The Fall

The Fall

Tarsem (2006)

Mr. Ebert says you should watch this movie just because it exists. Mr. Wilde says that art exists only for this reason. As an addict of aesthetics, especially when they agree with my own sensibilities, this movie is far and away the most beautiful thing created in the last ten years. Actually, I'll get back to you on whether its the most beautiful thing from the last century. What comes close? Hmmm... a couple Picassos, Maybe some Miles Davis. Henry Fonda's face? Well, if you combined these things and added the cutest child ever to act and strung them into a complexly plotted and tightly executed conglomeration of sight and sound, you'd get Tarsem's movie here.

Plot: girl breaks arm picking oranges in orange county. Hospitalized. Man paralyzes himself jumping from a moving train to horseback as he is a stuntman in early Hollywood. Hospitalized. When bones are broken and people are confined, unlikely friendships form and stories are told. The movie follows two plots: the story that he tells her and the story of their interactions with various doctors, nurses, priests, other patients... As the two plots intertwine, we learn more about each of their lives. As with all friendships, the more we learn of each character, the more complex plot. That is, he decides to commit suicide and enlists her in smuggling him morphine pills.

I mean, you just don't get more original or interesting or complex than that!

But! Its awesome does not end there!

Filmed in over 20 countries with a minimal of computer imaging, The Fall questions the power of imagination in a time period where people decided that moving pictures were both the new life and ultimate death of imagination. While it makes no effort to assert philosophy, The Fall exudes simple, childlike morality which is actually refreshing in our super gray world of ambiguity. What is bad? What is wrong? Manipulating children into aiding suicide: its bad, its wrong, it may be the ultimate bad wrong you can exert with your power as an adult. What is selfish and useless? Suicide. Period.

Tarsem sees little point lollygagging about thought-heavy things once these black and white morals are dealt with. Because of its moral simplicity the story becomes doubly potent and heart breaking—you as viewer are sucked into the child's earnest perspective, pretty much regardless of how cynical you may think you are.

To make this all the more realistic, our lead actress, Cantica Untaru, is a young Romanian lass who actually barely acts. She was told “this is a movie set, this is your co-star, this is the story.” Beyond that, most is ad-libbed. Her costar, Lee Pace, who I hope to see in many more things, knew what he had to say and where the story had to go, but beyond that... They even went so far as to not let him out of character the whole time so they were constantly interacting, as his character is paralyzed from the waist down, this includes him being in a wheel chair for the whole of filming. It comes through most poignantly. Love it.

Lemme see... Special effects are minimalist. It's one of the main appeals of the film as a whole. That fade from butterfly to island? Done the old fashioned way-with splicing of gelatin, not with photo-shop. I don't even want to try and comprehend how long it took them to set up the one desert shot that segues between the marriage and the death sentence scenes. Colors are all more vivid and enhanced, but not annoyingly so. Wash out filters are only used subtly, most glaringly in the last scene where Orange County and Alexandra's experience of it are nostalgia-ized with a sepia hue, but again, its acceptably subtle. Black and white is used only because it has to be in the plot. Slow motion is used perfectly – not too much. Supporting cast, supports. Everything that seems out of place or odd is only as such because it fits the mind of an 8 year old in a foreign country imagining a story being told to her by an almost stranger.

When you're finished watching this the first time, you are nothing but stunned. Done the second, you start thinking about it, realize there's nothing to think about beyond the mastery of the film-making itself. Every detail your over analytical mind tries to pick apart and apply some obscure philosopher to just points back to the plot. Third watching, you start wondering how the hell long the story boarding must have taken.

Yea.

Damn.

Ultimate Romance -- Punches Titanic in the Face

The Notebook

Nick Cassavetes (2004)

I don't think I've yet posted my American Beauty review, but I can proudly admit that American Beauty as a close second favorite movie of mine, makes me cry almost every time I watch it. At the plastic bag. Yep. It's a new definition of – something. Je ne c'est crois. But everyone cries at triumphant/tragic love stories. Everyone cries when they see The Notebook. I don't wanna admit that! But it's true. It got me. The damn melodrama got me. It is really, really good.

Maybe it's because I watched Married Life so many times I fell in love with Rachel McAdams (young Allie). Maybe it's all the amazing costumes from anywhere between 1920 to 1965 that never cease to make me drool. Maybe I was in a moment of weakness and in the overwrought string orchestra got under my eyes.

It's not though. What sets this movie apart, and ultimately puts it at the top of its class, is the all encompassing melodrama of the plot. Seriously, what I said about Bill and Ted being the pinnacle of stoner comedy? This is the be all end all of romantic melodrama. James Cameron, eat your heart out, Titanic only comes kinda close. I'm yet to read the novel Nicholas Sparks wrote that this movie is based on, so I don't know if the book is this tight, but the plot has all the stops pulled. He does not stop with their meeting.(See Serendipity) Or their marriage (Sense and Sensibility), or even their first kid (The Young Victoria). It stops at the end. Sparks does not shy from his heroes, Noah and Allie, having rough patches and fights and other relationships. He doesn't preserve one in pristine good looks (see Titanic and Love in the Time of Cholera). Sparks and Carravetes declare that shit happens and that a love preached about in romantic comedies can not only prevail, but champions over things and even knows the perfect time to quit. I live in contempt of movies that preach “great love” and then never show it to me. As much as I will watch Pride and Prejudice over and over, I feel cheated. No such loss of pain and loss of gain here.

So, plot. Each set piece eats the heels of the one before in sparky timing (sorry, I had to. I dedicate this review to my friend Faith, and she would appreciate a good pun). If ever there seems peace between the characters we can always flash forward in time to see the couple old and her gone with dementia. The heart strings get a-tugged lickety split. What's even better is we aren't told this right away, in fact we don't know factually she is Allie until she “meets” her children, and don't hear Noah's name until the third or fourth false ending, but if you haven't got that figured out within 15 minutes you have never interacted with Story. Normally I'd call the director out on this sort of easy tension, but here, there are so many tiny scenes building the characters that even I, the eternal cynic, thought Allie might choose The Guy Who Plays Cyclops. The Guy Who Plays Cyclops is a totally likable guy. She even loves him. Narrator tells us so.

(I could go off on a tangent here about meta narratives – turns out our narrator is Allie herself writing the title notebook so Noah can read it to her over and over until she remembers, and Noah is the one telling the story and so we don't know if she really did or if she is just writing that to make everyone feel better about her difficulty in choice between the two handsome men, but! This is a plot movie, it does not call for analysis. And I'm afraid analyzing it would ruin this warm feeling it gave me...)

I could yell about the intrusive music, or the sap upon sap, but I can't. It's not just the writing. The acting is great. I mean, they aren't finding new ways to express pain or joy, not really, but McAdams and Ryan Gosling (Young Noah) manage the gamut of emotions demanded by a life (short of the tragic loss of a child or something. Noah comes close with his best friend getting shot in the war, but it's not that sort of drama). Now, Gena Rowlands and James Garner, they find new ways to express those emotions. And damn are they good.

Also good about these characters is their roundness. Noah is not John Cusack or Tom Hanks or any Strong Romantic Lead. He's a lumberjack who reads Walt Whitman – more like Will Hunting, but without succumbing to cliché. Allie is a little closer to ruin. She's a manic pixie dream girl to be sure, but somehow stays fresh as a real person. She grows up, chooses things grown ups choose. She's not a stunted Natalie Portman in Garden State or Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown.

Sparks gives each a dream, a fear, and each a parent or two for developmental purposes. Most surprising is the lack of Noah's mom. Normally a writer would jump on that, exploit it, it's not even mentioned. I am now going to read this book and if it's in the book I'm going to be disappointed, but here, its spare and touching in a way that mentioning would have just gummed into soap opera. This, and many other details are all that harnesses The Notebook from being just another tearjerker with new actors. It is a fully functional romance unafraid of where the love it preaches may wander – in sickness and in health. Finally.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

Stephen Herek, 1989

Discarded as stoner fluff and left for dead by the non-cult-flick-fanatics, Bill and Ted are not ever to be underestimated. I can't really critique it. I suppose that is why critics don't like it. They can't pick it apart and piss on it with their Derrida and Schopenhauer. I've said it before and I'll say it again—whatever.

This film is perfectly put together. Direction: Like Casablanca, it does nothing but point at nothing but the characters and what they're doing. Invisible. This is a talent I think has gone unappreciated a damn long time. I say “Bravo” nameless director, whoever the hell did this totally awesome flick.

Acting: exactly what its after. Where this movie comes out ahead of things like Waynes World is that those really are clueless teenagers, and I'd be willing to bet that that is what they wore to their audition. Wayne and Garth, on the other hand, kinda contrived and overly caricatured.

Plot: a fantastic spin on Candid-like picaresque. Oh! And its got one of those moral thingys. Aren't people always praising those? “Be Excellent to Each Other.” If the world were run by Bill and Ted, like the plot supposes may well happen, it would be a pretty radical place – both literally and how they, themselves, use it. Speaking of which, if you're seriously going to argue that its too 80s kitsch, you need to reconcile with your own poor choices and grow a sense of humor.

Why, I ask you, can people not love things for being perfect incarnations of what they are aiming for?

MY RESPONSE:

I love this movie for so many reasons, many of which you have listed above. It's a history nerd's wet dream in terms of absurd treatment of massive historical figures. That combined with the fact that they take nothing serious in the movie(Socrates is dancing to rock music, for fuck's sake!) makes it so much better than like you said, Wayne's World or something like that. Perhaps Dude, Where's My Car matches it for foolishness, but only because it goes for what Bill and Ted did 15 years prior. I never realized what you meant by the camera work until I thought about it, and agree. I think it would be nice if more movies were done as such. Good camera work is good when it plays well. Most of the time, however, it's mostly people imitating Guy Ritchie or someone similar, who actually know what they are doing when moving a camera around in a scene. Some call it poor directing, I call it letting the actors do their fucking job. And for the two dudes in this movie, its being as stoned as possible.

I believe its one of the first stoner movies that didn't try too hard, and was given to rest after a 2^nd, less good iteration. Unlike Cheech and Chong, these two knew when to stop and let this film grow into the amazing hit it is. I first saw it in High School and still list it as a favorite when people ask about stoner comedies. Pure fun.

The People's Pasta

The People's Pasta

Erika Ostergaard and Kraft

This delightfully flavorful dish is both easy to make and bright as the sun as seen while on acid. Conceived by a homesick lady with little to no flavor in her daily food, the only difficult to find ingredient on the list is Kraft cheeze flava.

1 pack Kraft cheeze flava

1 plate left over macaroni (plain as intended)

1 Tbs sour cream

1 Tbs mustard

the left over half of sausage

Take plain mac and sausage from fridge.

Sprinkle with contents of flava pack

Microwave 1 minute

Remove and stir; the juices of the half of sausage should be enough to get the first bits of cheeze sticking

Microwave another minute

Remove, stir in sour cream and mustard

Enjoy!

Taste Tester 1: Excellent. The excess of cheeze on so few noodles really kicks up the flavor.

Taste Tester 2: I don't like the clumps of cheeze, but they blend in with the clumps of sausage.

Taste Tester 3: I would never eat anything that wasn't organic, but, because this sour cream is straight from the cow, I'll make an exception for the cheeze.

And there you have it folks! Having scarce supplies and a Proletariat attitude will get you everything.

Time Magazine Vol. 175, No. 18

Time Magazine, Vol. 175, No. 8 | 2010

Richard Stengel, Managing Editor

I'm a recent recruit to the crowd of serious magazine readers. Usual fare for me is Juxtapoz or Giant Robot, personal favorite High Fructose. Magazines that follow art culture of graffitti fiends and guys in Japan who make sculptures of giraffes out of Celophane and then position them around cities to look like they're eating telephone wires. I bust out the $7 an issue for these guys because you just can't capture that shit online. You have to be able to hold these images, and, lets face it, for $7, frame my favorite whole pages and call the layout “art” itself. Especially HF. I rub the paper they print on across my cheeks it's so plush. Long story short, the most serious magazine I read on a regular basis is Zoetrope, France Ford Coppola's venus fly trap of short story fodder for his movies/films/whatever.

So, here I am, coaching Moldovan boys how to play American football. Already completely out of character, I pick up a spare issue of Time to peruse. Lady Gaga and Bill Clinton are posed side by side on the front cover, how serious can it be?

Turns out, not very. I have inadvertently started my readership on the “Special Double Issue” with “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” Yes, that is the gamut. Lady Gaga → Bill Clinton. As, thank the gods, columnist Joel Stein points out “Putting together the most influential list is easy,” if you wanna rub shoulders with the right sponsors and advertisers and subscribers to your magazine. Radhika Jones, assistant managing editor, describes the list building as “really fun” especially when they pair the worshiped with the worshipful writer. More on that later.

So, the issue is split four ways: Leaders, Artists, Thinkers, Heroes, and each gets 25 guys/gals. This is impressive. I'd have expected them just to outright schmooz Halliburton heads or Presidents of politically friendly countries, but this way Time points out that not every one is equally influenced just by art or just by politics. It encompasses all facets of life. All facets of our—dare such a frivolous person as me use a German word—zeitgeist, as the title of this magazine boasts. Sweet.

Better yet, upon checking with Matt and Martin, my fellow coaches who are way more in tune with the world than me, a lot of these names are not widely known by most people. I was going to learn! I live in a village where electricity works 60% of the time and internet 40%. so have little contact with the real world. Lady Gaga and Bill Clinton I've heard of (my Moldovan students LOVE Gaga) but Admiral Mike Mullen, Annise Parker, Robert Pattinson, Didier Drogba, or Glenn Beck... Nada.

The downfall started with some of the choices I did recognize. Sandra Bullock? They justify this with how much money she made last year. Even though she made 4 movies in one year (hard work to be sure) and they were each big popcorn flicks and seen by apparently tons of people, is it Ms. Bullock doing the influencing? Do the movies cause their viewers to change their mindsets? I'll give you Gaga. The woman is not only makin' the big bucks and being listened to by everyone from my basically illiterate Moldovan 5^th graders to people I term “uber intellectuals” in big name universities. And she has, as leader of her own haute couture art/music factory Haus of Gaga, revolutionized the concept of a music video from regular slut-fest with glitter to fine performance art. Not to mention acceptance of homosexuality.

Turns out the choosing is quite like a popularity contest. People are chosen based on a poll taken on Time's website. Editor Jones also points out that they narrow this contest by looking for “who had a good year,” making the zeitgeist captured significantly more narrow. Not bad.

But, really, Ashton Kutcher?

And then it got worse. Guess who wrote Mr. Kutcher's profile. None other than Mr. Sean “Diddy” Combs, a man who is so effective at changing people's hearts and minds he's influenced his own name into 5 or 6 incarnations. Allow me to clear my throat: “we are yin and yang: I am in your face, but he is understated, cool, sauve.” A) this is not a comparison to you, sir. B) maybe “what he and Demi do with Twitter” is influential, but what do they do? I didn't even know he still did anything except shoot camera commercials where Demi is conspicuously not present while he flirts with a dozen scantily clad chicks who apparently get off on candy pink hand held digi-cams. Advertising cameras and tweeting with “positive messages” does not a mogul make. Sorry Did, Diddy, Sean, Sir Combs, Puffy.

But, let me explain. I didn't originally think Time was letting cool people write these. I was just expecting Time freelancers and columnists to pull names from an Editor-chosen hat. I opened at random and was reading happily through the Leaders section til I got to Sarah Palin's blurb. Let me preface: I have nothing against Sarah Palin. She's done damn well for a lady with 5 kids. Has a killer bod, friends in high places, a good shot, damn good taste in shoes—she's on my shortlist of people to invite for my ideal dinner party. Sarah Palin's blurb however, and here's where I have to admit I was being a sloppy reader, did not strike me as well written. It was nothing short of—earmuff the children—ass kissing on the part of whoever this chump masquerading as a writer was. What the hell?!

Exhibit A : “The independent, patriotic spirit, attitude and soul of our forefathers are alive and well in Sarah.”

Exhibit B : “Her rugged individualism, self-reliance and a herculean work ethic resonate now more than ever in a country spinning away from these basics that made the USA the last best place.”

Exhibit C : “We are driven to be assets to our families, communities and our beloved country connect with the principles that Sarah Palin embodies.”

uh... Righteously angered I checked the byline. Who the f*** is Ted Nugent and why is he allowed to write in a public place? I was informed by my fellow football coaches that he is a former rock guitarist who likes guns. I see the connection, but is anyone else in the world a little freaked out by people vehemently agreeing with each other?

I mean even General Petraeus manages to keep it in the foxhole when talking about General McChrystal.

Anyway, between this Nugent/Palin fiasco, and other has-been music kids (P-Diddy, Cyndi Lauper, Stevie Nicks) trying to reinvigorate their own influence over ears by sucking up to currently influential music kids I was pretty much done with the whole issue.

But all that fury dissipated when I encountered others. Fusion chefs (David Chang) and leaders of far off countries (Recep Tayyip Erdogan) and doctors (Namperumalsamy) and prisoners (Nay Phone Latt) and lawyers (Elizabeth Warren) are extremely influential in the world whether most Americans know who they are or not. And their writers, even if not pros were well structured and actually answered the question: “Why is this person influential in the world of 2010?”

I rescinded. The contrast allowed me not only to learn about both cool people and shite people, but also the difference, at point blank range, between good reporting and propaganda. Time also did a pretty bang up job on letting opposite ends of party crazies praise each other. If Second Amendment nut jobs like Nugent get to do Palin, and Palin gets to do Beck, then it's only fair for the hippy liberal fruits that Hil-Dawg Clinton does Nancy Pelosi and Bono does Bill (Clinton, of course!). They even go so far as to go for Posh Spice doing Marc Jacobs and Robert DeNiro, Ben Stiller. It's one big, happy nepotisim!

Thank Thor people like Yukio Hatoyama, Ron Bloom and Steve Jobs were included and people like Joe Stein and Salman Rushdie get to write some. I would definitely cry if they'd left off Steve Jobs. Oh, and Banksy. A name I finally recognized! At last, mainstream America recognizes graffiti as a mogul-esque something or other that, even when they don't know it's you, they are influenced by what you're spraying. Time gets it overall. Phew for my time ghost.

Expansion

In the spirit of progress I am opening up this blog.

Not that you care anyway, this is one of the most unlooked at blogs ever, but! should my computer and hardrive both get blitzed by Moldovan sockets, I'll have my little rants and overtures of worship safe here in the gauze of our New Frontier.

(the next line of Star Trek should take place all in a Lain-like universe. The Delta quadrant can wait)

From now on my reviews will not just be about movies and they will not be confined to 500 words.

That's all.

Thank you minions.

Love in the Time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera
(Mike Newell, 2007)

Being a two hour film covering 50 years of complex relationships, it amazes me I had any feeling for it at all, besides maybe breathless. The writers were ambitious to say the least.

The set up is as follows: One rich, old man dies. We see the wife as visibly heartbroken. Our sympathy is all about her. We love this man who's dead—one attendant of the wake says “your husband was a saint.” We want to know his life. He is our hero.

Hitch in film making that can't be helped: The actress playing the wife is obviously NOT 72, like her makeup and wig want us to believe. No amount of newfangled, wrinkle-making, skinish makeup is going to hide that Giovanna Mezzogiorno is a gorgeous 20 something. The job on Benjamin Bratt, our dead hero, is more convincing. Whether this is because he has facial hair or because Hollywood clings to making their women as glamorous as possible despite how old and wrinkly they are supposed to be, I don't know, I don't really care either, but it's interesting.

Anway, it is here, suddenly that a very different old man sits upright in a luscious red hammock out of the arms of a ridiculously gorgeous young woman (naked) to rush to the window. He tells her to go back to college, there is something he must do.

Next cut, this new old man (could he, Florentino Ariza, played by Jarvier Bardem, be our actual hero? This shifty man with curled mustachios?) asks for the distraught old lady's hand in marriage for he has loved her for “50 years, 9 months and 4 days”. She, in no uncertain terms, tells him to drop dead, and we have a plot worth caring about.

The expected flash back happens, and we've a couple archetypes to suddenly deal with. IE. Bored again... Upstart young poor boy (Florentino), gorgeous/shy young rich girl (Fermina), forbidding father... Romeo and Juliet set in Colombia.

The best thing that has happened has to do with the supporting cast. John Leguizamo and Lieve Schieber need to do more things. I love them. Here Leguizamo is the father, resplendent in mullet and power trips. He is genuinely scary. Schieber is the telegraph master who tries to get Florentino laid at a brothel. Because of their intervention our leads start to show some spunk.

Fermina threatens to kill herself with a knife, not by saying anything, but by actually starting to do so at the dinner table. Florentino politely refuses advances of whores, not so dramatic, but that's what his character is all about. Tiny moments, crucial to the rest of their development, return interest to the viewer. The whole thing is storyboarded into these tiny moments.

So, yes, it gets better from here, she chooses to marry some other guy—a dandy doctor—after telling Florentino she never really loved him, get over it. Florentino starts a diary of 622 women he fucks over the aforementioned 50 years.

My personal favorite moment is the meeting of doctor (played by Benjamin Bratt) and Fermina meet. She might have cholera (oh gods, this theme is so well tied into everything without being too much a character itself, very well handled) so, as he has no stethoscope, he rips open her shirt and listens to her chest, back, chest again. He is very matter of fact, but Mezzogiorno's acting conveys all the emotions a virgin in this situation would garble and not quite express. Mezzogiorno's acting is first rate throughout. Full range of expression, nuanced, consistent and has excellent chemistry with both Bratt and Bardem. Who should by no means be underestimated either.

In fact, all the acting in this film is ridiculously good. It's probably the best thing about the film. The characters, and their various quirks and motivations would be completely lost without these actors, and the movie would have failed. Similarly, gods bless directors and writers who stick to the good literature they rip off. Every shot, down to the 2 second helicopter shot over a caravan, is fully cast, propped , colored and agonized over to present the feeling of opulence that Marquez spends so many words creating.

So many words that, even with this attention to detail, the book is obviously too involved to fully express on screen. Some details, in the film, make little sense, or are left loose. The conflict between with Catholicism, for example. There are many heavy handed shots of catholic masses and funerals, and the lady the Doctor has the affair with is Protestant... either this is a symbol of his character which never gets developed or it's a cultural conflict which never gets developed. In either case its left alone because movies have some serious time constraints, but that's something you gotta take into account. The sumptuous shots of transubstantiation are gorgeous, but ultimately distracting from the plot.

And after all this, the ending is actually a bit weak. With goal achieved, Florentino gives his last words on the subject “After 53 years, seven months and 11 days and night, my heart was at last fulfilled. And I discovered, to my joy, that it is life and not death that has no limits.” But, we haven't heard his thoughts on this before... See? Adapting books to movies is so slippery that even when you perfectly capture the writer's tone, and manage to squeeze the epic to two hours, it just won't have the same round impact.

At least all those characters and years are sufficiently understood. And most of it is damned pretty.