The Death of Imagination

I meant to use the weekend to catch up on some reading but I caught up more on films instead. For various reasons, there were three at the house, but I don't want to watch Winter's Bone until it's cold, so I sent it back. That left a Chinese film and a French-Canadian one, and I watched them in that order.

It's been so long since I dropped 桃姐 (English: A Simple Life) into my queue that I forgot it was a Hong Kong film. It took me until the end of the credits to figure out that they were speaking in Cantonese and even longer than that to figure out that this was an Andy Lau film. When I discovered Hong Kong film, Andy Lau was a god--or more precisely, a Heavenly King. We called him "Andy 'Not In The Face!' Lau" because his Cantopop heartthrob status meant that, even during the most vicious fight scenes, no one took at swing at his head. He wasn't as pretty as Leslie Wong, but then no one was, not even the starlets they paired him with. And he grew into his acting roles from a slightly stiff stand-and-model start.

Which is good, because the film rests on his shoulders as much as it does Deanie Ip. She's the focus character, an orphaned maid who's been with the same family her entire life. He was the last child she was allowed to spoil before the bulk of the family packed up and moved to California. Now middle-aged and still unmarried, he's the only one left for her to take care of in the cozy Kowloon apartment they share when he's not jetting away to Beijing or wherever on movie business.

Speaking of which, there's an early scene where he's in a contentious meeting with three other guys. Through the dialogue, it's revealed that one of them is a film director, another is an action director, and a third--the only Mandarin-speaker--is a financial backer of some sort. When the director pitches a fit and stalks off, someone calls after him, "Director Tsui!" It wasn't until that moment that I placed him as legendary director of the OUATIC series Tsui Hark. Then I took another look at the action director and placed him as fight choreographer and comic actor Sammo Hung.

That cosiness is one of the things I enjoyed about the Hong Kong cinema of the 90s. After all, the only reason I know what Tsui Hark looks like is because of his cameo in 雙龍會 (Twin Dragons), which also includes walk-ons from Ringo Lam and John Woo. And there's a callback to the in-jokes of that film in the very next scene, where it turns out that the argument in the conference room was all staged to extort more funds and Tsui compliments Lau's character by telling him, "You should've been an actor!"

So I was already in a nostalgic frame of mind, which made the film's themes of loss and forgetfulness all the more poignant. (Andy Lau hasn't had a chart-topping hit in more than fifteen years; after hears of chronic depression, Leslie Cheung killed himself in 2003.) Ip (the "Miss Peach" of the title) suffers a debilitating stroke and decides she wants to move into an nursing home before she becomes a burden to anyone. But Lau, left without any family in Hong Kong, becomes as devoted to her as any son. It's frankly sentimental, but that's not all bad, because (apart from discordant elements which recall some of the broader HK comedies) it works.

By contrast, I felt much less connected to the characters in Le Déclin de l'empire américain. They're all very full of themselves, in the way that only academics can be (The fact that they're all speaking French only makes it worse) and most are cheats or liars of one sort or another, even if they're only really lying to themselves. The drama turns on an incident of infidelity disclosed out of casual spite and at times the stereotyping (e.g. the nurturing homosexual addicted to dangerous sex) becomes a bit hard to take.

On the other hand, some of my best friends are intellectuals who are full of themselves and, at its best, Déclin reminds me of listening to their banter. At other times, it feels like a Canadian French Big Chill. (That's not a compliment.) Perversely, giving the viewing order, this functioned as a prequel to Les Invasions barbares for me, which probably made me less sympathetic going in. I'm not surprised that both films made the list of top Canadian films of all time, and I'm equally unsurprised that both have seen their position slip with time, to the point of dropping off altogether in the current version.

I may have managed to catch a summer cold. (One day after switching the AC on at home. Coincidence?) I only meant to take off half a day yesterday, but by the time I woke up from my nap it didn't seem worth going in. And since NetFlix had sent me Midnight Express, I thought I might as well spend the afternoon watching it.

Poor monshu got an earful at dinner when he asked me what I thought of it. To summarise what I ranted to him: technically accomplished, politically awful. I guess I'm just automatically supposed to identify with the protagonist because he's a good-looking middle-class White American guy like me? Never mind that he was actually guilty of the crime he was convicted of and only started out with a reduced sentence due to his family's money and pull. Yeah, the conditions inside the prison were terrible. But know what? They're every bit as terrible for the rest of the people in there. But (except for Randy Quaid, whose sad fate is also supposed to pain us though he brings most of it on himself) they're not Americans, so fuck 'em.

Honestly, any bit of sympathy I had for Hayes is extinguished halfway through by his grandstanding speech in the dock where he goes way beyond lamenting the fact that the Turks unaccountably aren't willing to give him special treatment and personally insults every one of them in the most brutal and vicious terms. And the director has the judge look abashed by this? I'd be like, "Fuck your slowly rotting living corpse."

What makes it even worse is the historical perspective that the movie was released just as the USA launched its "War on Drugs" in earnest. We all know how that turned out: sky-high incarceration rates, overcrowded prisons with conditions eventually ruled "cruel and inhumane", the decimation of inner-city communities, etc. It all makes his self-righteous speech about "justice" ring very hollow.

Ironically, those developments helped inform the script: In the featurette, Oliver Stone goes on about how the Turks were just a stand-in for oppressive authority in general. How convenient! Why take on your peers at home when you can demonise a whole country of brown people on the other side of the world who aren't in a position to put up much resistance? And since this is a Stone script, as a bonus we get the consensual homosexual relationship in Hayes' original memoir downgraded to a "thanks but no thanks" and a completely gratuitous (not to mention ludicrous) climactic male-rape-cum-revenge scene.

I'm glad I watched the "making-of", since hearing how Puttnam and Parker had to fight the studio to keep in even the hint of homoromance at least took some of the bad taste out of my mouth. The details of production, from the grueling shoot in Malta to the struggles with casting and the dramatic reversals of Cannes, were interesting to. But mostly, I'm just glad I can cross it off my list--and sad to see the late Paul L. Smith in another thankless part that probably contributed more than the rest to his relentless typecasting.

Today was a slug day. My excuse was that I was at work until 1 a.m. last night, but I still could've pulled off at least a half day. Instead, I slept in, watched an MST3K episode, and did one or two chores around the house, telling myself I'd make up for my idleness tomorrow. I also read the last couple chapters in The informer and watched Midnight cowboy, which I'd never seen before. It holds up well. Kind of amazing to think that it got an X rating back in the day, simply for suggesting that there was a homosexual relationship between the leads. But then it was released all of a month before Stonewall.

I was somewhat ambivalent about my annual visit to the Irish-American Heritage Center on Saturday and then, when I felt a twinge of gout, I decided the last thing I needed was to drink a lot of beer. So I gave it a miss and tried to get some things done at home instead. Things like making Irish soda bread and reading a murder mystery set in Galway. This was supposed to culminate in me writing an entry about my doings complete in Irish, but I just ran out of steam before that happened.

Partly it's because I decided to catch up on my NetFlix viewing so I could send the discs back and get me something Irishy for tomorrow. I've had Royal Flash and Coup de torchon at home since before monshu's surgery. I thought the former would be a delightful romp that we could enjoy sometime when we really needed a break from it all, but neither he nor my mother ever had any desire to watch it. It's amusing enough, but one can kinda see why it was never picked up as "a series like James Bond", as the producers were hoping for. For me the most outstanding thing it had going for it was Oliver Reed as Bismarck; every time he came on screen, my eyes would lock on him until I sorta forgot there was movie going on in the background. Alan Bates was great fun, and the early cameo from St Bob was simply gravy.

Coup de torchon is an odder duck in almost every way. It's based on a novel by Jim Thompson about a bumbling small-town sheriff with a hidden sadistic streak, but in order to keep the racial elements Tavernier had to translate the action to French West Africa. Clearly, the budget was small, which contributes to the vagueness of the setting. The principles are in period costume, but the extras just seem to be wearing their ordinary garb as if that hadn't changed at all in fifty years. There are old cars and advertisements around, but this is a colonial backwater so that's all inconclusive. As a result, I wasn't sure what decade we were in and what "the war" was that was being talked about until Germany gets mentioned three-quarters of the way through.

From the plot summary, I had pictured something rather different: a punching bag who gets pushed too far and finally snaps, à la Joe or Falling Down. But even after he starts killing, he preserves his inoffensive veneer, dropping it strategically to terrorise individuals or win their complicity while everyone else continues to take him for a fool. The results of that are even more disturbing. Overall, a good study of the corrosive effects of being a low-level enforcer in a corrupt system (and as timely now in the age of Ferguson as ever).

Ken Bruen's The guards covers some of the same ground but in a less serious way. Soon as the book arrived and I saw home much dialogue there was, I knew it would be a quick read, which is why I decided to take a break from my other reading and tackle it Saturday evening. I ended up reading the whole novel in less than three hours with only a couple breaks, which is the first time I can remember doing that in simply ages. It's the first in a series and I may stick with it to see how Bruen deals with the instability of having a murderous alcoholic as an ongoing protagonist.

As usual, Sunday was chores day. It was also the warmest day of the year so far (save today) and I decided to take advantage of it by strolling over to the former Safeminick's on Ridge. A friend of ours had related to us how it'd bought by one of the Hispanic minichains which didn't seem to know what to do with all the space. There solution seems to have been to fill it with every kind of crazy ethnic goods they can find. So it's the kind of place which has five brands of sugar wafers, only one of which is American and it's not Nabisco, while at the same time carrying only one brand of hummus. But if you want one-stop shopping for frozen idli, canned ackee, grass jelly drink, and Belarusian "wellness mayonnaise", then this is your store.

Unfortunately, I misunderstood the Old Man when he gave me a list of ingredients for dinner. Since he'd started cooking again the previous week, I thought we was offering to fix it himself when it turns out he was only "making suggestions" on what he could "help me out" with. This sparked an ugly fight at quarter to six when I discovered he was expecting me to do all the actual cooking. I'm so anxious to return to our old routine, I keep forgetting that it's something we should be renegotiating constantly in light of monshu's recovery rather than making any assumptions about. His making quiche tonight as a peace offering. Maybe that can be a stepping stone to getting this all worked out.

Last month, when I was casting about for movies to NetFlix, I tossed on couple of the better-looking dramas concerning Henry VIII and his wives. Then, a few days back, when I was feeling in need of some inspiration for the final push on Wolf Hall, I pushed Anne of the Thousand Days to the top of the queue. A sumptuous Technicolor costume drama starring Geneviève Bujold and Richard Burton? How could I go wrong!

I couldn't. Burton may have hated the film, but I loved him in it. Even when he was being hateful. Yeah, the acting can be a bit declamatory at times, but some of the dialogue is bracingly lewd and entertaining and the scenes with Bujold are touching. Her Anne is more sympathetic than Mantel's version without being as insufferably virtuous as Donizetti's heroine.

In fact, I was taken aback by how wanton she's portrayed in the opening sequence, where she admits to not being a virgin while propositioning Percy. And even moreso that, despite that, she's allowed to be the model of fidelity in her marriage to Henry afterwards. The film is an interesting collision of both the end of the Hayes Code and the twilight of the traditional costume drama, so everyone's wearing amazing embroidery while talking freely about adultery and incest.

Among the supporting cast, Torontonian John Colicos (a familiar face from the bad tv of my childhood) stands out as the oily lawyer Cromwell, as do Anthony Quayle as Wolsey and Irene Papas as Katherine. I'm sure errors of fact are legion (even with my rough understanding of the timeline, I caught some hiccoughs in the chronology) but there are worse ways to spend a couple hours on a cold winter's evening.

Pit Stop did have some elements I liked. For starters, most gay films end when the married guy comes out. Here that's already happened and instead we get a look at what happens when the lovers don't ride off into the sunset but the responsible one sticks around to give his child a stable home. We also don't see the accident that put someone into a coma, and we don't see them miraculously come out of it either. A less-than-accepting relative doesn't get lectured or undergo a sudden change of heart.

What it didn't have, however, was a satisfying arc. It feels unfinished, like there was at least another ten minutes of movie they forgot to film somehow. The central romance, if you can call it that, feels idealised and arbitrary and there's no sense of how it changes the characters whose backstories have been exposited so leisurely. So it all ends up feeling rather slack. I also joked to monshu that it could just as well have been called Awkward conversations with poor lighting. But that's true of any indie mumblecore film, gay or straight, isn't it?

Given the sketchy plot, I'm not sure how much better calibre actors would've helped. It goes to show that there's more to making a good gay movie than simply steering clear of all the clichés which make so many bad gay films bad.

It's hard to explain why I enjoyed Eyes Wide Open (עיניים פקוחות) so much more than Free Fall (Freier Fall) when they essentially tell the same story. I think the key is the degree of sympathy I have for the protagonist. In that review, I noted the permissiveness of society as throwing the selfishness of the father's actions into starker relief. Coming out would mean the end of his marriage, but not the lose of parental rights or contact with his family, plus he and his lover would be able to set up housekeeping together with little to no difficulty. The father in Eyes Wide Open, being a Hasidic Jew, has none of those options.

Another factor is the novelty of the milieu. I don't know much about Hasidim and the parallels between them and conservative religious communities I have had some experience with (e.g. ultra-Catholics) are approximate. Still, it's enough for me to understand how he's able to rationalise his (ultimately self-centred) choice as, of all things, an act of mercy, a mitzvah even. The differences, however, are fascinating. It's an austere lifestyle, but there's also a degree of spiritual joy unlike anything I ever say in Catholicism.

It's also better in all the small ways that count: better acting, better direction, better music, better mise-en-scène, etc.--though I still have to wonder why, in this day in age, it apparently isn't possible to film realistic daytime rain. Both movies contain downpour scenes which feature direct sunlight falling in the foreground, and I doubt that was a conscious choice. Also, the one aspect of the Israeli film which felt less-than-lived-in was the conspicuous and often convenient absence of customers at the butcher shop where most of the action takes place (although this could be at least partially attributed to the fact that it was only recently reopened and is only gradually winning a clientele).

It's still a familiar story, of course, but one which I suppose hasn't lost its power to move me and probably won't for as long as I know that there are still no shortage of communities in this world where openly loving people of the same sex means complete ostracism--or worse.

I watched Wreck-It Ralph tonight and enjoyed the hell out of it. I made only a token effort to get the Old Man to watch it with me, because I'm sure he has exactly zero warm feelies for any video arcade game. My moments of squee! included the first appearance of Q-bert and cameo by Beard Papa. (I think I may have actually yelled "Beard Papa!" at the screen.) It's probably for the best the Japanese girl group who sing the theme were some act I'd never heard of; has it been Shonen Knife, I would've shrieked like a little chiisai gyaru.

Even back in the 80s I was never a big video gamer, so a lot of the references passed me by--I couldn't've named any of the villains at the bad guy group and I wouldn't've picked up on the resemblance of Sugar Rush to Mario Kart if I hadn't just watched my nephew play that over vacation. Part of me wanted to watch the whole movie again just to have a chance to catch some of the more clever details. Oh, and given that the main characters were clearly modelled on the voice actors, I was surprised to discover Ralph was voiced by John C. Reilly rather than Mark Ruffalo.

I tried to call my older brother for his birthday but I only got my brother-in-law and my sister (fresh from the Jane Austen Festival in Louisville) instead. In preparation I'd even watched La planète sauvage, a trippy French/Czech animated film from 1973. (Actually, they'd begun work on it in 1967 but due to the turbulence of the times and disputes with the animation workshop it took a lot of doing to get a finished print released.) Not sure how my brother came across it, but he wanted to compare impressions.

The surreal imagery, stately pace, and somewhat disjointed plot (according to one of the producers in the making-of featurette, four sequences are missing) leave ample room for personal interpretations. At first I tried to read it as a straightforward political allegory, but I got more out of it when I tried to view it as a meditation on the nature of the creative process itself. It all feels very 60s and very very French. No wonder it won the Grand Prix at Cannes.

The DVD was badly organised, but I eventually found the Special Features. There was an earlier collaboration between the same artist and director about an attack of giant snails from the French countryside and a music video which seemed to be of more recent vintage inspired by the main feature but not directly related to it. I got the most out of the interviews with director René Laloux, a disheveled Santa bear and diehard Marxist. He actually got his start doing art therapy at a psychiatric clinic in Loir-et-Cher, which led to creating animated shorts incorporating the patients' own artwork.

I'm kind of at a loss about what to watch next. Apparently Laloux went to to create a film together with Mœbius, but as per usual, it's not available on NetFlix. As I was complaining to monshu the other night, nothing ever makes the jump from "Saved (Availability unknown)" to the queue. It really functions more as as a reminder to me of cool foreign films I've heard about that someday, when the politics of film distribution finally catch up to the technology of it, I might actually be able to order from somebody.

At Nuphy's suggestion, I queued Le temps qui reste from François Ozon. I didn't expect the GWO to watch it with me. "It's French," I reminded him. "What if you get bored?" "Then I'll go do something else." He didn't, but he didn't care for it either. I wasn't sure if I did myself until he opened his mouth to criticise it and I said, "I don't want to hear you didn't like it." Sometimes I feel like he doesn't really grok cinema--which is, of course, totally fine. But I'm just not used to that from someone who has such a consummate appreciation for literature, so it confuses and annoys me.

He made Swiss steak for dinner, which tasted like it did when I was a kid, only good. After the film, I called my sister to wish her a happy birthday. She was at a convention for boardgame geeks and having a whale of a time. I wasn't sure if our mother had given her my gift or not, so I kept her on the phone while I awkwardly felt her out about that. I guess she'll get the surprise on Sunday. Our stepmom is also in town, but she's solo babysitting, so it sounds like we won't see her before she leaves on Sunday.