Writing

Review: Inception

By Cathy on July 16, 2010 4:41 PM | 2 Comments

Inception left me shell-shocked and disoriented. It left my mind buzzing. It held me tight for a good twenty minutes after I left the theater. It did not leave me with the freeing, buzzing, radiant feeling that I felt after The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight is the kind of film that provides the viewer complete emotional filling and emptying. It is self-contained catharsis. Inception is a puzzle box bound together with frustration and desperation, presented with meticulous skill. We are placed within it and then led back out, but the experience simply fills, it doesn't empty.

I don't know if I can describe it any better than that. A conventional critical analysis of the film would be tricky. It's immaculately constructed. Other than some over-long, disorienting chase scenes and some clunky dialogue here and there, it borders on technical flawlessness.

I don't want to pose this as a criticism because I don't mean it as such, but it is a curiously humorless and emotionless film except for the very palpable longing Dom (Leonardo DiCaprio) feels for his family, represented beautifully by the motif of his children's backs. Inception presents the viewer with this powerful emotion, but for the most part does not allow us to experience it. We are held at arm's length, observers in the layers of dreams the characters traverse.

I guess this aspect of the film surprised me because one expects any movie about dreams to be immersive and subjective. Inception is most definitely experienced objectively. Rather than being immersed in the action, we are reminded of all the steps that must be taken to complete the process. Something at the complete other end of the spectrum but the same genre (roughly) would be Ocean's Eleven, where the viewer knows almost nothing about how the heist will happen and is swept up when it does. In Inception, the viewer is watching from the perspective of the mastermind, aware of every step.

Again, all of this is largely observation, not criticism. I thought the film was a masterwork. It's incredibly original. It's like nothing I've ever seen, and that's certainly saying something.

Highlights were Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy, who added really the only wryness and humor in the entire film. Ken Watanabe also got to be pretty fun. Gordon-Levitt's anti-gravity fight scenes were amazing. Cillian Murphy did an admirable job considering he wasn't given much to work with. DiCaprio, although very restrained, communicated Dom's tragedy perfectly.

I'm going to see it again tomorrow, so I may amend this entry if I have any other insights, but I felt I had to get out my thoughts right after the first viewing.

So, what did you think of Inception?

Fotygrafts and Egolatry

By Cathy on May 29, 2010 11:24 AM | No Comments

There are a few subjects about which I can speak with a reliable degree of expertise and authority, but literature is not one of them. My reading habits, especially over the past four years, have been sporadic and scattershot at best, and I somehow missed out on reading most of the classics that people are "supposed" to have read by the time they graduate from college. I might blame the fact that my high school literature program was really half focused on international literature and half focused on drama. I know a lot more about Mahfouz than Hemingway.

It saddens me to think how terrible a reader I am now, since I used to read voraciously. Although when you count up the words read per day (in tweets, web articles, emails, and magazine articles) I probably still read just as much as I ever did.

Anyway, I've never really taken the time to explore Ann Arbor's collection of great used book stores, so a couple weeks ago, I walked over to West Side Book Shop. I'm not sure what I expected to find, but after a half an hour of browsing the packed shelves, I emerged with two small, old volumes: The Fotygraft Album by Frank Wing and I. Youth & Egolatry by Pio Baroja.

The former is a strange little book from 1915 that basically contains portrait drawings of wacky people, ostensibly someone's relatives. The subtitle is "Shown to the New Neighbor by Rebecca Sparks Peters, Aged Eleven." So each drawing is accompanied by this imaginary eleven-year-old's commentary on the people depicted. It's pretty bizarre, but cute. I can only imagine that this is the 1915 equivalent of a Family Circus anthology.

This drawing, for example, is accompanied by the following description:

"Pa's cousin Stella, dressed up in some of her ma's old clothes fer a mask ball. Pa drawed in that streak and that printin'. He's a reg'lar artist and he ain't never had a lesson in his life, neither.

"He calls this pitchure 'Stella as Ajax defyin' th' lightin'!' "

The second book, Youth & Egolatry, is certainly less fluffy, but equally perplexing in its own way. As the introduction by H. L. Mencken (or as the West Side Books guy exclaimed to me "Mencken! From Baltimore!") explains, Baroja was a prominent Spanish author and intellectual around the turn of the twentieth century. The contents of the book are a strange mix of commentaries, thoughts, and observations, broken into short segments, which generally follow a loose thematic train of thought. For example, a section entitled "The Veils of Sexual Life" is followed by "A Little Talk," in which he discusses how he sometimes thinks he would have been happier if he were impotent.

Both books hold a collection of odd little gems that you can pick up on a whim and admire. They're foreign, archaic, and perplexing, but ultimately fascinating.

Things I Like: The League of Gentlemen

By Cathy on April 27, 2010 11:36 AM | No Comments

I've been prodded toward this British pseudo-sketch comedy group a couple of times, first by Max a few years ago, and more recently by Mandy, a Twitter friend who first contacted me for the sole purpose of recommending LoG to me. Since I was swamped with school work and completely anxiety-ridden over my various exams and research papers, I decided it was a wonderful time to become fixated on something new. I poked around on YouTube, watching clips, decided I liked what I saw, and procured the series.

It straddles a fine line between sitcom and sketch comedy. The episodes all take place in the fictional northern-England village of Royston Vasey. Almost all the characters are played by Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, and Reece Shearsmith (Jeremy Dyson writes for the group, but doesn't act), and their storylines are episodes or seasons long, not just one sketch.

The most interesting thing about the show is not that its humor is groundbreakingly unique, but rather the way in which that humor is mixed with tragedy and darkness. Characters that seem initially to be one-sided when they're introduced are then revealed to be far more complex as the series progresses. Power structures are constantly inverted. Characters that are initially villainous are later the sympathetic victims.

This not only indicates an intellectual appreciation of comedy's workings on the parts of the creators, but also an immense affection for their characters. In their universe, stories can be absurd and slightly terrifying:

Or spot-on mimicries that turn tragic:

Just that alone would be reason to watch and enjoy the series, but in addition, it has fantastic production values for a BBC comedy and Gatiss, Pemberton, and Shearsmith's ability to commit dramatically to their characters, both in comedy and tragedy, is remarkable.

Once you finish watching all 18 episodes of the TV show, their Christmas special, the feature-length The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse, and their two live shows on DVD, I recommend you move on to Psychoville, which is what Pemberton and Shearsmith are working on currently. It has a lot of things in common with LoG, including the special dance of comedy and drama, and makes you feel a little bit better when you realize you can't go back to Royston Vasey.

Musings on Detroit

By Cathy on March 11, 2010 4:29 PM | No Comments

As Max and I drove towards the Fox Theatre two weeks ago to see A Prairie Home Companion, along with hundreds of other suburban, white, upper-middle class yuppies, we got to talking about Detroit. This is not an uncommon topic of conversation in southeast Michigan, or even on the national stage. The New York Times, for instance, loves to print articles about Detroit.

Detroit has been on hard times since white flight, the 1967 riot, and before. These days, it's little more than a sad, windowless shell of its former self. The auto companies that allowed for the city's meteoric rise, that laid the foundations for its beautiful art deco buildings and its well-off, home-owning population are now struggling to stay afloat. All this is pretty much common knowledge.

Max and I were both raised in the suburbs, an area that exists because of Detroit, but largely does its best to ignore the city. Detroit, for us suburbanites, was a place to go a few times a year to see concerts, art, or museums. It was a place you made sure to lock the car doors before driving through. You shook your head at the blocks of burned-out buildings, the neglected historic sites, the demolished or forgotten monoliths of a more prosperous time.

For most of our lives, it's basically been assumed that we would move out of the area when we reached adulthood. Michigan as a whole has been suffering for so much longer than the rest of the nation that it's hard to take other states' budget crises seriously. There aren't many jobs here for someone looking to make something of himself, to start a promising career.

As we drove through the disused, grimy streets and gazed up at the remains of the once-beautiful Michigan Central Station, though, we both expressed a desire to stay. Despite never having lived in the city, both of us wanted desperately to help in the effort to rebuild and restore it, to reform it. We both talked about working for non-profits, helping to raze abandoned buildings, establishing urban farming projects, restoring some of the city's architectural gems, starting small businesses, and encouraging a stronger, safer, residential downtown area.

It's hard to say why exactly I have this urge. As I mentioned before, Detroit has not played a major role in my life so far. I don't spend much time there, and I'm not that familiar with most of the city. Maybe it's something about the nature of suburbanization that creates an implicit emotional link with the central city. My childhood community existed because of Detroit, the fact that I ended up as the person I am is because of Detroit.

Perhaps part of it is envy. I go to New York, Chicago, or San Francisco and see vibrant, exciting, living cities. Detroit is, for the most part, dead and hollowed out. But at one point it wasn't. And it still could be. It could be a place that encourages small business, creative professions, community, and environmental consciousness. You could fill all that empty space with whatever you wanted.

I know well enough the challenges it faces. It needs a major industry to replace the automakers. It needs massive amounts of demolition. It needs an influx of higher-income residents. It needs good housing. It needs better public safety and better public schools. It needs especially to stop electing horrible, corrupt leadership. It has a long way to go. But I can't think of many things more worthwhile and potentially rewarding than trying to push it along.

Review: The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

By Cathy on January 9, 2010 10:01 AM | No Comments

It's unfortunate that Terry Gilliam's newest Faustian dreamscape of a film is best known as "Heath Ledger's last movie," because there's so much else actually within it for people to know it for.

The premise is this: Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is a former monk who began making wagers with Mr. Nick (Tom Waits), the Devil. By winning these wagers, he managed to extend his life for thousands of years. Flash forward to the present day--Parnassus has a beautiful daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole), and travels through London in a horse-drawn traveling theater with her, his faithful friend Percy (Verne Troyer), and a boy named Anton (Andrew Garfield) whom he'd rescued from the streets as a child. The show they put on is always the same, and one viewer at a time is welcomed to enter their mirror into the imaginarium, in which they are faced with a choice between baser pleasures and higher aspirations (for example, a seedy bar or a twelve-step program). If they choose the former, Mr. Nick wins their soul. If the latter, Parnassus. The show is not very popular.

It turns out that Parnassus has made a wager that gives Valentina's soul to Mr. Nick on her 16th birthday. Knowing Parnassus wants desperately not to have this happen, Mr. Nick offers a bet wherein the first of the two to win five souls will get Valentina. Parnassus agrees. Valentina saves the mysterious, charming Tony (Heath Ledger), who allegedly can't remember his past, and he joins their troupe and agrees to help gather the five souls.

That's pretty much the simplest I can put it, although there's paragraphs and paragraphs more to write. It would be easy to say that the story is as simple as "man makes an ill-advised deal with the devil," but that's really not true. This isn't a film of simple, clean-cut morality. All of its central characters are at times ambiguous or duplicitous, and the eventual outcome is hardly what you'd expect going into the film. I love its story because it's not similar to how people remember Faust, it's similar to how Faust actually is. Mephistopheles is a friend as well as an antagonist, and Dr. Faust is no saint. Plummer's Parnassus is a weak-willed, blubbering drunk as well as a noble, god-like figure. And all of the people Mr. Nick wins seem to end up happy, despite their apparent damnation.

Visually, the film is gorgeous. There's tons of Gilliam's typical stylized decay, as well as the lush, bright fantasy world inside the imaginarium. Its visual effects are obviously artificial, but the characters still seem to physically inhabit them as much as they inhabit the gigantic, dingy wagon that holds the theater.

I bet you're dying to find out what I thought of Heath Ledger and his three all-star stand-ins (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell). In short, they blend into the narrative beautifully and unobtrusively. There's only one scene where I found myself wishing that Heath Ledger were playing the role when he wasn't. Happily, Ledger has a lot of screen time in the movie, and he does a very good job. It's no Joker performance, but certainly one of the best roles of his short career. The other three do a fantastic job of adopting his mannerisms and voice, and you can clearly imagine that they're just Tony with a different face.

All in all, this movie comes highly recommended. As Adrian commented to me after it ended, "That totally makes up for Avatar."

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Review: Inception

Fotygrafts and Egolatry

Things I Like: The League of Gentlemen

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