Doctor Zhivago

I don't really feel that I can do justice to Doctor Zhivago, other than to say that it is the best of the 4 films I've watched so far as part of my challenge to myself to watch 5 classics.

The cinematography, as with Lawrence of Arabia, leaves me unimpressed though I am conscious of the historical context. It is the love story that moves me, and Zhivago gives me the insight into the title character that Lawrence was missing. I would have liked to see Zhivago complete his walk home from his mistress to return, at last, to his pregnant wife rather than being whisked away into his two-year adventure through Mongolia. I doubt Zhivago was the sort of man who could have kept his promise to disavow his mistress; he does not seem, to me, to be a strong enough man to deny himself the joys of a second life (which is, after all, exactly the sort of life poetry allows a writer- the chance to step away from the everyday and things as they are).

The story of displacement, of military and social conscription, was fantastic and probably deserves a longer meditation than I have time for today. It's the sort of story (like The Old Man and the Sea or American Pastoral) that I could see as a touchstone.

30 Before 30: Lawrence of Arabia

Watching Lawrence of Arabia, one of the great films I picked as part of my 30 Before 30. left me surprisingly cold.

In part, I blame the pacing. Clearly, my modern sensibility can't handle a 4+ hour movie, and that's way too long for Carol to take in a single sitting. It took us three sessions to watch the whole movie.

But the second piece, the part I find counter-intuitively disturbing, is how post-modern the film felt. Lawrence achieves super-human heights rallying the Arabs to oppose the Turks and their German allies. He also endures tremendous lows, trying and failing to forge a Western democracy among the tribes, not anticipating their cruelty to each other or their conquered foes in the prison camp, and encouraging their lowest impulses in "taking no prisoners" when faced with the retreating marauders (who had committed war crimes of their own).

What disturbed me was how little insight we have into Lawrence. We see the things he does, but that tells us almost nothing of the man and his motives. Is he a supreme egotist, a genius, a lunatic? We can guess, but we know nothing definitively. And perhaps that dates the film- that David Lean was unwilling to fictionalize further in his epic biopic. What makes it hard for me to approach is that, in fiction, this is precisely the kind of story I treasure.

The cinematography was, of course, stunning. I can see the wide pan approach echoed in everything from Lord of the Rings to Inception. But, given modern access to images from around the globe, the cinematography can't be the main draw for me. The story, the characters, have to win out. And in Lawrence of Arabia, I couldn't quite decide if I was watching the story of a hero.

Citizen Kane

Goal #22 on my 30 Before 30 is to watch five great movies I've never seen. Sunday night, Carol and I watched Citizen Kane.

If you want a thorough analysis of Citizen Kane, go elsewhere. Here, or here, or here are good places to start. I'm not steeped enough in the history of cinema to weigh in meaningfully.

I'm really interested in the development of the character. Kane is a blank slate in many ways; in the movie's opening scenes, his mother inherits a tremendous fortune and sends him off to have the most wonderful life that money can buy. Unburdened by the demand to be profitable, Kane is able to be successful- to develop a declaration of principles and to live by them. His convictions galvanize the people around him, or at least, they understand that in the presence of the money man, they are to act galvanized. One of the most telling scenes is the party to celebrate the success of Kane's newspaper, when Kane's friends wonder to each other how long it will be until the real world begins to corrupt their young leader.

I'm also interested in the framing tale. The reporter's search for the meaning to "Rosebud" gives the movie its forward momentum; it justifies the act of telling. The reporter's failure is a classic nod- Mighty Casey strikes out, Frodo can't bring himself to throw the Ring into the volcano after all, Oedipus is as Oedipus does.

I especially enjoyed how many shots from the opening scene were echoed in later shots, especially the long rise up to the top of the gate/ house echoed in the even longer rise up from the Opera House stage to the crew mocking the show from the rafters. It's a common device in comics, and it made the three hour movie feel connected throughout its acts.

Gun Power Treason and Plot

Remember, remember...

5 Great Movies I've Never Seen

There are a lot of famous movies I've never seen: Gone with the Wind, Raging Bull, Psycho, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Which is why I made seeing some of these movies one of the goals of my 30 Before 30.

They say you have to know what you don't know, before you can really learn about it.

I've got some friends joining me for this challenge, and we decided we should focus on movies that none of us have seen.

1. Doctor Zhivago
2. Citizen Kane
3. On the Waterfront
4. Lawrence of Arabia
5. All Quiet on the Western Front

That's 24 Oscars and a ton of movie history.

An Unexpected Journey: Hating On The Hobbit

from here

Back in July, when I heard that Peter Jackson was breaking his The Hobbit into three parts, I was worried:

Maybe Peter Jackson really does have more to say through these characters; I think his role as director is not just transcriber of the films, but as translator- maintaining the intention of the original while imbuing the work with his own cadence.

I enjoyed the "translation" of the first section. It lagged, make no mistake- I have no idea how the studio will eventually release its inevitable Director's Cut of The Hobbit, because it already feels stuffed with every detail and slow camera pan that Jackson could find. I enjoyed it, but it was so much less than it could have been.

30 Before 30 Bucket List

1. Read In Search of Lost Time (A Remembrance of Things Past)

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel writes "It's said, after all, that people reach middle age the day they realize they're never going to read Remembrance of Things Past." That quote struck a nerve with me, and once I decided that 2013 would be my year for Remembrance... the rest of this list started to take shape.

The BFG and The Hunger Games, Locke and Hobbes

In the last few weeks I've read several books, all of which I intend to review.

But I keep circling around these two children's books: The BFG (by Roald Dahl) and The Hunger Games (by Suzanne Collins).

A strange combination, I suppose. I didn't intend to read them in succession, and I'd never read them before. I didn't know a thing about BFG until my wife brought it along as an audio book for one of our road trips. On the other hand, I'd heard all about The Hunger Games. Expectations are funny things. Friends of mine, people who know me but must not really know what I read (and why), kept recommending Hunger Games. And I kept resisting. I know myself.

I enjoyed Harry Potter, but I didn't read it until all the books had been published, and I came very close to not finishing the series. I blew through the first 3 books and promised myself that if the fourth book didn't pick up considerably, I was finished. Thankfully, the fourth book improved in the complexity of its plot, the depth of its characters, and its tenor. But Harry Potter was an exception to this simple rule: Young Adult books are too simple.

And Hunger Games was. Of course, I see (or think I see) all the injustices the author wants us to see: the brutality of wealth, the disenfranchisement of the oppressed, the divisions within the oppressed that prevent an overthrow of the system.

BFG traffics in many of the same themes: we meet monsters who force us to admit that our "civilization" is barbaric in its own ways, we see how hard it really is for someone who perceives him or herself as weak to stand up to thuggery.

Both protagonists are young girls snatched from their homes and put in a hostile environment. Food is central to both books (the hunger games tournament revolves around the threat of starvation, while the giants of BFG show their evilness by guzzling humans). 

But where the prose of Hunger Games felt static and lifeless (in fairness, largely because the bulk of the book was exposition by a character who is profoundly isolated from the people around her; it would be interesting to see how similar internal books fared in movie adaptations), BFG was brimming with dialogue. The voice of the giant who is the focus of BFG is unique, in the same fractured syntactical way that so many of Lewis Carrol's characters are.

In the denouement of both Hunger Games and BFG, our protagonists realize how their previous view of the world was too simple, that the real world is more complex than they had considered. But where Katniss raises her guard and begins to see enemies everywhere, Sophie finds friends. Maybe its wishfulness, the mix of nostalgia and childishness, that makes me prefer Sophie's ending.

The people of Sophie's world are, ultimately, good people. They are competent and capable. Though they need help to see past differences, with a little guidance from a young girl, they can. Katniss' world is darker, more filled with people willing to sacrifice each other. Thinking about the political science distinction between Locke and Hobbes, whether we are social creatures who come into conflict only when we delude ourselves into thinking that force is justified by the scarcity of resources, or whether we are individualists only bound together by the strictures of society.

I've always come down in favor of Locke- just as I prefer Dahl to Collins.

Books 35 and 36 of my book-a-week challenge.

Room to Imagine: The Hobbit, Movie Musicals, and Translation

One of my "in real life" passions is for theater, especially for musicals. They're often silly: most people don't break into song when we find ourselves overwhelmed by emotion (whether stressful or positive).

So when I heard the recent announcement that Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Hobbit would be a trilogy, I started thinking about recent musical adaptions I've seen (The Phantom of the Opera, Rent, Sweeney Todd) and ones I've skipped (Mama Mia, Rock of Ages).

A stretch? Not for me.

The thing that a stage does, with curtains and cardboard houses and lighting instruments suspended from the walls and ceiling, is demand a suspension of disbelief. The cinema doesn't (or rarely) ask for the same level of disbelief- a production on stage will include errors, alterations, and imperfections that movie won't. The version of a film that makes it past the cutting room is (almost always) the director's vision.

Reading is much more like a trip to the theater than a trip to the cinema, which is, in part, why even film critics agree that most every film adaptation pales in comparison to the book. In reading, we snap to attention at words, paragraphs, pages almost without understanding how; we can skim for pages when suddenly we're drawn a level deeper into the book. In film, the director guides us, makes it harder for us to miss the nuance- often, the director gets so heavy handed that we wish we could miss a little (I'm looking at you, Dark Knight Rises).

Which brings me to The Hobbit, which I can't imagine warranting a narrative arc equivalent of the entire Lord of the Rings.

The Muppets (Spoiler Free, I Promise)

I grew up with a certain degree of nonsensical in my life, and I love it.

(This may be the key to the modern condition: we've ceased to expect a rational narrative to our art, our politics, our lives; at the same time, Enlightenment ideals deny any non-rational exploration of the world. The nonsensical is then reduced to the fringes of discourse: humor, children's stories, "modern" art.)

Sometimes, we don't recognize the thing we've been missing until we find it. That's how I felt throughout The Muppets. All the other sources of humor, of joy, of unexpected celebration were just filler as we waited for this. I won't get into the details of the plot for the sake of spoilers, and frankly, I think the details of the plot are secondary to the emotion and the flavor of the movie.

This was a movie with a taste. The last movie that left me feeling like this was Lilo & Stitch, ten years ago. Go see it. I'm going to see it again.

V for Vendetta (Possibly with Spoilers)

How awful is it that I have to type "vendetta" into the googlemachine before I will believe I've spelled it correctly?

Awkward segue (another word I can't spell): V for Vendetta is a good movie. I saw it once, years ago (probably when I lived in Scranton), and I remember being disliking it. I had read the book first, and while I didn't love the book, my memory tells me that the movie is a shadow of the book.

But I watched it again last weekend (on the fifth of November) with friends and fudge and pumpkin roll, and I found it to be pretty enjoyable.

I picked up on some details I hadn't noticed before/ forgotten, like everyone dead being part of the end mob, and I also empathized more with the powerlessness of the masses necessitating the use of violence.

To connect to a half-thought I'd had in a post earlier this week, I think we can measure our own growth as people in the transformation of our reaction to re-viewing a work of art. I'm pretty firmly anti-violence, but I'm at a point in my life where I can imagine the need for NON-nonviolent resistance to government. This surprises me.

That said, I still object to the essential premise of V for Vendetta: that people are sheep, easily cowed, who will choose secure misery over freedom (in all it's messy, dangerous fun). I can't imagine that people who ever debase themselves to such a level that they yield complete control back to (effectively) a pharaoh (another word I apparently can't spell). I think people will always be interested in rising up against hegemony.

That's what I see in Occupy Wall Street, in the Arab Spring, in this summer's London riots, and other places around the world. The idea of democracy is a funny thing: the feeling that I possess a crucial, consensual stake in the world around me; the belief that I have the right and the responsibility to make my voice heard even if, or especially if, I am in the minority.

I see history as the progression of communication: the development of language, then the development of means to convey that language around the world. With word goes thought, and the human word is "I." I matter, I have a voice, I deserve to be heard. I see all of history pointing to the expansion of power in include more people, not an ebb and flow of power among the elite who may alternatively protect and enslave the rabble. I think Alan Moore (plus Frank Miller, Grant Morrison, and other giants of the graphic novel world) miss the power of communication as a (nearly) irreversible force.