A moving psychological study of men who have everything but a healthy sense of self. A series of high tech temper tantrums. A curious mix of American self regard and self loathing. What does this look like in Accra? Kracow? Bangkok? Quito?
A monstrous vision of infantile consumers weilding terrible weapons with no concern for collateral damage. A frightening caricature of politics, consumer culture, and the military-industrial complex. Rockwell nearly steals the show, making Downy's brattiness seem almost tasteful. The scary thing is that I know people like this. A comic book without a hero--only villians...interesting idea.
The message is that if you are powerful enough to construct reality--if your hegemony, dominance is truly full spectrum--you can do anything and not only get away with it but be celebrated for your crimes. Symbolism of creation of new atomic element. Actually creating reality and the world as you go. If you are this powerful your character flaws become ideals, desireable instead of dispicable traits. You can do no wrong b/c you have taken the place of god.
In aesthetic terms this means the triumph of bad taste, and Iron Man 2 is (ironically? self-consciously?) exemplary of the premise.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Sex, Okra, and Salted Butter
I liked this movie about a West African paterfamilias in Paris adjusting to some major life changes. It is light, but not frivolous. There’s the sense of a philosophy behind the lightness…a comic, as opposed to a tragic view of life. The comic sense of life doesn’t ignore loss, conflict, and unrequited desire, but neither does it ignore the small things, the everyday graces that make life bearable—not the least of which is a lively sense of humor. While I found a lot to admire in this film, I have the feeling that it won’t stick with me for too long. Maybe that’s a consequence of the comic tone, I don’t know. LC said the acting wasn’t that great and I admit that it wasn’t awe-inspiring. There was no sense of the mysteries of life being opened up to you, which was kind of how I felt about another recent movie based on a similar premise: 35 Shots of Rum. That film’s patriarch had a kind of heroic aura. He was a man’s man and a lady’s man and an everyman all in one. The patriarch of Sex, Okra and Salted Butter was just a man, warts and all, but a well-meaning one at heart.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
More thoughts on The A-Team
Sorry for the scatter-brained quality of these notes. This movie sucked so bad, but it was really disturbing.
Is father figure Hannibal Smith aka the “old man” a proxy for Judeo-Christian God? He’s certainly the pastor of a wayward flock. (Making the bad guy atheist is way of implying the theocratic righteousness of the good guys without being too heavy handed: Lynch, the villainous CIA agent, says that he doesn’t care if his opponent or whatever is God. Old man’s “faith” that there is a plan and everything happens for a reason. -- My response: “Sure it does, you’re a character in a movie!”)
Face – Old Man’s partner from start to finish. His “friend”. Like a son? An heir to the throne? A partner? Are we talking about a version of holy trinity: father, son, and the plan in which they have faith? Revealing moment when Face says to the Old Man “you trusted the general and didn’t see his betrayal coming. Would you ever do that to us?”. No? Why not? Because Rangers are different? They have tattoos, not just uniforms. Their loyalty is deeper, more personal. The have different values? Christian values? Communal values? Interpersonal values?
The General, Lynch, and the Blackwater (Blackforest) type mercenary Pike are all selfish, self-interested, devil take the hindmost types. They all just want to print their own money, to get rich quick. They are capitalists before all else, which is to say thieves. They have no core values beyond hedonistic self-interest. Lynch is ridiculed as infantile (his temper tantrums, video gamer’s mentality, etc.). He’s an immature, spoiled brat with too much power and influence for anyone’s good. Pike is a classic soldier of fortune stereotype, good at what he does but utterly lacking in scruples. He is amoral. He is only out to get his and will work for anyone. What matters to him, if anything, is the dignity of a job well done, not the meaning of the job, not the mission itself. He is a loner. What are the general’s motives? What are the woman’s motives? Sosa? Sosa seems genuinely concerned about justice, the mission, and the maintenance of law and order. Does she, like the A team, come to feel cheated by the system upheld by law order etc?
Is CIA any different from the A team? Is the fact that all operatives are “named” Lynch a sign of the agency’s impersonality and suppression of individuality or rather does that mean it’s like a family? The difference is CIA is not concerned about honor and keeping a good name. CIA is about hiding behind a mask. Or losing yourself in a mask. Or not having a self at all, just being a mask with no face. How is Blackforest different from A team? Supposedly it’s made up of individuals, each out for himself alone, brought together by mutual self interest. There is no magic bond of the tattoo and ranger brotherhood or whatever.
A team is like a fraternity, defined by a shared sense of honor, a kind of faith in one another and in the plan, and a sense of total confidence in its own abilities. All parties share the later sense minus Sosa who expresses cautious humility at one point saying, “we ought to assume they know more than we do”. This humility allows her to change her mind and accept the justice of the A team’s cause, etc.
BA’s soul searching is ridiculed along with nonviolence. He is made to feel impotent by The Old Man. His character is the only member who in any way questions the authority of Hannibal Smith and the core values of the A team. At no time does anyone engage in critical thinking. Even BA. He is shown with a book by an exoticized other, a western esotericist perhaps. But the book is a tool and a technology he is uncomfortable with. He quotes it, and then The Old Man quotes (supposedly) a refutation back at him. Biblical exegesis at the turning point of an action movie? Strange. It’s the fucking White Man’s Burden all over again. Seriously this whole subplot is super fucked up. Argh. The real, present father Smith, the Christian white man, the pastor, the patriarch, brings the wayward sheep back into the fold. And the sheep is all too willing to come home. BA’s attempt to go his own way was shown as an emasculating adventure with a false prophet. Ghandi was Christianized and recolonized by the white man and along with him the whole spirit of independent thought, inquiry, and living a self-examined life. The Socratic spirit is nipped in the bud as there’s no time for thought or discussion and too much ass to kick, to many guns to shoot, to much shit to blow up. BA kills Pike, which is fitting because Pike is a sort who might belong to the A team if only he had scruples or a sense of loyalty. BA comes around showing that his loyalty is stronger than his own sense of self. His previously troubled conscience is at peace with Pike’s murder, because the Old Man has shown him the way, the truth, the light (or at least some pyrotechnic simulation thereof). BA is portrayed as an animal throughout. His behavior is controlled against his will. Food is a means of control. Drugs too. His consciousness is switched on and off with no apparent moral qualms. At one point Murdoch speaks to him in a kind of pidgin English. He is subhuman, hence trainable. His adventure into pacifism is seen as an endearing, laughable, and naïve caper. Don’t animals do just the cutest little things?
“You look really tan”—homo-erotic bond between Old Man and Face? Is there some old style Greek shit going on here? Ridley Scott did have a hand in this movie after all. Is there some jealousy when The Old Man rebukes face for his history of embroilment with women? Face and the Old Man speak cavalierly about BA’s life—compare him to a midget. “Sure I knew the door of the van would hold him…it held the midget, right?” Again, the black man’s life is undervalued. Facility with language is the defining mark of intelligence. BA’s struggle with the book and his rhetorical defeat by the Old Man underline his failings as a human, relegate him to the animal realm. Murdoch’s surprise facility with Swahili impresses Face. Murdoch also does a South African accent. Face speaks French and German at various points in the film. The Old Man, presumably, is in possession of total mastery of The Word.
The unidentified Arab who turns out to be the general. The general who faked his own death. The demonized other: saboteur of the American economy. This symbolic other turns out to be a home grown cabal of military and mercenary. CIA trumps the cabal in the end. Triumph of secret government. Arab threat shown to be a misidentification. Real threat is corruption of military and government. Abuse of power in the military industrial framework.
Containers, destruction of port, collapse of global economy. Symbolic language. The A-Team seeks only honor and justice. Different values. Pike destroys ship with all containers on it. Ability and willingness to escalate conflict to a whole other level of destruction. Playing a “game changer”. What is this meant to stand for? An act of terrorism? Economic meltdown?
Only men have real power. Women are treated as objects by Face, Lynch. But Face grows up, comes to see Sosa as more than just another good time. He expands his circle of loyalty. Does the father figure approve? No; he resists all the way. Homosexual jealousy? Why? Is this characterization supposed to make us more sympathetic? Create dramatic tension? Or is it related to the holy trinity idea? The true born son of God ought to keep his mind on higher things? (But he’s so dreamy…)
What’s up with Murdoch? He is classified as insane, but how so? Just because he has no respect for rules or boundaries? Is he only with the A team because they are the baddest dudes out there and he can do the craziest shit with them? Because he craves excitement and the outlaw life?
Arizona and immigration policy. Arizona and militias. Arizona and racism. Arizona and white supremacists. Arizona and Nazis (Bolaño). Arizona and Mexico. Mexican federales are portrayed as cholos in uniform. Gangsters, hoods, criminals in uniforms. CIA is portrayed as frat boys with immunity. A team is bonded at the tattoo level. Why is the Old Man always recording voices? (Facility with The Word?) With the Mexican general in the helicopter…with Lynch…these tapes are never put to use, are they? Is it about being an honorable man, a man of his word, of The Word? The word in a Christian sense?
The Blackforest people are made to look like fascists (black shirts, brown shirts, what’s the dif?) Nobody in the A team wears a uniform. They are free to be themselves, so long as they kick ass and listen to the old man. So long as they stick to the plan. Their bond is with each other and with the plan. They are a kind of chosen people.
A team is scary. A team is propaganda for militias. A team is reaching out to vets of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and telling them the system is broken. If you work within it, you are only helping a bunch of privileged, infantile frat boys get rich while fucking over everybody else. To preserve honor, and good Christian values, (or are they Greek values? Or Roman, that is Latin values—honor, faith, family loyalty—but no—we must consider them strictly Anglo Saxon values or surely all Hell will break loose) one cannot work within the confines of the system. One must rebel to maintain the purity of the fatherland. It is totally crypto fascist propaganda.
Is father figure Hannibal Smith aka the “old man” a proxy for Judeo-Christian God? He’s certainly the pastor of a wayward flock. (Making the bad guy atheist is way of implying the theocratic righteousness of the good guys without being too heavy handed: Lynch, the villainous CIA agent, says that he doesn’t care if his opponent or whatever is God. Old man’s “faith” that there is a plan and everything happens for a reason. -- My response: “Sure it does, you’re a character in a movie!”)
Face – Old Man’s partner from start to finish. His “friend”. Like a son? An heir to the throne? A partner? Are we talking about a version of holy trinity: father, son, and the plan in which they have faith? Revealing moment when Face says to the Old Man “you trusted the general and didn’t see his betrayal coming. Would you ever do that to us?”. No? Why not? Because Rangers are different? They have tattoos, not just uniforms. Their loyalty is deeper, more personal. The have different values? Christian values? Communal values? Interpersonal values?
The General, Lynch, and the Blackwater (Blackforest) type mercenary Pike are all selfish, self-interested, devil take the hindmost types. They all just want to print their own money, to get rich quick. They are capitalists before all else, which is to say thieves. They have no core values beyond hedonistic self-interest. Lynch is ridiculed as infantile (his temper tantrums, video gamer’s mentality, etc.). He’s an immature, spoiled brat with too much power and influence for anyone’s good. Pike is a classic soldier of fortune stereotype, good at what he does but utterly lacking in scruples. He is amoral. He is only out to get his and will work for anyone. What matters to him, if anything, is the dignity of a job well done, not the meaning of the job, not the mission itself. He is a loner. What are the general’s motives? What are the woman’s motives? Sosa? Sosa seems genuinely concerned about justice, the mission, and the maintenance of law and order. Does she, like the A team, come to feel cheated by the system upheld by law order etc?
Is CIA any different from the A team? Is the fact that all operatives are “named” Lynch a sign of the agency’s impersonality and suppression of individuality or rather does that mean it’s like a family? The difference is CIA is not concerned about honor and keeping a good name. CIA is about hiding behind a mask. Or losing yourself in a mask. Or not having a self at all, just being a mask with no face. How is Blackforest different from A team? Supposedly it’s made up of individuals, each out for himself alone, brought together by mutual self interest. There is no magic bond of the tattoo and ranger brotherhood or whatever.
A team is like a fraternity, defined by a shared sense of honor, a kind of faith in one another and in the plan, and a sense of total confidence in its own abilities. All parties share the later sense minus Sosa who expresses cautious humility at one point saying, “we ought to assume they know more than we do”. This humility allows her to change her mind and accept the justice of the A team’s cause, etc.
BA’s soul searching is ridiculed along with nonviolence. He is made to feel impotent by The Old Man. His character is the only member who in any way questions the authority of Hannibal Smith and the core values of the A team. At no time does anyone engage in critical thinking. Even BA. He is shown with a book by an exoticized other, a western esotericist perhaps. But the book is a tool and a technology he is uncomfortable with. He quotes it, and then The Old Man quotes (supposedly) a refutation back at him. Biblical exegesis at the turning point of an action movie? Strange. It’s the fucking White Man’s Burden all over again. Seriously this whole subplot is super fucked up. Argh. The real, present father Smith, the Christian white man, the pastor, the patriarch, brings the wayward sheep back into the fold. And the sheep is all too willing to come home. BA’s attempt to go his own way was shown as an emasculating adventure with a false prophet. Ghandi was Christianized and recolonized by the white man and along with him the whole spirit of independent thought, inquiry, and living a self-examined life. The Socratic spirit is nipped in the bud as there’s no time for thought or discussion and too much ass to kick, to many guns to shoot, to much shit to blow up. BA kills Pike, which is fitting because Pike is a sort who might belong to the A team if only he had scruples or a sense of loyalty. BA comes around showing that his loyalty is stronger than his own sense of self. His previously troubled conscience is at peace with Pike’s murder, because the Old Man has shown him the way, the truth, the light (or at least some pyrotechnic simulation thereof). BA is portrayed as an animal throughout. His behavior is controlled against his will. Food is a means of control. Drugs too. His consciousness is switched on and off with no apparent moral qualms. At one point Murdoch speaks to him in a kind of pidgin English. He is subhuman, hence trainable. His adventure into pacifism is seen as an endearing, laughable, and naïve caper. Don’t animals do just the cutest little things?
“You look really tan”—homo-erotic bond between Old Man and Face? Is there some old style Greek shit going on here? Ridley Scott did have a hand in this movie after all. Is there some jealousy when The Old Man rebukes face for his history of embroilment with women? Face and the Old Man speak cavalierly about BA’s life—compare him to a midget. “Sure I knew the door of the van would hold him…it held the midget, right?” Again, the black man’s life is undervalued. Facility with language is the defining mark of intelligence. BA’s struggle with the book and his rhetorical defeat by the Old Man underline his failings as a human, relegate him to the animal realm. Murdoch’s surprise facility with Swahili impresses Face. Murdoch also does a South African accent. Face speaks French and German at various points in the film. The Old Man, presumably, is in possession of total mastery of The Word.
The unidentified Arab who turns out to be the general. The general who faked his own death. The demonized other: saboteur of the American economy. This symbolic other turns out to be a home grown cabal of military and mercenary. CIA trumps the cabal in the end. Triumph of secret government. Arab threat shown to be a misidentification. Real threat is corruption of military and government. Abuse of power in the military industrial framework.
Containers, destruction of port, collapse of global economy. Symbolic language. The A-Team seeks only honor and justice. Different values. Pike destroys ship with all containers on it. Ability and willingness to escalate conflict to a whole other level of destruction. Playing a “game changer”. What is this meant to stand for? An act of terrorism? Economic meltdown?
Only men have real power. Women are treated as objects by Face, Lynch. But Face grows up, comes to see Sosa as more than just another good time. He expands his circle of loyalty. Does the father figure approve? No; he resists all the way. Homosexual jealousy? Why? Is this characterization supposed to make us more sympathetic? Create dramatic tension? Or is it related to the holy trinity idea? The true born son of God ought to keep his mind on higher things? (But he’s so dreamy…)
What’s up with Murdoch? He is classified as insane, but how so? Just because he has no respect for rules or boundaries? Is he only with the A team because they are the baddest dudes out there and he can do the craziest shit with them? Because he craves excitement and the outlaw life?
Arizona and immigration policy. Arizona and militias. Arizona and racism. Arizona and white supremacists. Arizona and Nazis (Bolaño). Arizona and Mexico. Mexican federales are portrayed as cholos in uniform. Gangsters, hoods, criminals in uniforms. CIA is portrayed as frat boys with immunity. A team is bonded at the tattoo level. Why is the Old Man always recording voices? (Facility with The Word?) With the Mexican general in the helicopter…with Lynch…these tapes are never put to use, are they? Is it about being an honorable man, a man of his word, of The Word? The word in a Christian sense?
The Blackforest people are made to look like fascists (black shirts, brown shirts, what’s the dif?) Nobody in the A team wears a uniform. They are free to be themselves, so long as they kick ass and listen to the old man. So long as they stick to the plan. Their bond is with each other and with the plan. They are a kind of chosen people.
A team is scary. A team is propaganda for militias. A team is reaching out to vets of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and telling them the system is broken. If you work within it, you are only helping a bunch of privileged, infantile frat boys get rich while fucking over everybody else. To preserve honor, and good Christian values, (or are they Greek values? Or Roman, that is Latin values—honor, faith, family loyalty—but no—we must consider them strictly Anglo Saxon values or surely all Hell will break loose) one cannot work within the confines of the system. One must rebel to maintain the purity of the fatherland. It is totally crypto fascist propaganda.
The Match Factory Girl
“Don’t you hear that horrible screaming all around you? The screaming men call silence?” That’s from the start of Werner Herzog’s Kasper Hauser or Everyman for Himself and God Against All. (Best title, btw.). It’s a question Aki Kaurismäki has spent his career reiterating, occasionally switching it up with “can’t you hear the embittered laughter men call silence?” The Matchstick Girl is the most cynical of his films that I’ve seen and it may be the best. The Tiananmen Square massacre and the matchstick factory lend context to this tale of a young woman’s futile, half-hearted search for meaningful relationships. Dialogue is almost non-existent. The idea I got was that people succumb as mutely to the fate allotted them as the forests to the axe--both victims of a fundamentally exploitative society. (Tienanmen being the salient, contemporary example of society eating its young.) The implied notion of popular song as a substitute for individual self-expression was interesting. Is a comment being made on the social function of the cinema here?
Sisters of the Gion
Pretty compelling for 1936. Nice tracking shots through the back alleys of Kyoto’s red light district. The story of two geishas, their several patrons, and the difficulties faced by each in a world where affection and commerce are tied too closely together.
Monday, June 14, 2010
The A Team
P: Protecting the honorable values of the fatherland when no one else will. Propaganda and recruitment for crypto-fascist militias. Like looking the devil in the eye for 2 and a half hours.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
L: this was a great movie. it was quite long, I was never bored. There are some gruesome scenes (excessively so) but that would really be my only complaint. The story was interesting, the acting was good, and the movie kept up the suspense until the very end. I would recommend this movie to people who can read ("this movie has subtitles") and stomach scenes of graphic sexual assault.
P: This movie spun me out on a paranoid fantasy in which Stieg Larsson was a pen name for Roberto Bolaño or vice versa. (They both wrote about non-German Nazis and misogynistic, serial killers. They both wrote about writers trying to uncover the truth of the world, writers as detectives, writers committed to certain humanistic ideals, writers as tragic, heroic figures. They were nearly exact contemporaries; both died relatively young. Comet o think of it, maybe it'd be interesting to do a critical study of the two authors as if they were the same person.)
Anyway, this paranoid, literary fantasy soon exploded into a much more frightening geopolitical one. The ruling elite’s alarming lack of urgency concerning global warming, the Stanford prison experiment and Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority, the irrational belief in Apocalypse, 2012, rapture…It suddenly became clear to me that the human race is going to be drastically culled, and soon, according to a kind of diabolical sustainability initiative. All of which goes to say that I didn’t really give the movie much thought until now, my mind being occupied with other, more important things than mere cinema. I recommend it though, if for no other reason than because it launched me on this paranoid thrill ride and who knows, it might do the same for you.
P: This movie spun me out on a paranoid fantasy in which Stieg Larsson was a pen name for Roberto Bolaño or vice versa. (They both wrote about non-German Nazis and misogynistic, serial killers. They both wrote about writers trying to uncover the truth of the world, writers as detectives, writers committed to certain humanistic ideals, writers as tragic, heroic figures. They were nearly exact contemporaries; both died relatively young. Comet o think of it, maybe it'd be interesting to do a critical study of the two authors as if they were the same person.)
Anyway, this paranoid, literary fantasy soon exploded into a much more frightening geopolitical one. The ruling elite’s alarming lack of urgency concerning global warming, the Stanford prison experiment and Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority, the irrational belief in Apocalypse, 2012, rapture…It suddenly became clear to me that the human race is going to be drastically culled, and soon, according to a kind of diabolical sustainability initiative. All of which goes to say that I didn’t really give the movie much thought until now, my mind being occupied with other, more important things than mere cinema. I recommend it though, if for no other reason than because it launched me on this paranoid thrill ride and who knows, it might do the same for you.
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