Tag Archives: movies

Beasts of the Southern Wild: A movie review

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“Sometimes miraculous films come into being, made by people you’ve never heard of, starring unknown faces, blindsiding you with creative genius.” – Roger Ebert

I missed Beasts of the Southern Wild during its all too brief theatrical run last summer.  If you did too, I suggest you rent it.  Made on a low budget with a cast of first-time actors, notably the amazing Quvenzhané Wallis, who was only five when filming started, this movie is not like any other you’ve recently seen.  It is laced with joy while portraying  a group of have-nots on the cultural fringe as they struggle to hang on to their way of life.

Hushpuppy (Wallis) lives with her daddy, Wink (Dwight Henry), in The Bathtub, an island at sea level off New Orleans, barely protected by levees.  The Bathtub folk have nothing by the standards of “dry side” people.  They live by fishing and raising pigs and chickens.  They build homes in trees out of cast off materials and make boats out of pickup beds and empty metal drums.  They have moonshine, music, community, and the gift of celebration.

Hushpuppy talks to the animals and her mother, who is gone, and sometimes they reply.  She knows a storm is coming  Her schoolteacher tells the class about aurochs, huge prehistoric beasts.  “You got to learn to survive,” warns the teacher.  There’s a picture of ice caps in the classroom, and Hushpuppy is close enough to the world that she seems to hear them melting, seems to see the frozen aurochs stir.

southern-wild

The winds rise and the sky turns black.  The storm is never named, but we know it’s Katrina.  Salt water fills the bathtub and everything starts to die.

“I’m gonna make it right,” says Wink, but Hushpuppy sees that he’s sick.”  The aurochs are very close.  “No crying,” says Wink.  “You got to survive.”

Bathtub people look to Hushpuppy’s father as a natural leader, a role he tries to pass on to his daughter in his bluff and sometimes whisky-soaked way.  “Who da man?” he often demands.  “I’m the man,” Hushpuppy replies, but she’s also six years old.  What can she do against all the disasters taking shape in her mind as a herd of fearsome beasts?  If you can’t outrun an auroch, how do you stare it down?

Roger Ebert says, “Hushpuppy lives in desolation, and her inner resources are miraculous. She is so focused, so sure, so defiant and brave, that she is like a new generation put forward in desperate times by the human race.”

Everyone’s saying Quvenzhané Wallis is on the shortlist for a best actress nomination.  This year I can’t think of anyone more deserving.  Watch the movie and see what you think.

The Life of Pi: A movie review

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What you’ve heard about this movie is true: it’s the tale of a boy who winds up in a lifeboat in the Pacific with a Bengal tiger. It’s also true that most critics have praised The Life of Pi. I’m with them; this is a magical film.

Pi Patel livess an idyllic childhood in Pondicherry, India.  His father owns a zoo, and Pi develops a love for the animals as well as a spirituality that embraces the Hindu gods, Jesus, and Allah.

As he tries to practice all three faiths, his father, convinced of the supremacy of reason, warns that “If you believe in everything, you will end up not believing in anything at all.”  Pi’s father also demonstrates graphically that tigers are not your friend, a lesson that shakes Pi’s trust in nature.  The real blow falls after economic hardship forces Pi’s family to relinquish the zoo.  They sail for Canada with all the animals on a freighter, but a storm sinks the vessel, and Pi is the only human to survive.

What god do you pray to and what do say when your way of life and your family are suddenly gone, and you’re alone in a lifeboat with a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and a tiger named Richard Parker?  Initially, there is little time for prayer in the struggle to survive.  Soon it’s just Richard Parker and Pi.  There are cans of water and boxes of biscuits for 30 aboard the lifeboat, as well as a book on survival and a pencil that Pi uses to journal in the margins.

An optimist, Pi’s spirituality returns with expressions of gratitude and surrender as the ocean moves through her various phases, with deadly storms, cornucopias of fish and rain, and scenes of unearthly beauty.

Einstein once said the only important question is whether or not the universe is a friendly place. The adult Pi, who narrates the tale, believes it is. Was his ocean a friendly place or not? Both and neither, his story seems to say; it’s far more vast than that.

The western fantasy of objective truth leads us to believe there are true stories and false ones. The eastern view, shared at least in part by novelists and movie makers, is that our stories create our realities.

What does your heart say?  What does it lead you to believe?  That’s the question the grown-up Pi seems to asks us with his story and a half smile on his face.  It’s the same enigma the ocean and Robert Parker put to him.

The One Thing

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In my previous post, I talked about “Rosebud,” the sled that represented the unrequited desires of Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’ classic film, Citizen Kane.  I’ve been thinking a lot about metaphors for the deep yearnings that push and pull us through life, for good or ill, depending on whether they’re wise or foolish and if we know what they are.

Another of my favorite movie metaphors comes from the 1991 comedy, City Slickers. Three middle aged men, looking to reignite the passion in their lives, sign up for an old west style vacation that includes a cattle drive.  Things go wrong of course, and the dude ranch experience becomes a fight for survival, with nasty villains, a stampede, and raging rivers.

One night, after chasing stray cows into a canyon, timid Mitch (Billy Crystal) opens up to Curly (Jack Palance), the hardened trail boss.  Curly turns out to be wise as well as tough, and tells Mitch he needs to discover and follow “the one thing” that matters most in his life.

The one thing

Another phrase I love for our one thing, is “throughline,” a screenwriting term that was coined by Constantin Stanislavski, the great proponent of character acting.  A throughline propels the protagonist through a story.  It’s the core motivation that carries the hero from scene to scene and through all the gains and setbacks.

“Throughline” is great as a metaphor because it’s expected to change, just as our “one things” do in life.  Frodo initial goal is to carry the ring to Rivendell and place it in more capable hands, but just as in our lives, inner and outer events alter his goal.

Because of the election season, I recall the same dynamic in the life of Jimmie Carter.  In 1980, his goal was a second term as president.  After a resounding defeat, his life’s “through line” changed and deepened.  He threw himself into humanitarian work and extensive diplomatic travel and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.  I read two books of his theological reflections and realized that Carter’s “one thing” is a dedication to Christian values that transcends what you usually hear from politicians still trying to get elected.

“Thread” is another common image for the one thing we use to chart our course in life.  In the Greek myth, Ariadne gives Theseus a ball of thread to find his way out of the labyrinth after slaying the monster within.

Ariadne and Theseus by Niccolo Bambini, Italian. Date unknown. Public domain.

I’ve already quoted my favorite thread image on this blog, but will do it again.  It’s William Stafford’s poem, “The Way it Is,” 1993:

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

There may be people who know from the start what matters in their lives, but for the rest of us, there’s a lot of trial and error.  Awareness of “time’s unfolding” is what gives such reflections their force.  What is the one thing or few things I truly care about?  Is there any question more important than this?  Next time I will write about a man whose entire life is an exemplary answer.

Rosebud

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It couldn’t be a finer autumn day in north-central California.  Going to vote this morning, in the golden-tinged sunlight, it was easy to bask in the hope of new beginnings, in the hope that difficult times will call forth a renewed vision and strength of purpose in those we elect.  Perhaps “ordinary” men and women will prove to be extra-ordinary in our times as they have done in the past.

Yet this week I’ve been thinking of Citizen Kane, for I fear that many who run for political office share the motivation of Charles Foster Kane, in what some have called the greatest American movie ever made.  Kane had a hole in his heart that no amount of money, or women, or power, or things could fill.

After his death, one of his friends told a reporter, “All he ever wanted in life was love.  That’s Charlie’s story, how he lost it.  You see, he never had any to give.”

How could he?  When he was a boy, his mother essentially sold him into public life for a comfortable yearly stipend.  The last word on Kane’s dying lips was “Rosebud,” the name of his boyhood sled, which represented the dream of freedom and warmth he could never force the world to yield up.

I think we have to know something about our own Rosebud, the hole in our own hearts, to keep our lives from careening out of control.  If we haven’t gone a few rounds with our private angels and demons, we might even enter politics for all the wrong reasons!

Joseph Campbell phrased it in terms of the Grail Quest.  In youth we may gain a vision or intimation of a Great Good, beyond the power of youth to bear.  We spend our lives on the trail of this Boon which we have seen and lost.  Something like that appears to happen to nations when the youthful vision gets lost, for the old stories make clear that when the Grail is hidden, the land becomes barren.

It’s a good day to pray for our new leaders, whoever they turn out to be, for “us and them” is just a destructive illusion; no matter what we may wish, we are all in this together.

Cloud Atlas: a movie review

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Synopsis by author David Mitchell: “An exploration of how the actions of individual lives impact one another in the past, present and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.”

***

One viewing isn’t sufficient for a comprehensive “review” of a movie like this.  Like Roger Ebert, who called Cloud Atlas “one of the most ambitious films ever made,” I knew before it was half over that I wanted to watch it again.  Different critics have praised and panned the movie.  I want to offer a brief synopsis and weigh in with a solid two thumbs up.

It’s harder to move around in time in movies than in books. Inception 2010, notably altered the linear flow of time, with four levels of dreaming that unfolded simultaneously, yet fundamentally it was structured as a frame-tale.  Scheherazade did the same thing centuries ago in the The Arabian Nights.

British author, David Mitchell tried something more ambitious in his novel, Cloud Atlas 2004.  Six stories take place in different times and places, with implications that past, present, and future interconnect in ways that are too complex for a linear narrative.  For one thing, Mitchell says that the main characters in the different tales that bear an unusual birthmark are reincarnations of the same character.  Somni~451, the clone-turned-visionary in the dystopian future scene voices what I take to be the core theme of the movie:  “Separation is an illusion.  All our lives are interconnected.”

Counter to what I expected, the different stories were not hard to follow.  Anyone interested in fresh ways of imagining novels and movies should not miss Cloud Atlas.  I’m pretty sure you’ll want to see it more than once.

Copyrights and the Olympic Opening Ceremony

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Since my July 24 post on copyrights http://wp.me/pYql4-2fA generated significant interest, I want to direct you to another blog post discussing the probable copyright violations of Danny Boyle in his fanciful opening ceremony at the Olympics.

In her article “Reclaiming Mary Poppins and the Characters We Love,” Maggie O’Toole discusses way in which corporate interests have successfully lengthened and strengthened the rules in their own interest.  Maggie says:

“In this bit of public theater, director Danny Boyle reclaimed the British people’s ownership of their children’s literature, the rights to which have long since been sold off to various corporate interests…In doing so, he challenged the idea that these characters, or any characters, can belong to someone.”

Despite my recent musings on copyright, the idea never occurred to me.  Please read the full article.  If you love these characters, you will enjoy it!

http://maggienotmargaret.com/2012/07/28/reclaiming-mary-poppins-and-the-characters-we-love/

Notes on Superman and The Superman Song

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It doesn’t take much reflection on superheroes (see my previous Batman post) to remember Superman.  For me, he always brings to mind a strange, funny, and poignant song by The Crash Test Dummies from their 1991 debut album, “The Ghosts That Haunt Me.”

What the song underscores is an intuition that has shaped my approach to characters in fiction:  they need to be larger than life but flawed and human too.  Though the plot needs super-strength, without his kryptonite allergy, the guy in the cape would be pretty boring.  Besides, it’s Clark Kent who we bond with.  Holding tight to his geek persona, in the days before geeks were cool, Clark sacrificed his hopes for human happiness out of dedication to a public that could never be allowed to know who to thank.  If you like stories of unrequited love and hopeless triads, Superman, Lois, and alter-ego, Clark, had it going decades before Twilight.

Even more poignant than fiction was the life of Christopher Reeve (1952-2004), one many actors – and I think the best – who played the Man of Steel.

Reeve as Superman

Reeve became a paraplegic in 1995, after a spinal injury suffered when he was thrown from a horse. For the rest of his life, he lobbied on behalf of spinal-cord injury treatment and stem-cell research. In overcoming the kind of loss that is most people’s worst nightmare, Reeve found the steel of courage in the depths of his human misfortune.

Reeve after his injury

Just like Clark Kent, in the last years of his life, Christopher Reeve lived a selfless life, dedicated to other people’s good.

The Crash Test Dummies had a similar intuition about Superman several year’s before Reeve’s accident, one both deeper and richer than what the word, “superhero” generally implies:

Folks said his family were all dead
Their planet crumbled but Superman, he forced himself
To carry on, forget Krypton, and keep going.

Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy
And sometimes I despair the world will never see
Another man like him

Holy Pathology, Batman!

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Batman, originally Bat-man or The Batman, first appeared in Detective Comics #27, in May, 1939, the creation of artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger. Popular from the start, Batman had his own comic by 1940.

The Caped Crusader joined the screen actor’s guild in the 60’s, with a campy TV show that altered some of my speech patterns forever (Observe the title of this post, Robin).

When the show ended, so did much of Batman’s popularity. In 1969,writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Neal Adams tried to return Batman to his roots as  “grim avenger of the night.”  Beginning with Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, several big budget movie series have portrayed Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego in a dark and dangerous world – it’s always night in Gotham City.

Batman Begins, 2005

As if this intrepid crime fighter didn’t have enough on his plate, some are raising questions about his mental health.  And when you think about it – what’s with the addiction to danger, the cape, the muscle suit, and probably lifts in the shoes? His car says size matters, but he can’t hang onto a girlfriend. His deepest relationship is with his butler.  He’s certainly stuck in black and white thinking – people are good or bad, nowhere a shade of gray.  Maybe he hasn’t worked through all of his childhood issues. Maybe he should ask his doctor about anti-depressants.  Or viagra.  Join an online dating service and settle down as a hedge-fund manager, like a respectable member of the 1%.

But no, says psychologist, Robin Rosenberg, author of What’s the Matter with Batman?  The boy’s all right.

In a recent NPR interview, Rosenberg, who blogs about superheroes for Psychology Today, said: “Bruce Wayne is a really clever man who has both high intelligence and high EQ, emotional quotient.” http://tinyurl.com/6npy226.

Rosenberg turns the spotlight on us, asking why we assume there is something wrong with Batman.  “People who are truly selfless, who have given so much of themselves, are confusing to most of us. And I think some of us, in cynical moments, say, ‘There must be something the matter with someone who would do that.'”

I’d modify her words to say that nowadays, we think a selfless billionaire is weird.  Nothing new about this sentiment.  In 1939, the year Batman emerged, Woody Guthrie wrote “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd.”

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

Change “fountain pen” to “computer” and the statement rings as true as it did 73 years ago.  The biggest difference now, as the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, comes out this Friday, is that most of us probably find it even harder to believe a super-rich man could be our friend.

In a post on the Psychology Today superhero blog, Robin Rosenberg wrote:  “The stories of superheroes and heroes resonate with us because they tap into some essential truths about human nature, about our yearnings and aspirations, our demons and dilemmas, our fears and our frustrations.”  http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superheroes.

Superheroes are archetypes.  They’ve been present in our stories for millennia – only the outfits and details change.  Heracles didn’t need to change clothes in a phone booth, because he didn’t work at The Daily Planet.

Heroes and superheroes are a secular expression of something everyone knows when they wake at the hour of the wolf – without a Higher Power, or higher powers, we’re screwed.  There’s nothing accidental about the number of superhero movies so far this year.  And some of them are a lot of fun!

Enjoy this new incarnation of The Caped Crusader!