although in hindsight his other two vengeance movies---Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance---are in some ways deeper and more serious meditations on the futility and spiritual bankruptcy of revenge than the more pop-accessible, though no less devastating, Oldboy; maybe Cho might have thought twice about his actions if he had seen the bleak and near-Kubrickian Sympathy, especially) for inspiring Cho's own "revenge," even as most of those critics inevitably ignore context? Check and check.
So what's left to talk about that hasn't already been discussed in these past few days since the tragedy? Well, let me take a more personal tack---always a useful strategy for trying to say something fresh about a topic discussed to death (no insensitive pun intended there!)---and admit right upfront that, for me, there's something morbidly fascinating about this whole incident...about Cho.
If my movie-watching and movie criticism-reading over the years has taught me something valuable, it has taught me to embrace empathy, nuance and complexity instead of feeling more comfortable in black-and-white. It's a complicated world out there, and the people inhabiting it are no less contradictory and complex. So, when the Virginia Tech story broke and we found out the killer was this South Korean 23-year-old with paranoid-schizophrenic problems and an apparently, long-held grudge against hedonistic rich kids, my first reaction wasn't to decry him as a human monster, a mentally-disturbed freak. My first reaction was to try to understand what drove him to his actions. Maybe this stems from a special feeling I sometimes have toward loners---I sometimes felt like one myself during my high school years---but I, perhaps morbidly, immediately wanted to know more about Cho, to understand what may have happened in his life to have led him to this. Did neglect or lack of interest from fellow students or teachers lead him to a path of destruction? (Maybe not so much in this case; more on that below.) Did that neglect lead him to feel that the only way for him to make any mark on society would be through violence? Is this a sick fascination to have? It's the same perverse fascination I felt when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up Columbine High School eight years ago. In fact, I'll admit it: I was almost ready to at least empathize with the killers, perhaps unduly projecting my own occasional bouts of isolation and loneliness to try to give a semblance of humanity to these people.
But, of course, however understandable their motives, their actions are, by any human standard, atrocious. There were plenty of other ways to express themselves; is it a statement about the society we live in that the only thing they could apparently think to do with load themselves up with ammo and gun people down in cold blood to do it?
Cho Seung-hui's story bothers me in a different way, though. He did express himself, apparently---through, by all accounts, extremely violent and profane plays he wrote for an English class. He wasn't really neglected by fellow students; they knew of him, and they were disturbed by him (rightly so, it seems). When you dare to take under-the-table pictures of women during class, how else are people supposed to think of you? As healthy and normal? (I'm as horny and as sex-obsessed as the next guy, but I don't try to take informal upskirt pictures and stalk them.) And it's not like people didn't try to reach out to him; he simply rejected all the help, preferring to indulge in his perverted fantasies of violent conquest. It sounded like he figured he wasn't the one with the problem; to him, the so-called "rich kids" were the ones with the problem. And he, I guess, would be the savior of all the "oppressed"---their "Jesus Christ," as he labeled himself.
I could try to find numerous twisted ways to feel even a little bad for Cho, to try to empathize with him. (I could try to do the same thing for Harris and Klebold, for that matter.) But as someone who likes to think I try to look at things and people with a measure of nuance and complexity, should I even bother to try to empathize with messed-up people who themselves seem to have trouble recognizing nuance, who regard other people with apparently little regard for their humanity except as pawns in a game of good and evil? It doesn't sound like it's worth the trouble or the emotional resources.
Maybe a daring artist will one day come along and attempt to understand Cho Seung-hui, to pick at his brain. (Not even Gus Van Sant was willing to go quite that far with the killers in Elephant, his formalistic response to Columbine.) For now, though, I think I'll just leave at this: Mr. Cho was one disturbed human being. The humanistic side of me refuses to believe that it's not worth trying to understand what led him to his mental collapse and killing spree, but understanding him certainly doesn't excuse him, especially since it looks like he didn't try very hard to look at the reality beyond his own fucked-up worldview. He brought it on himself, and maybe, in the end, he has only himself to blame. (And Koreans and Korean-Americans everywhere, by all means don't feel the need to apologize for this guy! He's no more a reflection of how Koreans really are than Adolf Hitler is an indication of how Germans are in general.)
To the victims: all our hearts are with you. Here's hoping you can all successfully move on from this.
I've been meaning to blog a little bit about the Virginia Tech incident, because, I mean, college students got killed---as a college student myself, this kind of thing hits close to home at least a little bit. But I haven't really been sure of what to say that hasn't already been said by various journalists and pundits already. Pointing fingers at the ridiculously easy access Cho had to guns? Check. Reviving the debate over the Second Amendment? Check. (Not sure where I stand on that issue, although it seems to me that something deeper needs to be done instead of simply banning civilians from owning firearms.) The backlash against Koreans and Korean-Americans across the country and in Korea? Disturbing (as was the backlash against Arabs after Sept. 11), but check. Criticizing the media for exploiting tragedy in various ways? Check. (I'm still a little iffy on NBC's airing of Cho's videos and pictures, since that'd be giving him the publicity he clearly wants; but if it gives us in the audience a slightly better understanding of what drove him to coldblooded murder, then maybe it was worth something.) Blaming movies like Chanwook Park's Oldboy (a movie I love very much, although in hindsight his other two vengeance movies---Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Lady Vengeance---are in some ways deeper and more serious meditations on the futility and spiritual bankruptcy of revenge than the more pop-accessible, though no less devastating, Oldboy; maybe Cho might have thought twice about his actions if he had seen the bleak and near-Kubrickian Sympathy, especially) for inspiring Cho's own "revenge," even as most of those critics inevitably ignore context? Check and check.
So what's left to talk about that hasn't already been discussed in these past few days since the tragedy? Well, let me take a more personal tack---always a useful strategy for trying to say something fresh about a topic discussed to death (no insensitive pun intended there!)---and admit right upfront that, for me, there's something morbidly fascinating about this whole incident...about Cho.
If my movie-watching and movie criticism-reading over the years has taught me something valuable, it has taught me to embrace empathy, nuance and complexity instead of feeling more comfortable in black-and-white. It's a complicated world out there, and the people inhabiting it are no less contradictory and complex. So, when the Virginia Tech story broke and we found out the killer was this South Korean 23-year-old with paranoid-schizophrenic problems and an apparently, long-held grudge against hedonistic rich kids, my first reaction wasn't to decry him as a human monster, a mentally-disturbed freak. My first reaction was to try to understand what drove him to his actions. Maybe this stems from a special feeling I sometimes have toward loners---I sometimes felt like one myself during my high school years---but I, perhaps morbidly, immediately wanted to know more about Cho, to understand what may have happened in his life to have led him to this. Did neglect or lack of interest from fellow students or teachers lead him to a path of destruction? (Maybe not so much in this case; more on that below.) Did that neglect lead him to feel that the only way for him to make any mark on society would be through violence? Is this a sick fascination to have? It's the same perverse fascination I felt when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up Columbine High School eight years ago. In fact, I'll admit it: I was almost ready to at least empathize with the killers, perhaps unduly projecting my own occasional bouts of isolation and loneliness to try to give a semblance of humanity to these people.
But, of course, however understandable their motives, their actions are, by any human standard, atrocious. There were plenty of other ways to express themselves; is it a statement about the society we live in that the only thing they could apparently think to do with load themselves up with ammo and gun people down in cold blood to do it?
Cho Seung-hui's story bothers me in a different way, though. He did express himself, apparently---through, by all accounts, extremely violent and profane plays he wrote for an English class. He wasn't really neglected by fellow students; they knew of him, and they were disturbed by him (rightly so, it seems). When you dare to take under-the-table pictures of women during class, how else are people supposed to think of you? As healthy and normal? (I'm as horny and as sex-obsessed as the next guy, but I don't try to take informal upskirt pictures and stalk them.) And it's not like people didn't try to reach out to him; he simply rejected all the help, preferring to indulge in his perverted fantasies of violent conquest. It sounded like he figured he wasn't the one with the problem; to him, the so-called "rich kids" were the ones with the problem. And he, I guess, would be the savior of all the "oppressed"---their "Jesus Christ," as he labeled himself.
I could try to find numerous twisted ways to feel even a little bad for Cho, to try to empathize with him. (I could try to do the same thing for Harris and Klebold, for that matter.) But as someone who likes to think I try to look at things and people with a measure of nuance and complexity, should I even bother to try to empathize with messed-up people who themselves seem to have trouble recognizing nuance, who regard other people with apparently little regard for their humanity except as pawns in a game of good and evil? It doesn't sound like it's worth the trouble or the emotional resources.
Maybe a daring artist will one day come along and attempt to understand Cho Seung-hui, to pick at his brain. (Not even Gus Van Sant was willing to go quite that far with the killers in Elephant, his formalistic response to Columbine.) For now, though, I think I'll just leave at this: Mr. Cho was one disturbed human being. The humanistic side of me refuses to believe that it's not worth trying to understand what led him to his mental collapse and killing spree, but understanding him certainly doesn't excuse him, especially since it looks like he didn't try very hard to look at the reality beyond his own fucked-up worldview. He brought it on himself, and maybe, in the end, he has only himself to blame. (And Koreans and Korean-Americans everywhere, by all means don't feel the need to apologize for this guy! He's no more a reflection of how Koreans really are than Adolf Hitler is an indication of how Germans are in general.)
To the victims: all our hearts are with you. Here's hoping you can all successfully move on from this.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Biblical???
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - A short entry for today. So the past couple of days, a nor'easter has drenched our area with heavy rain up the wazoo...so much that it has flooded the heck out of both Rt. 18 and Ryders Lane here in East Brunswick. And so much that Rutgers has canceled classes for two days in a row, yesterday and today.
Can you believe it? Rutgers stubbornly stays open during snowy winter conditions, but it shuts down for two days because of rain. I guess not even snow could shut down Rt. 18, that's why.
It didn't really matter much to me yesterday, because I don't have any scheduled classes on Mondays, but today's cancellation of classes means I don't have my Cinema Studies seminar.
Funny thing: after last night's episode of 24 (which kinda sucks this year) had ended, an apartment-mate and I were watching a preview for Fox 5's upcoming 10 p.m. newscast, and one of the anchors described the rains that fell these couple of days as "Biblical." We both burst out laughing. Biblical??? It was certainly heavy, but Biblical on the scale of the 40 days/40 nights storm that led Noah (directed by God, of course) to build his ark? I don't think so. Sensationalism, anyone?
Can you believe it? Rutgers stubbornly stays open during snowy winter conditions, but it shuts down for two days because of rain. I guess not even snow could shut down Rt. 18, that's why.
It didn't really matter much to me yesterday, because I don't have any scheduled classes on Mondays, but today's cancellation of classes means I don't have my Cinema Studies seminar.
Funny thing: after last night's episode of 24 (which kinda sucks this year) had ended, an apartment-mate and I were watching a preview for Fox 5's upcoming 10 p.m. newscast, and one of the anchors described the rains that fell these couple of days as "Biblical." We both burst out laughing. Biblical??? It was certainly heavy, but Biblical on the scale of the 40 days/40 nights storm that led Noah (directed by God, of course) to build his ark? I don't think so. Sensationalism, anyone?
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Life Update No. 14: Hallelujah!...Almost/Good Intentions/Bad Intentions
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Done.
Well almost.
That's where I am with my senior thesis right now.
I'm not completely finished. I told my adviser that I'd like her to critique it one more time before I even come close to getting bound something that I'd consider a final copy. But essentially I'm done with the writing of the thing---so all that is left is, I guess, to revise, add endnotes, write a bibliography, etc.
I actually was able to get it up to about 40 pages total. That's amazing---I didn't even think I'd have enough for the Livingston College Honors Program minimum of 25! Guess I have a lot to say on the subject of Jean-Luc Godard versus Quentin Tarantino (the latter of whom has temporarily gotten on my critical good side with Death Proof---his mostly wonderful contribution to Grindhouse---which I'd like to write about soon in a future entry) after all. Of course, it's quality, not quantity that counts...but still, 40 pages. Take that, you State Theatre usher who told me 25 pages "wasn't a thesis"! I have 40 now---is that thesis enough for ya?
Anyway...now all that's left is to worry about my upcoming presentation. I will have to present my thesis to my fellow Livingston College Honors Program peers on Saturday, April 28 over on Livingston Campus. I guess it shouldn't be too bad; I only have to speak for 10 minutes and maybe field questions for about 5. Still, I've never been the most confident public speaker around, and I'm not all that great at improvising or thinking on my feet. And the Q & A? Expect a lot of stuttering and flailing! Everyone tells me "anticipating questions" is the key. Well, it hasn't helped me all that much in the past. I couldn't stand being asked questions when I took IPLE---a high school form of Model Congress---during my senior year of high school because every time I did, I'd inevitably look and sound like an idiot after delivering a decent speech. It was usually pretty embarrassing...and considering how self-conscious I am, it's something I always tend to get nervous about.
Of course, I can hear my mother now: "Think positive." Of course, if I think negative, I'm automatically labeled a pessimist, when perhaps all I'm being is realistic. Either that, or it's all just a big defense mechanism.
But that's for later next week or the week after. Next week I'm probably going to be working on a paper I'm writing for my Cinema Studies senior seminar. It's on Ross McElwee's famous 1986 documentary Sherman's March, a first-person documentary way before Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock came around and imposed their (sometimes entertaining and enlightening) thuggery on the format. Before picking it for my paper (and presentation, which I've done already), I had only heard about its reputation. But it's actually a really good film, folks---witty and touching and interesting, as long as you're not inclined to think of someone who films himself as he tries to struggle with his relationships with women as insufferably self-absorbed. I guess McElwee is a bit of whiner. But at least here he's taking on universal subjects---male/female relationships, history, art vs. life---and doing it in a compellingly confessional style that I find rather endearing. Either that, or I just identify with the guy a bit too much (although no, I don't have dreams about thermonuclear war).
Anyway, I have to write a paper about the movie now, and at this point I only have a bare idea of what I want to discuss. In my presentation, I talked about how McElwee tries to get at the intersection of art and life in Sherman's March: how he explores the idea of art shining a brighter light on our lives, and how he perhaps concludes that art isn't always adequate in that regard (especially for him, since he pretty much ends his recreation of General William T. Sherman's ruinous path of destruction in the South during the Civil War no closer to a personal understanding of his troubles than he did at the beginning of this strange project). No one in the class seemed to really bite on that topic, alas. I'll still write about it, but I hope I have enough for 10-15 pages.
**********
Speaking of movies: again, I haven't seen much in the theaters recently and, with the exception of Tarantino's half of Grindhouse---Robert Rodriguez's self-consciously campy Planet Terror strikes me as pretty disposable and as soulless as his overrated Sin City, even if it was intended to be disposable and soulless---not much I've seen has been worth spending much time on.
Reign Over Me (** out of ****) was a particular disappointment. Adam Sandler is hardly an actor for the ages, but, while back in the day---when I wanted to come off as smart and sophisticated about movies---I used to fall squarely into the anti-Adam Sandler bandwagon, recently I've come to recant my Sandler-phobia. He's not a great actor by any means---his range is extremely limited, and most of the movies he's been in has played variations on his passive-agressive manchild persona. But I can't help but give him a lot of credit for his sincerity and his occasional adventurousness. He was one of the best things about James L. Brooks' underrated Spanglish, and I still don't think the critically-reviled (but popularly-embraced) Click was nearly as bad as many of the mainstream critics suggested. Shamelessly sentimental in parts, perhaps, but it was also disarmingly sincere and had some agreeable things to say about modern overreliance in technology.
In Reign Over Me, Sandler plays an emotional victim of 9/11: his entire family was wiped out on that fateful day, and he hasn't gotten over it since, deliberately sealing himself off from the world and indulging in odd bits of business like decorating and then redecorating his kitchen. As in Punch-Drunk Love, Sandler isn't so much playing a totally different character from his norm as he is playing off his usual persona and trying to suggest more emotional depth. He doesn't always succeed---sometimes his attempts at emotion simply seem like, well, child-like attempts---but more often than not, I found writer/director Mike Binder's use of him fascinating and judicious. Sandler keeps your eyes glued on his character, especially when he's playing off the typically-marvelous Don Cheadle, who plays an old college roommate who is trying to help him out of his frail shell.
The best that can be said about the rest of this movie is that it itself is sincere. But sincerity of intent is often nothing without the execution to back it up, and Reign Over Me is so sitcom-ish and clumsy so often that, after a while, I had trouble buying any of the characters and the situations. As hard as Sandler tries, his Charlie Fineman is basically an abstraction, meant to be some kind of symbol of 9/11 grief. Sandler, alas, isn't quite imaginative enough an actor to glue all those pieces together and come up with a convincing human being. But at least you keep rooting for him. As the movie veers into melodramatic courtroom drama territory, I just kept getting dread hints of Big Daddy, with its equally shameless climactic courtroom dramatics. Reign Over Me is, frankly, a mess, full of one-note characters (Cheadle's wife, Saffron Burrows in a stupid subplot about a potential harrassment lawsuit) and unconvincing situations; even Oliver Stone's nearly-as-sentimental World Trade Center came up with more authentic portraits of grief during a time of crisis (mostly embodied by the women, Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal).
**********
If Reign Over Me reeks of insufferable good intentions, though, this whole Don Imus brouhaha reeks of bad ones. You know the story by now: the old-school shock jock calls the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed ho's" (among other things) and suddenly finds himself in hot water because of it. Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are calling for his resignation, and just yesterday a whole group of Rutgers students rallied on College Ave. calling for the same.
Now, call me insensitive, but doesn't this sudden outcry of rage against Imus's comments strike some as a little over-the-top? Why is his job suddenly in danger now and not five years ago, when I'm sure he was saying similarly racist and sexist things on his "Imus in the Morning" show? Where was the outrage when he called Gwen Ifill "a cleaning lady covering the White House"? I'm not defending Imus in any way, but he's been getting away with this for years (and believe me, I think I've heard his show enough to get an idea what kind of a person he is). And hello...First Amendment??? I know even free speech has its limits, but I don't really think Imus has overstepped any bounds with his derogatory speech. He's exposed himself as a bigot and a sexist, maybe, but that's his problem.
I dunno. This outcry calling for his head just strikes me as akin to a mob crying out for blood---a group of understandably angry people blowing things out of proportion and falling into the rarely-helpful revenge mindset. Despite what you see enforced in your usual Hollywood action movie, though, vengeance rarely gets us anywhere, and I don't see how getting Don Imus to resign will solve anything. Does Sharpton, Jackson and the rest of the people in this country who want him to get the hell off the air really think this will strike a decisive, seminal blow against racism or sexism in this country? It's nice to think that it would, but I, in my usual circumspection, am not so sure.
Sorry, but that's what I think. Either that, or I'm just trying to justify my own indifference toward this whole matter. You can read it either way, I guess.
Well almost.
That's where I am with my senior thesis right now.
I'm not completely finished. I told my adviser that I'd like her to critique it one more time before I even come close to getting bound something that I'd consider a final copy. But essentially I'm done with the writing of the thing---so all that is left is, I guess, to revise, add endnotes, write a bibliography, etc.
I actually was able to get it up to about 40 pages total. That's amazing---I didn't even think I'd have enough for the Livingston College Honors Program minimum of 25! Guess I have a lot to say on the subject of Jean-Luc Godard versus Quentin Tarantino (the latter of whom has temporarily gotten on my critical good side with Death Proof---his mostly wonderful contribution to Grindhouse---which I'd like to write about soon in a future entry) after all. Of course, it's quality, not quantity that counts...but still, 40 pages. Take that, you State Theatre usher who told me 25 pages "wasn't a thesis"! I have 40 now---is that thesis enough for ya?
Anyway...now all that's left is to worry about my upcoming presentation. I will have to present my thesis to my fellow Livingston College Honors Program peers on Saturday, April 28 over on Livingston Campus. I guess it shouldn't be too bad; I only have to speak for 10 minutes and maybe field questions for about 5. Still, I've never been the most confident public speaker around, and I'm not all that great at improvising or thinking on my feet. And the Q & A? Expect a lot of stuttering and flailing! Everyone tells me "anticipating questions" is the key. Well, it hasn't helped me all that much in the past. I couldn't stand being asked questions when I took IPLE---a high school form of Model Congress---during my senior year of high school because every time I did, I'd inevitably look and sound like an idiot after delivering a decent speech. It was usually pretty embarrassing...and considering how self-conscious I am, it's something I always tend to get nervous about.
Of course, I can hear my mother now: "Think positive." Of course, if I think negative, I'm automatically labeled a pessimist, when perhaps all I'm being is realistic. Either that, or it's all just a big defense mechanism.
But that's for later next week or the week after. Next week I'm probably going to be working on a paper I'm writing for my Cinema Studies senior seminar. It's on Ross McElwee's famous 1986 documentary Sherman's March, a first-person documentary way before Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock came around and imposed their (sometimes entertaining and enlightening) thuggery on the format. Before picking it for my paper (and presentation, which I've done already), I had only heard about its reputation. But it's actually a really good film, folks---witty and touching and interesting, as long as you're not inclined to think of someone who films himself as he tries to struggle with his relationships with women as insufferably self-absorbed. I guess McElwee is a bit of whiner. But at least here he's taking on universal subjects---male/female relationships, history, art vs. life---and doing it in a compellingly confessional style that I find rather endearing. Either that, or I just identify with the guy a bit too much (although no, I don't have dreams about thermonuclear war).
Anyway, I have to write a paper about the movie now, and at this point I only have a bare idea of what I want to discuss. In my presentation, I talked about how McElwee tries to get at the intersection of art and life in Sherman's March: how he explores the idea of art shining a brighter light on our lives, and how he perhaps concludes that art isn't always adequate in that regard (especially for him, since he pretty much ends his recreation of General William T. Sherman's ruinous path of destruction in the South during the Civil War no closer to a personal understanding of his troubles than he did at the beginning of this strange project). No one in the class seemed to really bite on that topic, alas. I'll still write about it, but I hope I have enough for 10-15 pages.
Speaking of movies: again, I haven't seen much in the theaters recently and, with the exception of Tarantino's half of Grindhouse---Robert Rodriguez's self-consciously campy Planet Terror strikes me as pretty disposable and as soulless as his overrated Sin City, even if it was intended to be disposable and soulless---not much I've seen has been worth spending much time on.
Reign Over Me (** out of ****) was a particular disappointment. Adam Sandler is hardly an actor for the ages, but, while back in the day---when I wanted to come off as smart and sophisticated about movies---I used to fall squarely into the anti-Adam Sandler bandwagon, recently I've come to recant my Sandler-phobia. He's not a great actor by any means---his range is extremely limited, and most of the movies he's been in has played variations on his passive-agressive manchild persona. But I can't help but give him a lot of credit for his sincerity and his occasional adventurousness. He was one of the best things about James L. Brooks' underrated Spanglish, and I still don't think the critically-reviled (but popularly-embraced) Click was nearly as bad as many of the mainstream critics suggested. Shamelessly sentimental in parts, perhaps, but it was also disarmingly sincere and had some agreeable things to say about modern overreliance in technology.
In Reign Over Me, Sandler plays an emotional victim of 9/11: his entire family was wiped out on that fateful day, and he hasn't gotten over it since, deliberately sealing himself off from the world and indulging in odd bits of business like decorating and then redecorating his kitchen. As in Punch-Drunk Love, Sandler isn't so much playing a totally different character from his norm as he is playing off his usual persona and trying to suggest more emotional depth. He doesn't always succeed---sometimes his attempts at emotion simply seem like, well, child-like attempts---but more often than not, I found writer/director Mike Binder's use of him fascinating and judicious. Sandler keeps your eyes glued on his character, especially when he's playing off the typically-marvelous Don Cheadle, who plays an old college roommate who is trying to help him out of his frail shell.
The best that can be said about the rest of this movie is that it itself is sincere. But sincerity of intent is often nothing without the execution to back it up, and Reign Over Me is so sitcom-ish and clumsy so often that, after a while, I had trouble buying any of the characters and the situations. As hard as Sandler tries, his Charlie Fineman is basically an abstraction, meant to be some kind of symbol of 9/11 grief. Sandler, alas, isn't quite imaginative enough an actor to glue all those pieces together and come up with a convincing human being. But at least you keep rooting for him. As the movie veers into melodramatic courtroom drama territory, I just kept getting dread hints of Big Daddy, with its equally shameless climactic courtroom dramatics. Reign Over Me is, frankly, a mess, full of one-note characters (Cheadle's wife, Saffron Burrows in a stupid subplot about a potential harrassment lawsuit) and unconvincing situations; even Oliver Stone's nearly-as-sentimental World Trade Center came up with more authentic portraits of grief during a time of crisis (mostly embodied by the women, Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal).
If Reign Over Me reeks of insufferable good intentions, though, this whole Don Imus brouhaha reeks of bad ones. You know the story by now: the old-school shock jock calls the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy-headed ho's" (among other things) and suddenly finds himself in hot water because of it. Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are calling for his resignation, and just yesterday a whole group of Rutgers students rallied on College Ave. calling for the same.
Now, call me insensitive, but doesn't this sudden outcry of rage against Imus's comments strike some as a little over-the-top? Why is his job suddenly in danger now and not five years ago, when I'm sure he was saying similarly racist and sexist things on his "Imus in the Morning" show? Where was the outrage when he called Gwen Ifill "a cleaning lady covering the White House"? I'm not defending Imus in any way, but he's been getting away with this for years (and believe me, I think I've heard his show enough to get an idea what kind of a person he is). And hello...First Amendment??? I know even free speech has its limits, but I don't really think Imus has overstepped any bounds with his derogatory speech. He's exposed himself as a bigot and a sexist, maybe, but that's his problem.
I dunno. This outcry calling for his head just strikes me as akin to a mob crying out for blood---a group of understandably angry people blowing things out of proportion and falling into the rarely-helpful revenge mindset. Despite what you see enforced in your usual Hollywood action movie, though, vengeance rarely gets us anywhere, and I don't see how getting Don Imus to resign will solve anything. Does Sharpton, Jackson and the rest of the people in this country who want him to get the hell off the air really think this will strike a decisive, seminal blow against racism or sexism in this country? It's nice to think that it would, but I, in my usual circumspection, am not so sure.
Sorry, but that's what I think. Either that, or I'm just trying to justify my own indifference toward this whole matter. You can read it either way, I guess.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Small Yet Giant Deliverances in Killer of Sheep
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Not much to report on my life, really---thesis-writing (almost to the promised land of completion!) and class assignments (a cinema studies seminar presentation coming up soon, a newsletter page to lay out) are keeping me busy. But I wanted to take the time to reprint an article of mine that was published yesterday in the Inside Beat---a review of Charles Burnett's rarely-seen 1977 indie classic Killer of Sheep, which is only now getting a proper theatrical release. I saw this film for the first time during Spring Break at a press screening, and folks: it's worth a trip to the city, not only because the film is such a beautiful achievement, but also because you're not likely to see a truer---or at least more authentic-seeming---or more poetic depiction of ghetto life in movies today. Makes me want to check out more of Burnett's work (I hear The Glass Shield is supposed to one of American cinema's more honest depictions of racism in society---but then, anything's probably more honest than Crash).
Anyway, I'm reposting the review because I was planning to get it published in today's edition of the Pulse---remember, that weekly entertainment section of the Home News Tribune for which I wrote a few articles last summer?---but apparently I was too late in letting the editor know about the article. So, to make up for my tardiness, I'm posting it here.
There's a lot more I would have liked to say about the movie had I been allowed more space---its editing of its various episodes struck me as particularly interesting in its own free-associative way---as well as going into more detail about a couple more scenes that intrigued me. But, because I'm such a busy man (something some friends of mine simply don't seem to understand!), I'll just post what was published in yesterday's Targum. Enjoy!
EDIT (March 31, 10:58 a.m.): I forgot that I actually had good-sized photos to go along with the published piece in Thursday's Targum! I'll post on here, just for fun. Thanks to Milestone Films for the picture.
Anyway, I'm reposting the review because I was planning to get it published in today's edition of the Pulse---remember, that weekly entertainment section of the Home News Tribune for which I wrote a few articles last summer?---but apparently I was too late in letting the editor know about the article. So, to make up for my tardiness, I'm posting it here.
There's a lot more I would have liked to say about the movie had I been allowed more space---its editing of its various episodes struck me as particularly interesting in its own free-associative way---as well as going into more detail about a couple more scenes that intrigued me. But, because I'm such a busy man (something some friends of mine simply don't seem to understand!), I'll just post what was published in yesterday's Targum. Enjoy!
Unknown Gem Finally Gets Proper Recognition
by Kenji Fujishima
Published in the 3/29 issue of Inside Beat
Long available only in worn-out 16mm prints and, even then, only shown on rare occasions at film festivals and museums, Charles Burnett’s 1977 low-budget independent film Killer of Sheep — beautifully restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive — is only now, 30 years later, getting a proper theatrical release, starting a run at the IFC Center in New York and at various theaters across the country.
This is certainly a big deal, but not simply because of its rarity. It isn’t even a big deal simply because of its induction into the prestigious National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1990. No, the real big deal about Killer of Sheep is, most simply and eloquently, the film itself, which is one of the most grittily realistic yet strangely poetic looks at ordinary life in a small, predominantly African-American ghetto.
One can get a sense of that gritty realism right on the surface. From its deliberately unassuming — and, in this 35mm blow-up, noticeably grainy — black and white cinematography (Burnett shot the film himself) to its authentic location settings, and from the fairly amateurish performances of its mostly nonprofessional cast to its episodic plot — all of these elements serve to give us the feeling of real life taking place right in front of our eyes.
The real life of this film isn’t particularly glamorous, either: its main character, Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders), works at a slaughterhouse for a living — thus the film’s title — and goes through much of the film palpably disillusioned by the depressing reality of his lower-class existence in his Watts, Calif. community. In its interest in capturing the harsh realities of the everyday lives of ordinary citizens, Killer of Sheep works in the great tradition of neorealism, the famous post-World War II artistic movement that attempted to render real life on film as authentically as possible with documentary-style techniques — handheld camerawork, outdoor location shooting, etc.
But Italian neorealist classics like Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves or Roberto Rossellini’s Open City aren’t great just because of its documentary-like realism. Like De Sica and Rossellini, Charles Burnett has both compassion and a poetic — yet fiercely unsentimental — sensibility to go along with his sharply observant sense of lived-in realism.
Thus, no one is made out to be exaggerated caricatures in Killer of Sheep — not even the two show-offy “rich” guys who are first seen stealing a television set, and then are shown asking Stan to participate in a murder for money. Even scenes like those, Burnett suggests, are an unmistakable part of life in an African-American ghetto; you do what you feel you have to do in order to get by in such dire surroundings.
And even in the midst of Stan’s sense of despair, Burnett is still able to find, and poetically convey, moments of indelible beauty and joy. Perhaps its most touching moment comes in long sequence in which Stan and his wife (Kaycee Moore) share a silent slow dance in their apartment to the tune of Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth.” It’s all in one unbroken shot, and Burnett’s camera simply sits there, observing the wife’s attempt to try to reach out to her emotionally distant husband. When the song is over and the dance ends, everything seems to be back to (dreary) normal. Within Killer of Sheep, however, those small gestures — and there are many of them at unexpected, isolated moments — have the power of giant deliverances.
EDIT (March 31, 10:58 a.m.): I forgot that I actually had good-sized photos to go along with the published piece in Thursday's Targum! I'll post on here, just for fun. Thanks to Milestone Films for the picture.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Life Update No. 13: Boy, this thing is turning into a straight-up diary, isn't it?
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - I think the title says it all. Sorry readers, but it looks like right now, My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second is turning---well, maybe "degenerating" is the more appropriate word---into just your usual boring diary of one-thing-after-another events. In other words, it's turning into the verbal equivalent of a typical biopic (albeit one without Oscar pretensions---'cause blogs don't win Oscars, dummy!). Booooooo!
I promise, I kept telling myself I'd update this thing sometime during my Spring Break last week. I kept saying to myself, I am going to find time to make some nice, cool, thoughtful entries to this thing, and maybe try to reclaim whatever fanbase I had before life kept throwing things in my way. Nope. Didn't happen quite as I hoped.
And it's not like I was super-busy during this break either. Going into my break, I was planning to try to get at least a good majority of my Godard-versus-Tarantino thesis done. That didn't work out quite as planned either. True, I do have a little under 13 pages at this point, which is something---but it's not really close to done, and considering how slowly I write, it probably won't be done unless I somehow find it in me to awaken that long-dormant devil-may-care side of me and just keep on writing, writing, writing 'til I have a first draft finished.
At least, though, it looks like I might actually have enough to go past the minimum 25 pages. I know, I know: quality, not quantity. But I was talking to one of the State Theatre ushers sometime last week, and when I told her about the 25-page minimum, she said, "That's not a thesis! That's, like, a paper." Perhaps she was joking (she has that lightly-joking kind of personality). She later qualified that statement with, "Well, as long as it counts as a thesis, that's all that matters."
Look, I know I probably shouldn't be complaining so much about my thesis project only because many other seniors are probably struggling with 60- or 100-page theses they have to write. Hey, it's in my nature of worry at least a little bit, even about something that maybe I shouldn't worry so much about. Is it a good thing if I still find myself doing a little bit of research, reading through books and such? Seems like I should have been done with that stuff months ago. Meh.
Whatever. Today, at least, I finished up my projected second section of the paper. Two more sections to go.
**********
Meanwhile, my backlog of films that I've seen but haven't written about for this blog is growing. Let's run them down, shall we?
There's Breach (*** out of ****), that based-on-real-events thriller about Robert Hanssen that isn't particularly distinguished visually, but generates a few indelible suspense moments and has a great performance by Chris Cooper as Hanssen. Cooper is so good at conveying the tortured inner soul of the character that he suggests the great movie this could have been. Instead, the film sets Hanssen up as basically a sympathetic villain for Ryan Phillippe's relatively boring young agent to catch. (But then, Phillippe's pretty boring in nearly anything I've seen him in---including Flags of Our Fathers
. Maybe that's why Reese Witherspoon left him.) Writer/director Billy Ray laudably keeps Hanssen's motives vague---there are suggestions of resentment on Hanssen's part toward the relative lack of attention he received for all his years of service---but, like his previous docudrama, Shattered Glass, Breach is more honorable than memorable. (Tak Fujimoto's grayed-out cinematography is slick at first but gets monotonous after a while, although I suppose it's an appropriate choice given the relatively mundane, dull surrounding in which these events take place.)
Same for The Lives of Others (*** out of ****), the recent German Oscar-winner that tells parallel stories, both set at the same time during the existence of the oppressive Stasi in 1980s East Germany. By far the more compelling of the two is the transformation of Stasi member Gerd Wiesler from mere foot soldier with occasional bouts of conscience to full-blown human being with a full conscience. Here's another fantastic performance, from Ulrich Mühe as Wiesler; the moment where he first hears the "Sonata for a Good Man" as he's surveilling the artsy couple he's spying on is memorable for Mühe's facial expression, which literally seems to melt at hearing music of such beauty. The Lives of Others---far from being just another version of Francis Coppola's great The Conversation---is really about the possibility of creating art in the midst of a regime that represses the voice of artists, and on that level I suppose I developed a loving attachment to this movie as I watched it, partly because it confirmed my idealistic sentiments about the possibility of creating transforming art even in less-than-ideal circumstances. It's only afterwards that I realize that the movie itself is rather prosaic and safe aesthetically, although again the cinematography is impressively gray and serves its purpose. A movie about the power of edgy art that is itself an aesthetically safe, humdrum piece of work? Kind of a paradox there, I'd say. But I admit, it did move me in the end, and its lunge toward Oscar-baiting uplift at its conclusion struck me as fairly honest and genuine. It's not bad...
...but even better is David Fincher's surprisingly excellent Zodiac (***½ out of ****). A friend and I actually braved the nasty winter weather on Friday night to go see this movie, but I think it was worth the effort (although we were probably nuts to chance it in the first place). I can imagine some people finding its 160-minute length rather excessive for what is essentially an extended police procedural. But I was riveted every minute. This is an obsessive movie about obsessive characters searching for the elusive Zodiac killer---and it turns out that the most obsessive person of all is a cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal, well-cast), who refuses to let the case go years after many of the other detectives and journalists had given up on it as a lost cause. So whether or not every detail is important is secondary to the fact that, for many of these characters, God really is in the details---even at the expense of personal attachments. Zodiac is a classic example of style being the movie's substance: perhaps not every single detail of the movie is important, but it's there, haunting these characters to the point of absurdity.
Of course, why are these characters so obsessed? Why does Graysmith become obsessed? Hitchcock arguably captured the mania of obsession more powerfully in Vertigo, but, while Fincher isn't known for being a psychological director (although one could certainly interpret his cult hit Fight Club as one long twisted journey into one man's frustrated mind), here he's at least trying to tone down his TV ad style here in order to focus on character and plot. To its credit, the movie has enough integrity not to beat us over the head with thuddingly obvious "explanations" for these characters' behavior. For all I know, Graysmith couldn't let this go simply because he, as puzzle-minded as he is, simply wasn't wired up to rest until this particular puzzle was solved, at least to his satisfaction. In some ways, I see Zodiac as sharing a mild thematic kinship with Michael Mann's Miami Vice: all the cops in both movies are so immersed in their jobs that their personal attachments---whether to a person or to their job---suffers. In Zodiac, some are able to walk away; some are not.
For those who don't know much about the Zodiac case, it's probably a good idea to know beforehand that technically no one has ever been caught in the case. So what Zodiac, with all its meticulousness and attention to detail, amounts to is a gigantic case of frustrated expectations---Fincher shapes his film so that you're expecting the fairly tidy resolution of, say, a typical CSI or Law and Order episode, and then...well, Graysmith might get a certain kind of closure at the end, but it's not the sense of absolute truth that one gets from the usual CSI episode, where the rightness of the solution is rarely in doubt. Then you realize, of course, that life doesn't always lead to such easy answers, and that policework can be a long, arduous process. The skillful way both of those points are made are what distinguish Zodiac from its other police-procedural peers.
And finally---Zodiac is another high-definition video movie, but, as with the case with Ed Lachman's work for Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion last year, I could hardly tell that Harris Savides' work here was high-def video, except maybe for its lack of grain. In Miami Vice and Collateral, Michael Mann made no concessions as far as trying to make his digital video images look like film---at certain points in both films, he leaves in the video grain, and both films in general have that undefinable video "look" to them. Not Zodiac. Fincher's feature apparently never saw a foot of film or videotape: the whole thing was stored onto a hard drive and, I guess, edited from there. More interesting than that, however, is why Fincher decided to shoot a movie that is set in the late '60s through early '90s in a format that is pretty much associated with the new millennium. Hmm. Well, maybe Fincher was merely interested in creating a long-running visual counterpoint: for a film that is very much about the characters' fuzziness about the truth, even the clarity of the digital images seem to taunt them.
Zodiac, thankfully, isn't merely distinguished on the basis of technology. Fight Club fanboys---and personally, I'm on the fence on that film, at least until I see it one more time---might find this a disappointment, perhaps, but for me this is---to indulge in ad-copy hyperbole a teeny bit---the first near-great film of 2007 that I've seen.
Finally, oh yeah: Fast Food Nation(**½ out of ****). Richard Linklater's adaptation of Eric Schlosser's muckracking bestseller is pretty much a wash as drama---its rampant didacticism ensures that it's pretty much received as polemic first, drama way way second. (Linklater has never been much of a visual filmmaker anyway---which is probably why Waking Life, with its playful, pleasurable rotoscoping animation, is probably his best feature to date.) Still, as polemic, it explores some interesting areas outside of those disgusting meat factories, especially regarding political idealism in all different walks of life. The most cutting scene, for my money, isn't the concluding graphic footage of cow slaughter. Instead, it's the few scenes where those action-oriented high school/college kids decide to stage a symbolic protest---by letting all the cows loose---only to realize how ineffective it is, because the cows simply aren't, by nature, smart enough to leave. It looked powerful in theory, but in practice it turns out to be a disaster. It's one of the more thought-provoking depictions of political idealism gone awry I've seen recently.
I promise, I kept telling myself I'd update this thing sometime during my Spring Break last week. I kept saying to myself, I am going to find time to make some nice, cool, thoughtful entries to this thing, and maybe try to reclaim whatever fanbase I had before life kept throwing things in my way. Nope. Didn't happen quite as I hoped.
And it's not like I was super-busy during this break either. Going into my break, I was planning to try to get at least a good majority of my Godard-versus-Tarantino thesis done. That didn't work out quite as planned either. True, I do have a little under 13 pages at this point, which is something---but it's not really close to done, and considering how slowly I write, it probably won't be done unless I somehow find it in me to awaken that long-dormant devil-may-care side of me and just keep on writing, writing, writing 'til I have a first draft finished.
At least, though, it looks like I might actually have enough to go past the minimum 25 pages. I know, I know: quality, not quantity. But I was talking to one of the State Theatre ushers sometime last week, and when I told her about the 25-page minimum, she said, "That's not a thesis! That's, like, a paper." Perhaps she was joking (she has that lightly-joking kind of personality). She later qualified that statement with, "Well, as long as it counts as a thesis, that's all that matters."
Look, I know I probably shouldn't be complaining so much about my thesis project only because many other seniors are probably struggling with 60- or 100-page theses they have to write. Hey, it's in my nature of worry at least a little bit, even about something that maybe I shouldn't worry so much about. Is it a good thing if I still find myself doing a little bit of research, reading through books and such? Seems like I should have been done with that stuff months ago. Meh.
Whatever. Today, at least, I finished up my projected second section of the paper. Two more sections to go.
Meanwhile, my backlog of films that I've seen but haven't written about for this blog is growing. Let's run them down, shall we?
There's Breach (*** out of ****), that based-on-real-events thriller about Robert Hanssen that isn't particularly distinguished visually, but generates a few indelible suspense moments and has a great performance by Chris Cooper as Hanssen. Cooper is so good at conveying the tortured inner soul of the character that he suggests the great movie this could have been. Instead, the film sets Hanssen up as basically a sympathetic villain for Ryan Phillippe's relatively boring young agent to catch. (But then, Phillippe's pretty boring in nearly anything I've seen him in---including Flags of Our Fathers
. Maybe that's why Reese Witherspoon left him.) Writer/director Billy Ray laudably keeps Hanssen's motives vague---there are suggestions of resentment on Hanssen's part toward the relative lack of attention he received for all his years of service---but, like his previous docudrama, Shattered Glass, Breach is more honorable than memorable. (Tak Fujimoto's grayed-out cinematography is slick at first but gets monotonous after a while, although I suppose it's an appropriate choice given the relatively mundane, dull surrounding in which these events take place.)Same for The Lives of Others (*** out of ****), the recent German Oscar-winner that tells parallel stories, both set at the same time during the existence of the oppressive Stasi in 1980s East Germany. By far the more compelling of the two is the transformation of Stasi member Gerd Wiesler from mere foot soldier with occasional bouts of conscience to full-blown human being with a full conscience. Here's another fantastic performance, from Ulrich Mühe as Wiesler; the moment where he first hears the "Sonata for a Good Man" as he's surveilling the artsy couple he's spying on is memorable for Mühe's facial expression, which literally seems to melt at hearing music of such beauty. The Lives of Others---far from being just another version of Francis Coppola's great The Conversation
---is really about the possibility of creating art in the midst of a regime that represses the voice of artists, and on that level I suppose I developed a loving attachment to this movie as I watched it, partly because it confirmed my idealistic sentiments about the possibility of creating transforming art even in less-than-ideal circumstances. It's only afterwards that I realize that the movie itself is rather prosaic and safe aesthetically, although again the cinematography is impressively gray and serves its purpose. A movie about the power of edgy art that is itself an aesthetically safe, humdrum piece of work? Kind of a paradox there, I'd say. But I admit, it did move me in the end, and its lunge toward Oscar-baiting uplift at its conclusion struck me as fairly honest and genuine. It's not bad......but even better is David Fincher's surprisingly excellent Zodiac (***½ out of ****). A friend and I actually braved the nasty winter weather on Friday night to go see this movie, but I think it was worth the effort (although we were probably nuts to chance it in the first place). I can imagine some people finding its 160-minute length rather excessive for what is essentially an extended police procedural. But I was riveted every minute. This is an obsessive movie about obsessive characters searching for the elusive Zodiac killer---and it turns out that the most obsessive person of all is a cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal, well-cast), who refuses to let the case go years after many of the other detectives and journalists had given up on it as a lost cause. So whether or not every detail is important is secondary to the fact that, for many of these characters, God really is in the details---even at the expense of personal attachments. Zodiac is a classic example of style being the movie's substance: perhaps not every single detail of the movie is important, but it's there, haunting these characters to the point of absurdity.
Of course, why are these characters so obsessed? Why does Graysmith become obsessed? Hitchcock arguably captured the mania of obsession more powerfully in Vertigo
, but, while Fincher isn't known for being a psychological director (although one could certainly interpret his cult hit Fight Club as one long twisted journey into one man's frustrated mind), here he's at least trying to tone down his TV ad style here in order to focus on character and plot. To its credit, the movie has enough integrity not to beat us over the head with thuddingly obvious "explanations" for these characters' behavior. For all I know, Graysmith couldn't let this go simply because he, as puzzle-minded as he is, simply wasn't wired up to rest until this particular puzzle was solved, at least to his satisfaction. In some ways, I see Zodiac as sharing a mild thematic kinship with Michael Mann's Miami Vice: all the cops in both movies are so immersed in their jobs that their personal attachments---whether to a person or to their job---suffers. In Zodiac, some are able to walk away; some are not.For those who don't know much about the Zodiac case, it's probably a good idea to know beforehand that technically no one has ever been caught in the case. So what Zodiac, with all its meticulousness and attention to detail, amounts to is a gigantic case of frustrated expectations---Fincher shapes his film so that you're expecting the fairly tidy resolution of, say, a typical CSI or Law and Order episode, and then...well, Graysmith might get a certain kind of closure at the end, but it's not the sense of absolute truth that one gets from the usual CSI episode, where the rightness of the solution is rarely in doubt. Then you realize, of course, that life doesn't always lead to such easy answers, and that policework can be a long, arduous process. The skillful way both of those points are made are what distinguish Zodiac from its other police-procedural peers.
And finally---Zodiac is another high-definition video movie, but, as with the case with Ed Lachman's work for Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion
last year, I could hardly tell that Harris Savides' work here was high-def video, except maybe for its lack of grain. In Miami Vice and Collateral, Michael Mann made no concessions as far as trying to make his digital video images look like film---at certain points in both films, he leaves in the video grain, and both films in general have that undefinable video "look" to them. Not Zodiac. Fincher's feature apparently never saw a foot of film or videotape: the whole thing was stored onto a hard drive and, I guess, edited from there. More interesting than that, however, is why Fincher decided to shoot a movie that is set in the late '60s through early '90s in a format that is pretty much associated with the new millennium. Hmm. Well, maybe Fincher was merely interested in creating a long-running visual counterpoint: for a film that is very much about the characters' fuzziness about the truth, even the clarity of the digital images seem to taunt them.Zodiac, thankfully, isn't merely distinguished on the basis of technology. Fight Club fanboys---and personally, I'm on the fence on that film, at least until I see it one more time---might find this a disappointment, perhaps, but for me this is---to indulge in ad-copy hyperbole a teeny bit---the first near-great film of 2007 that I've seen.
Finally, oh yeah: Fast Food Nation
(**½ out of ****). Richard Linklater's adaptation of Eric Schlosser's muckracking bestseller is pretty much a wash as drama---its rampant didacticism ensures that it's pretty much received as polemic first, drama way way second. (Linklater has never been much of a visual filmmaker anyway---which is probably why Waking Life, with its playful, pleasurable rotoscoping animation, is probably his best feature to date.) Still, as polemic, it explores some interesting areas outside of those disgusting meat factories, especially regarding political idealism in all different walks of life. The most cutting scene, for my money, isn't the concluding graphic footage of cow slaughter. Instead, it's the few scenes where those action-oriented high school/college kids decide to stage a symbolic protest---by letting all the cows loose---only to realize how ineffective it is, because the cows simply aren't, by nature, smart enough to leave. It looked powerful in theory, but in practice it turns out to be a disaster. It's one of the more thought-provoking depictions of political idealism gone awry I've seen recently.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Brief (Probably Not) Life Update No. 12: Learning, Partying, and Learning About Partying
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - Isn't it ironic how it seems like I'm updating less this semester even though I have less credits---14---compared to last semester, when I had less free time with 17 credits on my figurative college plate? Don'tcha think?
I have a bit of free time right now by virtue of the only computer lab on College Ave. with the desktop publishing program Quark XPress being currently occupied by a class, so I figured I'd let all of you readers---whoever's left of you, anyway---in on what's been happening in my life since my last post.
Well, let's see. Last week I prepared my tail off for a midterm in my Cinema Studies seminar on Thursday, March 1. Oh, you might say, it's a film class---shouldn't that be easy for you? Ah, but complacency is a big enemy of mine: I always try to resist the urge to get too overconfident lest I come crashing down with a disheartening thud. So yeah, I spent about three days in various College Ave. computer labs---away from my Rockoff apartment, where I often have trouble getting serious work done with all the distractions (and odors---don't ask)---working up a personal study guide---8 pages long!---for the test. The test turned out to be straightforward and fairly easy, if long (it took me nearly the whole period).
This week my attention is focused on a quiz in my Desktop Publishing class that I have tomorrow---not much to worry about, really, except for the promise that the quiz is going to have a section in which I basically have to create something from scratch on Quark XPress. Uh-oh, I need to practice!
And also, good news on the senior thesis front: I actually have some solid written pages! Not much---an introduction lasting for about 3½ pages---but it's a start, and at least I'll have something to show my thesis advisor when I meet with her tomorrow. (I suspect I probably won't get much more of it done today, but we'll see.)
Looks like this upcoming spring break is going to be very nearly all thesis writing, all the time. It sucks, but it's not like my previous spring breaks have ever been breathtakingly full of lavish, sun-drenched, girls-gone-wild incident.
**********
Ah, but enough about school stuff. What about the fun stuff?
This past Friday night, I had one of my rare days off from doing any ushering at the State Theatre---nothing was scheduled for that night, apparently. So I decided not only to catch up on Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation at our local film festival (more on that in a subsequent entry, perhaps), but also to do something that I hadn't done in a long while---catch up with an old friend and get drunk on a lot of beer.
The old friend was my old freshman-year roommate from when I lived on Quad I over at boring old Livingston Campus. Cool guy, fun to be around, and the occasion for our meeting was a 22nd birthday bash he was throwing at his house over on Senior Street. Apparently there was a theme to this party: everyone was supposed to wear short shorts---so NBA-style shorts for guys and short shorts or miniskirts and a lot of exposed cleavage for the gals. I knew about this going on, but I had no short shorts, only some boxers---and I wasn't about to go out in 30° weather with only boxers on. No sirree, Bob! But he was cool about it---I guess he was just happy to see me.
And I guess I was really happy to be there, because it only took about one cup of beer for me to start feeling buzzed.
There's not much to say about the party itself, except that I apparently (I feel like I'm using that word a lot in this entry) loosened up so much that I left quite a big impression on not only my friend's housemates, but also on a few of the females I talked to, some of whom decided thenext day to add me as a friend on Facebook. I don't know if I'd ever get into relationships with any of them---not that I'm looking that hard for one at this point anyway---but at least I talked to them, right? As opposed to not just sitting around wishing they'd talk to me.
One of the things I often end up doing at college parties of this sort is to simply sit around like a wallflower and watch other people dance around instead of getting up and moving myself. Somehow, though---I guess it was the alcohol---I got the courage to actually get up and start shaking my ass a little bit. I think it's inhibition---even when drunk---that hampered me over the years---I've never been much of a dancer, and I always feel like I'd look stupid next to girls, many of whom always seem to know how to move a lot better than I do. But Friday night, I guess I must have said to myself, Who cares about all that? I probably looked like a total fool doing it, but hey, I was doing something to try to have fun, and everyone around me seemed to respond.
And thankfully, throughout all this, I didn't get so drunk that I either a) blanked out for a lengthy period of time, or b) threw up. (Did I ever tell you about my wine-and-cheese party experience, readers? To sum it up if I haven't: I basically drank too much wine and not enough cheese at an Inside Beat gathering and eventually found myself lying in my bed with bits of barf on my pillow, having forgotten most of what happened that night. I was told later that a friend and I went to another party and I threw up on some girl's jacket; then that friend had to basically drag me all the way back to Rockoff because no bus, seeing my immensely drunken state, would take me back. It's not so much the fact that I got sick that disappoints me; it's that I got so drunk that I barely remember what happened, because I'm pretty sure I was probably at my loosest that night.)
Supposedly I left such a favorable impression on my friend's housemates that they're already talking about inviting me back for some future house party. In fact, one of those housemates recognized me as I was walking toward the computer lab where I am now and said something to that effect. I guess I should be happy about that, right?
Don't worry, though: I'm not turning into a fratboy or anything. Girls---or, in this case, a fairly shy Asian guy with an acne problem---just wanna have fun.
**********
Well, that's it for this life update. I was going to talk a bit more about some of the recent new movies I've seen (including the aforementioned Fast Food Nation, which isn't much as drama, but is actually fairly interesting as agitprop), as well as briefly touch upon both the boredom that was much of Oscar 2007 as well as my recent explorations into the uniquely funky, eclectic soundworld of the Talking Heads (thank you, DC++, for allowing me to illegally download More Songs About Buildings and Food
, Remain in Light, and others). But I think that'll wait for another entry---coming hopefully sometime soon. Don't go away just yet!
I have a bit of free time right now by virtue of the only computer lab on College Ave. with the desktop publishing program Quark XPress being currently occupied by a class, so I figured I'd let all of you readers---whoever's left of you, anyway---in on what's been happening in my life since my last post.
Well, let's see. Last week I prepared my tail off for a midterm in my Cinema Studies seminar on Thursday, March 1. Oh, you might say, it's a film class---shouldn't that be easy for you? Ah, but complacency is a big enemy of mine: I always try to resist the urge to get too overconfident lest I come crashing down with a disheartening thud. So yeah, I spent about three days in various College Ave. computer labs---away from my Rockoff apartment, where I often have trouble getting serious work done with all the distractions (and odors---don't ask)---working up a personal study guide---8 pages long!---for the test. The test turned out to be straightforward and fairly easy, if long (it took me nearly the whole period).
This week my attention is focused on a quiz in my Desktop Publishing class that I have tomorrow---not much to worry about, really, except for the promise that the quiz is going to have a section in which I basically have to create something from scratch on Quark XPress. Uh-oh, I need to practice!
And also, good news on the senior thesis front: I actually have some solid written pages! Not much---an introduction lasting for about 3½ pages---but it's a start, and at least I'll have something to show my thesis advisor when I meet with her tomorrow. (I suspect I probably won't get much more of it done today, but we'll see.)
Looks like this upcoming spring break is going to be very nearly all thesis writing, all the time. It sucks, but it's not like my previous spring breaks have ever been breathtakingly full of lavish, sun-drenched, girls-gone-wild incident.
Ah, but enough about school stuff. What about the fun stuff?
This past Friday night, I had one of my rare days off from doing any ushering at the State Theatre---nothing was scheduled for that night, apparently. So I decided not only to catch up on Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation
at our local film festival (more on that in a subsequent entry, perhaps), but also to do something that I hadn't done in a long while---catch up with an old friend and get drunk on a lot of beer.The old friend was my old freshman-year roommate from when I lived on Quad I over at boring old Livingston Campus. Cool guy, fun to be around, and the occasion for our meeting was a 22nd birthday bash he was throwing at his house over on Senior Street. Apparently there was a theme to this party: everyone was supposed to wear short shorts---so NBA-style shorts for guys and short shorts or miniskirts and a lot of exposed cleavage for the gals. I knew about this going on, but I had no short shorts, only some boxers---and I wasn't about to go out in 30° weather with only boxers on. No sirree, Bob! But he was cool about it---I guess he was just happy to see me.
And I guess I was really happy to be there, because it only took about one cup of beer for me to start feeling buzzed.
There's not much to say about the party itself, except that I apparently (I feel like I'm using that word a lot in this entry) loosened up so much that I left quite a big impression on not only my friend's housemates, but also on a few of the females I talked to, some of whom decided thenext day to add me as a friend on Facebook. I don't know if I'd ever get into relationships with any of them---not that I'm looking that hard for one at this point anyway---but at least I talked to them, right? As opposed to not just sitting around wishing they'd talk to me.
One of the things I often end up doing at college parties of this sort is to simply sit around like a wallflower and watch other people dance around instead of getting up and moving myself. Somehow, though---I guess it was the alcohol---I got the courage to actually get up and start shaking my ass a little bit. I think it's inhibition---even when drunk---that hampered me over the years---I've never been much of a dancer, and I always feel like I'd look stupid next to girls, many of whom always seem to know how to move a lot better than I do. But Friday night, I guess I must have said to myself, Who cares about all that? I probably looked like a total fool doing it, but hey, I was doing something to try to have fun, and everyone around me seemed to respond.
And thankfully, throughout all this, I didn't get so drunk that I either a) blanked out for a lengthy period of time, or b) threw up. (Did I ever tell you about my wine-and-cheese party experience, readers? To sum it up if I haven't: I basically drank too much wine and not enough cheese at an Inside Beat gathering and eventually found myself lying in my bed with bits of barf on my pillow, having forgotten most of what happened that night. I was told later that a friend and I went to another party and I threw up on some girl's jacket; then that friend had to basically drag me all the way back to Rockoff because no bus, seeing my immensely drunken state, would take me back. It's not so much the fact that I got sick that disappoints me; it's that I got so drunk that I barely remember what happened, because I'm pretty sure I was probably at my loosest that night.)
Supposedly I left such a favorable impression on my friend's housemates that they're already talking about inviting me back for some future house party. In fact, one of those housemates recognized me as I was walking toward the computer lab where I am now and said something to that effect. I guess I should be happy about that, right?
Don't worry, though: I'm not turning into a fratboy or anything. Girls---or, in this case, a fairly shy Asian guy with an acne problem---just wanna have fun.
Well, that's it for this life update. I was going to talk a bit more about some of the recent new movies I've seen (including the aforementioned Fast Food Nation, which isn't much as drama, but is actually fairly interesting as agitprop), as well as briefly touch upon both the boredom that was much of Oscar 2007 as well as my recent explorations into the uniquely funky, eclectic soundworld of the Talking Heads (thank you, DC++, for allowing me to illegally download More Songs About Buildings and Food
, Remain in Light, and others). But I think that'll wait for another entry---coming hopefully sometime soon. Don't go away just yet!
Saturday, February 24, 2007
(Long Overdue) Brief Life Update No. 11: My Own Big Scoop/Oscar
EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. - The over two-week gap between this entry and my last one may be the longest gap in the history of My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second. For all those faithful readers out there, I apologize for the long delay. If there are any of you out there who are actually fuming over the fact that "Kenji didn't update his friggin blog for over two weeks! He doesn't care about his readership!"---well, I guess the following will suffice as an explanation. (If it makes any of you feel any better, believe me when I say that I was genuinely intending to update this thing earlier in the week. For what that's worth.)
Over the past two weeks, I've been tied up not only with my usual classwork, but also with a rather exasperating---well, challenging, to put it more optimistically---reporting project for my Desktop Publishing class in which I basically had to try to track down as many Rutgers University alumni/journalism major grads as I could that were currently working at the Wall Street Journal, whether as reporters or editors, whether for the actual print publication or for either its online version or the Online Network, the latter of which includes such potentially useful Web sites such as CollegeJournal.com and StartupJournal.com, among a few others. I had to find them and interview them---all of them---asking them questions about how they got to where they are now, how their Rutgers education helped them, what they like about working for the Journal, etc. The story, once it's all finished and laid out and such, is going to be published in the upcoming edition of AlumKnights, the Rutgers journalism department's alumni newsletter. (We lucky Desktop Publishing students, by the way, are in charge of laying out the whole thing.)
I ended up interviewing five people from the Journal, four of them people whose names were provided for me by one of my Desktop Publishing professors (we have two for this class). The fifth one was referred to by more than one of my interview subjects, and I was thankfully able to get the fifth one---the so-called Deputy Managing Editor of the online Journal---for a relatively short phone interview; apparently he's a very busy man---so busy that he's the one that called me for the interview, not the other way around.
I would think five people would be enough for any article; most of my Desktop Publishing peers only had to interview one or two for their stories. But I spent most of this past week fairly irritated when I found out indirectly that I was supposed to try to track down all the Rutgers journalism alums at the Journal. All? Are you kidding? Most of the people to whom I complained about this agreed that this was a bit much; heck, even one of my interview subjects, when I called her to ask a few follow-up questions, said the same thing. In the end, though, I wrote up an initial draft based on my five interviews...and I think that's where I'm going to draw the line. Besides, one name who was mentioned by one of my interview subjects turned out to not even be in the paper's employee database, and another hasn't gotten back to me after about three e-mails and a message left on her work number. I guess I should try to leave another message...but really, I'm for the most part done with this thing, man.
Besides...I have a goddamn thesis I actually have to start writing! Remember, that thing comparing Jean-Luc Godard and Quentin Tarantino? The thing that's due in about, oh, a little over a month???
So actually, these past two days I've been taking it easy after handing in my first draft of my Desktop Publishing story. In fact, I've been taking it so easy that I've basically been sitting around in front of my computer either playing around with Windows Movie Maker---using Mozilla's handy Video Downloader 2.0, downloading various Youtube clips, converting them to .avi files and stitching them together in true stream-of-consciousness collage style---or delving deep into the world of Youtube vlogs. (Sidenote: I should probably devote a whole future entry to discussing Youtube and, I guess, trying to elucidate its appeal, especially when it comes to vlogs. Besides, I've discovered some pretty cool, interesting vlogs on Youtube, and I'd like to share some of them with you readers sometime soon.)
Of course, shouldn't I be doing, like, homework or something? Well, I think I deserve a bit of a break...just to brace myself for another fairly tough week coming up. I have a midterm in my Cinema Studies senior seminar coming up this Thursday, and of course I'm probably going to attempt to get started on thesis stuff. (A friend of mine is also working on a thesis this year; supposedly she set herself a goal this past week to try to get 25-30 pages of it written. When I talked to her online on Monday, she said she had already gotten 10 finished. My internal reaction to hearing this was, Damn! It probably takes me more than one day to get 10 pages finished; how do I expect myself to get 30 done in a week? Well, at least 30 pages might be my whole thesis right there; that friend of mine is working on something much longer. Perhaps I could take heart in the fact that I was actually able to get my entire five-plus page draft for my Desktop Publishing story done in one day---although that's probably because I had all the notes in front me from which to refer as I wrote it.)
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In the meantime...tomorrow's Oscar night!
Actually, I'm not as excited about it as that exclamation mark may suggest; I'm fairly cynical about the Oscars, since I don't see it as much other than a self-important orgy of Hollywood self-congratulation, one that can hardly be said to be worth much as an indicator of actual quality. Maybe of "quality"---meaning what passes for "serious" prestige filmmaking in Hollywood (like this year's Best Picture frontrunner Babel
---although again, I think Babel overall is preferable to last year's blunt-instrument-rather-than-movie Crash). But hey, in the right frame of mind, I suppose it can be fun as merely a pageant...and tomorrow night, I'm going to try to have some fun with it with a few good friends (one of whom takes the Oscars a bit more seriously than I do).
A few random thoughts about what multiple host Billy Crystal once sang "Oscar, Oscar":
I still believe Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima is the best film of the nominated five. It's not the most aesthetically daring of the lot, but, in its fresh and serious contemplation of issues of honor and morality in war, I think it'll end up the most lasting and memorable of the lot.
It may well be Martin Scorsese's year to finally win the Best Director Oscar he has long craved, but if he wins, to me it'll clearly be one of those make-up wins (a la Paul Newman for an earlier Scorsese picture, The Color of Money), an acknowledgment of a distinguished body of work rather than an award for his work in The Departed. It really is about time---although I wish he'd have won it for a better movie.
I'm guessing Pan's Labyrinth (** out of ****) is the favorite to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. But I saw the film a couple of weekends ago and I'm not sure I get the immense positive hype for it. Yes, its fairy-tale fantasy sequences are enchanting, scary and memorable, and its ambition to try to blend childlike fantasy with brutal reality is laudable. But an "end-of-childhood [elegy]," as one critic wrote about it? Really? If anything, the movie, in all of its visually splendid triteness, is a confirmation of childlike naiveté---with clearly drawn good guys and bad guys (let's face it, there's not much nuance to speak of when it comes to the intensely fascist Capitán Vidal, who engages in ruthless murder and torture even though he perhaps realizes that his cause is nearing its end)---and an at best clumsy intermingling of fantasy and reality. The rather blank 12-year-old heroine doesn't really grow in wisdom about the real world throughout the movie, and by the end...
(spoiler alert for those who haven't seen the film)
...she's actually died and gone to some kind of heaven, confirming her belief in the weird (and admittedly wonderful) creatures she sees and interacts with. And political allegory? Where is it? Fascism was a terrible thing, no doubt, but the film's aura of political depth---accomplished simply by making the atmosphere violent and heavy, as well as by trafficking in black-and-white instead of dealing with any kind of complexity---struck me as disingenuous. In all, Pan's Labyrinth is not only purely escapist, but it's also a celebration of escapism as a way to get away from the rotten real world. (Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander might have seen things through a child's innocent eyes and imaginative mind, but at least it also seemed to recognize the emotional complexities of the adult world surrounding Alexander.) Maybe others don't mind seeing a movie like that as much as I do (or maybe I've just gotten so pretentious myself that I've lost touch with the common moviegoer or something).
It's fairly obvious that Jennifer Hudson is going to win for Dreamgirls, but aren't people going ga-ga over her powerhouse singing and forgetting that she's perhaps serviceable at best as a dramatic actress? Her best acting is in her singing---which, I suppose, is good enough for a musical, but I wonder if, down the road, she takes on a purely dramatic role and feels a lot of pressure to impress especially to justify that Oscar statuette sitting on her mantle.
And finally, one major snub: Laura Dern in Inland Empire, for basically anchoring David Lynch's richly fucked-up vision to some kind of human footing. (Did Academy voters even bother to see Lynch's movie---or, I guess more accurately, digital video? Probably not, I suspect.)
Oh, and as for the ceremony itself: I'm pretty immune to whatever charms people see in Ellen Degeneres---I've usually rolled my eyes at her comic blandness whenever I've chanced upon her daytime talk show---so I'm not expecting a whole lot of comic gold out of her tomorrow night as host, to be honest. Maybe she'll surprise me. Last year, Jon Stewart started off kinda rocky but managed to come up with a few good pieces of ribbing as the show went along.
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One more thing: to make up for not even feeling the motivation to post this on Valentine's Day, here's a video for fans of one of Jean-Luc Godard's great muses, the eternally gorgeous Anna Karina, to drool over. Does anyone have any idea how to obtain a copy of Anna, the French TV-movie from which the following clip appears?
Over the past two weeks, I've been tied up not only with my usual classwork, but also with a rather exasperating---well, challenging, to put it more optimistically---reporting project for my Desktop Publishing class in which I basically had to try to track down as many Rutgers University alumni/journalism major grads as I could that were currently working at the Wall Street Journal, whether as reporters or editors, whether for the actual print publication or for either its online version or the Online Network, the latter of which includes such potentially useful Web sites such as CollegeJournal.com and StartupJournal.com, among a few others. I had to find them and interview them---all of them---asking them questions about how they got to where they are now, how their Rutgers education helped them, what they like about working for the Journal, etc. The story, once it's all finished and laid out and such, is going to be published in the upcoming edition of AlumKnights, the Rutgers journalism department's alumni newsletter. (We lucky Desktop Publishing students, by the way, are in charge of laying out the whole thing.)
I ended up interviewing five people from the Journal, four of them people whose names were provided for me by one of my Desktop Publishing professors (we have two for this class). The fifth one was referred to by more than one of my interview subjects, and I was thankfully able to get the fifth one---the so-called Deputy Managing Editor of the online Journal---for a relatively short phone interview; apparently he's a very busy man---so busy that he's the one that called me for the interview, not the other way around.
I would think five people would be enough for any article; most of my Desktop Publishing peers only had to interview one or two for their stories. But I spent most of this past week fairly irritated when I found out indirectly that I was supposed to try to track down all the Rutgers journalism alums at the Journal. All? Are you kidding? Most of the people to whom I complained about this agreed that this was a bit much; heck, even one of my interview subjects, when I called her to ask a few follow-up questions, said the same thing. In the end, though, I wrote up an initial draft based on my five interviews...and I think that's where I'm going to draw the line. Besides, one name who was mentioned by one of my interview subjects turned out to not even be in the paper's employee database, and another hasn't gotten back to me after about three e-mails and a message left on her work number. I guess I should try to leave another message...but really, I'm for the most part done with this thing, man.
Besides...I have a goddamn thesis I actually have to start writing! Remember, that thing comparing Jean-Luc Godard and Quentin Tarantino? The thing that's due in about, oh, a little over a month???
So actually, these past two days I've been taking it easy after handing in my first draft of my Desktop Publishing story. In fact, I've been taking it so easy that I've basically been sitting around in front of my computer either playing around with Windows Movie Maker---using Mozilla's handy Video Downloader 2.0, downloading various Youtube clips, converting them to .avi files and stitching them together in true stream-of-consciousness collage style---or delving deep into the world of Youtube vlogs. (Sidenote: I should probably devote a whole future entry to discussing Youtube and, I guess, trying to elucidate its appeal, especially when it comes to vlogs. Besides, I've discovered some pretty cool, interesting vlogs on Youtube, and I'd like to share some of them with you readers sometime soon.)
Of course, shouldn't I be doing, like, homework or something? Well, I think I deserve a bit of a break...just to brace myself for another fairly tough week coming up. I have a midterm in my Cinema Studies senior seminar coming up this Thursday, and of course I'm probably going to attempt to get started on thesis stuff. (A friend of mine is also working on a thesis this year; supposedly she set herself a goal this past week to try to get 25-30 pages of it written. When I talked to her online on Monday, she said she had already gotten 10 finished. My internal reaction to hearing this was, Damn! It probably takes me more than one day to get 10 pages finished; how do I expect myself to get 30 done in a week? Well, at least 30 pages might be my whole thesis right there; that friend of mine is working on something much longer. Perhaps I could take heart in the fact that I was actually able to get my entire five-plus page draft for my Desktop Publishing story done in one day---although that's probably because I had all the notes in front me from which to refer as I wrote it.)
In the meantime...tomorrow's Oscar night!
Actually, I'm not as excited about it as that exclamation mark may suggest; I'm fairly cynical about the Oscars, since I don't see it as much other than a self-important orgy of Hollywood self-congratulation, one that can hardly be said to be worth much as an indicator of actual quality. Maybe of "quality"---meaning what passes for "serious" prestige filmmaking in Hollywood (like this year's Best Picture frontrunner Babel
---although again, I think Babel overall is preferable to last year's blunt-instrument-rather-than-movie Crash). But hey, in the right frame of mind, I suppose it can be fun as merely a pageant...and tomorrow night, I'm going to try to have some fun with it with a few good friends (one of whom takes the Oscars a bit more seriously than I do).A few random thoughts about what multiple host Billy Crystal once sang "Oscar, Oscar":
I still believe Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima is the best film of the nominated five. It's not the most aesthetically daring of the lot, but, in its fresh and serious contemplation of issues of honor and morality in war, I think it'll end up the most lasting and memorable of the lot.
It may well be Martin Scorsese's year to finally win the Best Director Oscar he has long craved, but if he wins, to me it'll clearly be one of those make-up wins (a la Paul Newman for an earlier Scorsese picture, The Color of Money
), an acknowledgment of a distinguished body of work rather than an award for his work in The Departed. It really is about time---although I wish he'd have won it for a better movie.I'm guessing Pan's Labyrinth (** out of ****) is the favorite to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. But I saw the film a couple of weekends ago and I'm not sure I get the immense positive hype for it. Yes, its fairy-tale fantasy sequences are enchanting, scary and memorable, and its ambition to try to blend childlike fantasy with brutal reality is laudable. But an "end-of-childhood [elegy]," as one critic wrote about it? Really? If anything, the movie, in all of its visually splendid triteness, is a confirmation of childlike naiveté---with clearly drawn good guys and bad guys (let's face it, there's not much nuance to speak of when it comes to the intensely fascist Capitán Vidal, who engages in ruthless murder and torture even though he perhaps realizes that his cause is nearing its end)---and an at best clumsy intermingling of fantasy and reality. The rather blank 12-year-old heroine doesn't really grow in wisdom about the real world throughout the movie, and by the end...
(spoiler alert for those who haven't seen the film)
...she's actually died and gone to some kind of heaven, confirming her belief in the weird (and admittedly wonderful) creatures she sees and interacts with. And political allegory? Where is it? Fascism was a terrible thing, no doubt, but the film's aura of political depth---accomplished simply by making the atmosphere violent and heavy, as well as by trafficking in black-and-white instead of dealing with any kind of complexity---struck me as disingenuous. In all, Pan's Labyrinth is not only purely escapist, but it's also a celebration of escapism as a way to get away from the rotten real world. (Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander
might have seen things through a child's innocent eyes and imaginative mind, but at least it also seemed to recognize the emotional complexities of the adult world surrounding Alexander.) Maybe others don't mind seeing a movie like that as much as I do (or maybe I've just gotten so pretentious myself that I've lost touch with the common moviegoer or something).It's fairly obvious that Jennifer Hudson is going to win for Dreamgirls, but aren't people going ga-ga over her powerhouse singing and forgetting that she's perhaps serviceable at best as a dramatic actress? Her best acting is in her singing---which, I suppose, is good enough for a musical, but I wonder if, down the road, she takes on a purely dramatic role and feels a lot of pressure to impress especially to justify that Oscar statuette sitting on her mantle.
And finally, one major snub: Laura Dern in Inland Empire, for basically anchoring David Lynch's richly fucked-up vision to some kind of human footing. (Did Academy voters even bother to see Lynch's movie---or, I guess more accurately, digital video? Probably not, I suspect.)
Oh, and as for the ceremony itself: I'm pretty immune to whatever charms people see in Ellen Degeneres---I've usually rolled my eyes at her comic blandness whenever I've chanced upon her daytime talk show---so I'm not expecting a whole lot of comic gold out of her tomorrow night as host, to be honest. Maybe she'll surprise me. Last year, Jon Stewart started off kinda rocky but managed to come up with a few good pieces of ribbing as the show went along.
One more thing: to make up for not even feeling the motivation to post this on Valentine's Day, here's a video for fans of one of Jean-Luc Godard's great muses, the eternally gorgeous Anna Karina, to drool over. Does anyone have any idea how to obtain a copy of Anna, the French TV-movie from which the following clip appears?
Friday, February 09, 2007
Brief Life Update No. 10
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - It seems like this blog is becoming more of a weekly than anything else, since I seem to have time only to come up with one update a week. And this weekend I didn't see any films in a theater, so I can't even write about that!
Anyway...how's my life been going? Okay, although it looks to be getting busier this coming week, with a first quiz and, yes, another layout assignment (hopefully one which won't take forever to finish like the assignments I had in Editing & Layout last semester).
Good news on the senior thesis front: I finally put together a decent outline for the project off of which to work. Hopefully I can get started writing soon. My thesis adviser alerted me to this fascinating book by Robert Stam entitled Reflexivity in Film and Literature which is all about the ways some novels and films---Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote being examples of the former, nearly any Jean-Luc Godard film (thus my personal interest in it) or Fellini's 8 1/2 examples of the latter---flaunt their own, uh, novel- or movie-ness in trying to expose the inherent artificiality of fiction, get us to think about our reactions to them, and---in typical scholarly terms---"lay bare the device." It's been very instrumental in giving me a focus point for my thesis, which in part examines reflexivity in terms of the cinema of both Godard and Quentin Tarantino, and what each filmmaker's version of reflexivity means to both. I hope to get started actually writing the damn thing soon---kinda have to, since it's due by the end of the semester! (I don't expect mine to be too lengthy: the Livingston College Honors Program minimum is 25 pages, and that's what I've been instructed by my thesis adviser to shoot for.)
It might be hard to get started right away, considering I'm in the midst of working on a rather hefty feature story for my Desktop Publishing class. My Desktop Publishing class is in charge of putting together AlumKnights, the journalism and media studies department alumni newsletter, and I---perhaps stupidly, in hindsight---decided to tackle probably the most involved story assignment offered by the professor: I have to interview about four or five Rutgers alums who are currently working at the Wall Street Journal and put all their information together into one big story. Most other students only need to make contact with one or two people for their stories; not me. Aren't I lucky? Anyway, I think I've made decent progress so far: I was able to interview two people so far (both were very nice to me in addition to sounding fairly attractive over the phone---yes, I'm talking about females, not males), got in contact with two others (one of whom I'm not sure I'm going to interview anyway, since I'd say four people is enough for any story), and still need to track down one more. This is due in about two weeks, so I can't really afford to slack off. (Of course, this is probably going to cut down a little bit on my ability to make serious headway on my thesis in time for my next scheduled meeting with my adviser in two weeks...)
Not much else really. I'm probably going to try like heck to get stuff done early next week just so I can settle in on Valentine's Day with my great love: movies! How about a romantic Wong Kar-Wai/Hou Hsiao-hsien double bill? Chungking Express followed by Three Times? Two excellent films, both on the subject of love. Hey, I think it's worth waiting for, don't you?
Anyway...how's my life been going? Okay, although it looks to be getting busier this coming week, with a first quiz and, yes, another layout assignment (hopefully one which won't take forever to finish like the assignments I had in Editing & Layout last semester).
Good news on the senior thesis front: I finally put together a decent outline for the project off of which to work. Hopefully I can get started writing soon. My thesis adviser alerted me to this fascinating book by Robert Stam entitled Reflexivity in Film and Literature
which is all about the ways some novels and films---Tristram Shandy or Don Quixote being examples of the former, nearly any Jean-Luc Godard film (thus my personal interest in it) or Fellini's 8 1/2 examples of the latter---flaunt their own, uh, novel- or movie-ness in trying to expose the inherent artificiality of fiction, get us to think about our reactions to them, and---in typical scholarly terms---"lay bare the device." It's been very instrumental in giving me a focus point for my thesis, which in part examines reflexivity in terms of the cinema of both Godard and Quentin Tarantino, and what each filmmaker's version of reflexivity means to both. I hope to get started actually writing the damn thing soon---kinda have to, since it's due by the end of the semester! (I don't expect mine to be too lengthy: the Livingston College Honors Program minimum is 25 pages, and that's what I've been instructed by my thesis adviser to shoot for.)It might be hard to get started right away, considering I'm in the midst of working on a rather hefty feature story for my Desktop Publishing class. My Desktop Publishing class is in charge of putting together AlumKnights, the journalism and media studies department alumni newsletter, and I---perhaps stupidly, in hindsight---decided to tackle probably the most involved story assignment offered by the professor: I have to interview about four or five Rutgers alums who are currently working at the Wall Street Journal and put all their information together into one big story. Most other students only need to make contact with one or two people for their stories; not me. Aren't I lucky? Anyway, I think I've made decent progress so far: I was able to interview two people so far (both were very nice to me in addition to sounding fairly attractive over the phone---yes, I'm talking about females, not males), got in contact with two others (one of whom I'm not sure I'm going to interview anyway, since I'd say four people is enough for any story), and still need to track down one more. This is due in about two weeks, so I can't really afford to slack off. (Of course, this is probably going to cut down a little bit on my ability to make serious headway on my thesis in time for my next scheduled meeting with my adviser in two weeks...)
Not much else really. I'm probably going to try like heck to get stuff done early next week just so I can settle in on Valentine's Day with my great love: movies! How about a romantic Wong Kar-Wai/Hou Hsiao-hsien double bill? Chungking Express
followed by Three Times? Two excellent films, both on the subject of love. Hey, I think it's worth waiting for, don't you?
Thursday, February 01, 2007
In Love and War
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. - This past week, NJ Transit allowed students to ride on their trains for free. They do this for one week every semester, so this wasn't some new thing (and sadly, it isn't permanent either). But this may have been the first free ride week which I took advantage of to the fullest. Last Monday I went to see Letters from Iwo Jima at AMC Empire 25 on 42nd Street in New York City, and this weekend I took two more trips to NYC to see two more films: my second viewing of Hou Hsiao-hsien's beautiful Three Times (***½ out of ****) at the IFC Center, and my first viewing (finally) of Jean-Pierre Melville's highly acclaimed 1969 feature Army of Shadows (***½ out of ****), which was released for the first time in the United States last year and thus found its way into many a end-of-year Top 10 list. (Sidebar: oh yeah, wasn't I supposed to attempt one of those?) The latter played twice on Sunday at Symphony Space way the hell uptown (95th Street and Broadway).
Interesting thing about my experience with Army of Shadows: for most of the film, I found myself oddly frustrated by the thing. For some reason, I found much of it rather confusing on a plot level---I only figured out afterward when I discussed the film with someone that Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) was already a leader of the underground Resistance movement of the title when he's arrested and thrown into a prison camp at the beginning of the film. Is that a fault with Melville's storytelling, or was I just not in a particularly sharp and receptive mood on Sunday? And once again, detachment was pretty much what I felt throughout much of the movie. I guess it's intentional: these people are so dedicated to their fight that they've somehow become nearly automaton-like in the way they go about planning and executing---as if they've already been beaten down psychologically by the moral costs of being a French patriot during Vichy France in WWII. But that still meant that I barely felt I knew any of these people---if anything, it felt more like Melville deglamming the heck out of genre archetypes---the noir-ish narrator, the loyal sidekicks, the strong woman of many disguises, etc.---transplating them into this historical environment, and using a economical yet occasionally lyrical style to do the job of characterizing them. For Melville, so it seems, it's all about the looks the characters give to each other.
And then...bam! Something happens at the end of Army of Shadows---the same bam! I felt at the end of Fritz Lang's M (1930) and Francis Coppola's The Conversation (1974), two other films whose greatnesses only revealed themselves to me with a final sequence or image---that somehow puts a powerful spin on everything that came before. It's a gutwrenching, morally suspenseful finish that both shocks you and somehow sums up its themes and gets you to reflect deeply. I don't want to spoil it too much for anyone who hasn't seen the film yet: suffice it to say, the characters make a tough decision, but you're startled as to how quickly and near-affectlessly most of the characters (with one exception) seem to come to that decision. Even fighting for a winning cause, Melville seems to be suggesting, has its moral and personal costs; what's so different and devastating about the ending of Army of Shadows is precisely the realization that perhaps these people have already suffered that cost even before the movie begins. Most movies that tell this kind of story might try to dramatize some kind of arc; Melville seems to be going more for a regretful, elegiac tone suggesting that humanity has already been leeched out of these people. That's challenging---and it challenged me so much that I was deep in thought for a solid hour-and-a-half after the film had ended, and as I got onto the subway and made my way onto an NJ Transit train to make my way back to (snowy) New Brunswick.
What I definitely do know now is that I need to see this again. Perhaps a second viewing would reveal to me the meaning of little throwaway moments that Melville throws into the film. In one sequence, Gerbier, who is in England, walks into some dance hall, and Melville gives us point-of-view shots of Gerbier looking at the beautiful ladies in uniforms talking to other guys. What's profound about this seemingly arbitrary sequence is how suggestive it is: juxtaposed with shots of Gerbier himself, standing alone, looking at these women with his usual stoic look, you get the sense that perhaps Gerbier sees some kind of civilization that he's no longer a part of anymore. Maybe the whole film is about the death of this particular kind of underground civilization; I mean, it's pretty obvious in hindsight that none of these characters have really been a part of regular civilization for a while now. Perhaps there are other moments in this movie that, through something as simple as a mere image, implies waves of regret; I just wasn't able to pick them all up in my first viewing. Maybe, of course, that's a measure of just how much of a masterpiece Army of Shadows is. Hey, I think I'm starting to like this film more and more as I write about it...
No such ambivalence---at least, not as much of it---with Three Times, which is almost as much a meditation---albeit on totally different subject matter---as Melville's film is, but much more formalistic in nature. I saw this a couple of months ago on DVD, so this was my second viewing---but I had to put up with a solid but un-enhanced transfer on DVD, which of course made the film seem a lot smaller than it is. So when I found out that the IFC Center in New York was bringing both this film and the (effective but slightly overrated) Death of Mr. Lazarescu to its screens for a nine-day engagement (sorry readers, it ends tomorrow), I jumped at the chance. And, as I expected, the experience was near-revelatory.
I complained about the extravagant formalism of Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower detracting from the humanity of the characters onscreen, getting the uneasy sense that it felt like Yimou was more interested in creating pretty visual effects than with using form to express feeling. (Wow, don't those assassins flying through the air look cool? Wow, doesn't the blood splashing on yellow flowers look elegant?) Now, I won't deny that some of the characters in Three Times don't feel just as remote from us as the character's in Zhang's film does---heck, Hou Hsiao-hsien dares to shoot his whole second section as a silent movie (and a claustrophobically-blocked one at that), so perhaps a certain remoteness is inherent in such a fascinating artistic choice. But the difference between Hou's emphasis on form above character and Zhang's is that Hou's visual choices seem to organically come out of the characters and their respective milieus---it isn't sumptuousness for its own sake. That second section of Three Times---set in 1911 as the Taiwanese are fighting for independence from the Japanese---emphasizes the claustrophobia of its sets and the beauty of its costumes to suggest the cramped feeling its female character, a prostitute named Ah Mei (Shu Qi) who yearns for freedom, feels on a consistent basis as she remains quietly attracted to a self-proclaimed reformer (Chang Chen) who seems more interested in focusing on political reform than he is on helping the one person who loves him. Even its silent-movie conceit seems appropriate in this regard: none of the characters in Three Times are big yakkers anyway, relying more on looks and body gestures to express their yearning or disappointment (much like Melville's band of underground Resistance fighters do, in some ways), so taking out dialogue altogether forces us to pay more attention to those small gestures: the way Ah Mei looks at Mr. Chang, for instance, or the anguished moment when she realizes that she may be trapped in her societal position forever.
For those who haven't heard much about this movie: Hou tells three different stories---the first one set in 1966 in Kaohsiung, the second in 1911, the third in 2005---using the two same lead actors (Shu Qi, Chang Chen) and exploring similar themes: love, politics, history, the possibilities and barriers to human connection. Essentially, it's an anthology movie (one that, according to critics who have more experience with Hou Hsiao-hsien than I admittedly do, uses previous films like The Puppetmaster (1993), Flowers of Shanghai (1998), and Millennium Mambo (2001) as fairly obvious reference points), but it wouldn't benefit the viewer to simply see Three Times as three different films in one. What fascinated me, seeing this film a second time, were the thematic and imagistic connections among the three stories---example: when a pool-parlor girl reads a letter in 1966, it's framed the same way as when Ah Mei reads a letter from Mr. Chang in 1911; so it is with the various cell phone messages in 2005. But, of course, the differences are just as interesting to parse out as the similarities: if the 1966 story is infused with nostalgia (a nostalgia which borders on Wong Kar-Wai-ian, although Wong is much more operatic and stylized with his romantic mores), the 1911 story nearly beats you into submission with its sheer claustrophobia, and the 2005 story comes off as aimless as the gray modern society it depicts. Maybe love remains the same throughout the ages, Hou seems to imply, but the ways we do it in certain societies may be more different than we'd like to admit.
Three Times is not going to be for everyone, and I'll admit, there were moments in the second and third segments especially in which I yearned for characters to actually give voice to their obsessions much more than they actually do. And that constant pejorative "slow"? It applies here, even with three consecutive stories being told instead of one. If you check it out on DVD sometime soon, you're going to need a certain amount of patience, as well as a receptiveness to Hou's emphasis on small moments to tell big stories.
But a funny thing happened when I saw this film on DVD the first time: a few days later, I found myself actually thinking more deeply about love---how we fall in love, and whether Hou is right in suggesting that we do it in different ways, depending on different circumstances, whether political or personal. I don't know if I've experienced true love yet (ladies, I'm still unattached---wink wink), but Three Times comes close to suggesting, through its impeccably spare technique and fascinating performances, what it might feel like to be in love.
And its first segment is just so darned magnificent---an ineffable depiction of the stirrings of some kind of love, whether or not it's really true love or just one soldier's desperation to feel something romantic in a time of war---that it's gotten me thinking of the Platters' "Smoke Gets Through Your Eyes" pretty much every minute of every day these past few days. Since I'm not writing for a print publication, I think I'll indulge myself in a moment of movie ad-happy hyperbole: this may be my favorite film of last year other than Inland Empire.
Interesting thing about my experience with Army of Shadows: for most of the film, I found myself oddly frustrated by the thing. For some reason, I found much of it rather confusing on a plot level---I only figured out afterward when I discussed the film with someone that Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) was already a leader of the underground Resistance movement of the title when he's arrested and thrown into a prison camp at the beginning of the film. Is that a fault with Melville's storytelling, or was I just not in a particularly sharp and receptive mood on Sunday? And once again, detachment was pretty much what I felt throughout much of the movie. I guess it's intentional: these people are so dedicated to their fight that they've somehow become nearly automaton-like in the way they go about planning and executing---as if they've already been beaten down psychologically by the moral costs of being a French patriot during Vichy France in WWII. But that still meant that I barely felt I knew any of these people---if anything, it felt more like Melville deglamming the heck out of genre archetypes---the noir-ish narrator, the loyal sidekicks, the strong woman of many disguises, etc.---transplating them into this historical environment, and using a economical yet occasionally lyrical style to do the job of characterizing them. For Melville, so it seems, it's all about the looks the characters give to each other.
And then...bam! Something happens at the end of Army of Shadows---the same bam! I felt at the end of Fritz Lang's M (1930) and Francis Coppola's The Conversation (1974), two other films whose greatnesses only revealed themselves to me with a final sequence or image---that somehow puts a powerful spin on everything that came before. It's a gutwrenching, morally suspenseful finish that both shocks you and somehow sums up its themes and gets you to reflect deeply. I don't want to spoil it too much for anyone who hasn't seen the film yet: suffice it to say, the characters make a tough decision, but you're startled as to how quickly and near-affectlessly most of the characters (with one exception) seem to come to that decision. Even fighting for a winning cause, Melville seems to be suggesting, has its moral and personal costs; what's so different and devastating about the ending of Army of Shadows is precisely the realization that perhaps these people have already suffered that cost even before the movie begins. Most movies that tell this kind of story might try to dramatize some kind of arc; Melville seems to be going more for a regretful, elegiac tone suggesting that humanity has already been leeched out of these people. That's challenging---and it challenged me so much that I was deep in thought for a solid hour-and-a-half after the film had ended, and as I got onto the subway and made my way onto an NJ Transit train to make my way back to (snowy) New Brunswick.
What I definitely do know now is that I need to see this again. Perhaps a second viewing would reveal to me the meaning of little throwaway moments that Melville throws into the film. In one sequence, Gerbier, who is in England, walks into some dance hall, and Melville gives us point-of-view shots of Gerbier looking at the beautiful ladies in uniforms talking to other guys. What's profound about this seemingly arbitrary sequence is how suggestive it is: juxtaposed with shots of Gerbier himself, standing alone, looking at these women with his usual stoic look, you get the sense that perhaps Gerbier sees some kind of civilization that he's no longer a part of anymore. Maybe the whole film is about the death of this particular kind of underground civilization; I mean, it's pretty obvious in hindsight that none of these characters have really been a part of regular civilization for a while now. Perhaps there are other moments in this movie that, through something as simple as a mere image, implies waves of regret; I just wasn't able to pick them all up in my first viewing. Maybe, of course, that's a measure of just how much of a masterpiece Army of Shadows is. Hey, I think I'm starting to like this film more and more as I write about it...
No such ambivalence---at least, not as much of it---with Three Times, which is almost as much a meditation---albeit on totally different subject matter---as Melville's film is, but much more formalistic in nature. I saw this a couple of months ago on DVD, so this was my second viewing---but I had to put up with a solid but un-enhanced transfer on DVD, which of course made the film seem a lot smaller than it is. So when I found out that the IFC Center in New York was bringing both this film and the (effective but slightly overrated) Death of Mr. Lazarescu to its screens for a nine-day engagement (sorry readers, it ends tomorrow), I jumped at the chance. And, as I expected, the experience was near-revelatory.
I complained about the extravagant formalism of Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower detracting from the humanity of the characters onscreen, getting the uneasy sense that it felt like Yimou was more interested in creating pretty visual effects than with using form to express feeling. (Wow, don't those assassins flying through the air look cool? Wow, doesn't the blood splashing on yellow flowers look elegant?) Now, I won't deny that some of the characters in Three Times don't feel just as remote from us as the character's in Zhang's film does---heck, Hou Hsiao-hsien dares to shoot his whole second section as a silent movie (and a claustrophobically-blocked one at that), so perhaps a certain remoteness is inherent in such a fascinating artistic choice. But the difference between Hou's emphasis on form above character and Zhang's is that Hou's visual choices seem to organically come out of the characters and their respective milieus---it isn't sumptuousness for its own sake. That second section of Three Times---set in 1911 as the Taiwanese are fighting for independence from the Japanese---emphasizes the claustrophobia of its sets and the beauty of its costumes to suggest the cramped feeling its female character, a prostitute named Ah Mei (Shu Qi) who yearns for freedom, feels on a consistent basis as she remains quietly attracted to a self-proclaimed reformer (Chang Chen) who seems more interested in focusing on political reform than he is on helping the one person who loves him. Even its silent-movie conceit seems appropriate in this regard: none of the characters in Three Times are big yakkers anyway, relying more on looks and body gestures to express their yearning or disappointment (much like Melville's band of underground Resistance fighters do, in some ways), so taking out dialogue altogether forces us to pay more attention to those small gestures: the way Ah Mei looks at Mr. Chang, for instance, or the anguished moment when she realizes that she may be trapped in her societal position forever.
For those who haven't heard much about this movie: Hou tells three different stories---the first one set in 1966 in Kaohsiung, the second in 1911, the third in 2005---using the two same lead actors (Shu Qi, Chang Chen) and exploring similar themes: love, politics, history, the possibilities and barriers to human connection. Essentially, it's an anthology movie (one that, according to critics who have more experience with Hou Hsiao-hsien than I admittedly do, uses previous films like The Puppetmaster (1993), Flowers of Shanghai (1998), and Millennium Mambo (2001) as fairly obvious reference points), but it wouldn't benefit the viewer to simply see Three Times as three different films in one. What fascinated me, seeing this film a second time, were the thematic and imagistic connections among the three stories---example: when a pool-parlor girl reads a letter in 1966, it's framed the same way as when Ah Mei reads a letter from Mr. Chang in 1911; so it is with the various cell phone messages in 2005. But, of course, the differences are just as interesting to parse out as the similarities: if the 1966 story is infused with nostalgia (a nostalgia which borders on Wong Kar-Wai-ian, although Wong is much more operatic and stylized with his romantic mores), the 1911 story nearly beats you into submission with its sheer claustrophobia, and the 2005 story comes off as aimless as the gray modern society it depicts. Maybe love remains the same throughout the ages, Hou seems to imply, but the ways we do it in certain societies may be more different than we'd like to admit.
Three Times is not going to be for everyone, and I'll admit, there were moments in the second and third segments especially in which I yearned for characters to actually give voice to their obsessions much more than they actually do. And that constant pejorative "slow"? It applies here, even with three consecutive stories being told instead of one. If you check it out on DVD sometime soon, you're going to need a certain amount of patience, as well as a receptiveness to Hou's emphasis on small moments to tell big stories.
But a funny thing happened when I saw this film on DVD the first time: a few days later, I found myself actually thinking more deeply about love---how we fall in love, and whether Hou is right in suggesting that we do it in different ways, depending on different circumstances, whether political or personal. I don't know if I've experienced true love yet (ladies, I'm still unattached---wink wink), but Three Times comes close to suggesting, through its impeccably spare technique and fascinating performances, what it might feel like to be in love.
And its first segment is just so darned magnificent---an ineffable depiction of the stirrings of some kind of love, whether or not it's really true love or just one soldier's desperation to feel something romantic in a time of war---that it's gotten me thinking of the Platters' "Smoke Gets Through Your Eyes" pretty much every minute of every day these past few days. Since I'm not writing for a print publication, I think I'll indulge myself in a moment of movie ad-happy hyperbole: this may be my favorite film of last year other than Inland Empire.
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