Ida Review

I wrote my first piece for The Ithaca Voice, a new online venture founded by my good friend and former Sun colleague Jeff Stein. I am not going to copy-paste what I write there to my blog, for reasons of traffic and professionalism. But I'll provide a link of course - RIGHT HERE - and I hope you all will read it. This is a great film - 4.5/5 star material.

Governors Ball 2014 Wrap-Up

Vampire Weekend, GovBallNYC Stage

Governors Ball

Randall's Island, New York City

June 6-8, 2014

Her eyes bulged out of their sockets when she saw him. She pointed her finger at his face and screamed, “You’re here! You’re fucking here!!!!” Her blushing friend pulled her arm along as the girl craned back her neck and cackled to the sky. At a loss to make sense of what just happened, I looked at the mystery man to my left that was the target of this strange outburst. He was wearing a red and white striped sweater and beanie. Like Waldo. Where’s Waldo. He was right next to me. 

For its fourth year, Governors Ball attracted what must be the largest congregation of carefree twentysomethings to ever descend onto Randall’s Island, and sure, there were times when our numbers proved overwhelming: waiting on line for entry, water, restrooms, $16 lobster rolls. But as an experience to pocket and carry with me, Governors Ball 2014 was a great time, thanks to both the musicians and the good-humored, damn inspiring masses that showed up for the love of music and a good time.

Strolling into the Gotham Tent Friday afternoon to see Washed Out, my first set of the festival, I saw Jeff Goldblum. Not in the flesh, but the next best thing: A cardboard cut-out, roughly four feet wide, of the bare-chested actor splayed across a table, an image familiar to anyone who grew up watching Jurassic Park (so everyone in attendance). Some friends brought multiple copies of Sexy Goldblum so they could find each other in crowds, and one even had a blow-up T. Rex that he used to chase around the others. It was Exhibit A of the festival’s hilarious signage; other winners included a Steve Buscemi head, a screaming Schwarzenegger from Total Recall and a Face-Off poster folded down the middle, so we could admire either Nic Cage or John Travolta in profile. Seeing any of these stupid faces waving above the throngs of festivalgoers added a strain of irreverence, community, even mythology to the long weekend.

When Julian Casablancas + The Voidz, a spin-off band he is set to release an album with later this year, took to the main stage Friday afternoon, an already packed crowd bum rushed forward to destroy any lingering fantasies of personal space. Which was just fine, since Julian inspires that kind of fanaticism and his short set offered an opportunity for Strokes fans to chill together before the real thing the next day. When the synthesizers rolled into “Instant Crush,” Julian’s hit with Daft Punk last year, everyone mumbled the unintelligible lyrics along with him. Hunched over, his hands wrapped around a microphone and a vocoder, Julian looked pained as he belted the high-pitched, “I don’t understand!” refrain twice. Not long after, some guy collapsed to my right, likely due to dehydration. After he came to, an onlooker deadpanned, “Julian is just so overpowering.”

Outkast summoned an unbelievable mass of people for their headliner set Friday night, and they did not phone it in, as they reportedly did at Coachella in April. Emerging from a transparent cube, André and Big Boi launched into “B.O.B.,” their motormouth classic that ended, of course, with the crowd jumping up and down yelling, “Power music electric revival!” And while Janelle Monáe bounced on-stage to shake it like a Polaroid picture during “Hey Ya!,” I must mention TV on the Radio, which played a furious set just before Outkast across the park on the Big Apple Stage. A homecoming of sorts, the Brooklynites tore through classics with the help of lots of red spotlights and a dude who looked like Jesus playing the tambourine, trombone — everything really. “Halfway Home,” the opening track off their greatest album Dear Science, barreled through any audience fatigue, while “Wolf Like Me” inspired a mosh pit that nearly broke my best friend’s glasses. He was all smiles, of course.

Phoenix, GovBallNYC Stage

First thing Saturday, I caught the last two songs from Deafheaven, the post-rock metal band from San Francisco behind 2013’s Sunbather. They carry this mystique with them, in part due to the way some songs start with spaced-out guitars and not so much segue as violently rupture into a heavy metal maelstrom for the song’s remaining duration. Then there’s George Clarke, the band’s lead screamer, sporting an all-black button-down and raising his hands in the air like a fascist leader. His hypnotic presence could not contrast more with the jovial antics of Chance the Rapper, the next star to rule the Gotham Tent. In a tight Superman t-shirt, Chance had the packed house in his hand as he conducted sing-alongs to “Pusha Man,” from his breakout mixtape Acid Rap, and Ziggy Marley’s “Believe in Yourself,” the theme song from Arthur (yes, that Arthur). With thousands of happy millennials before him, Chance used a break between songs to conclude, “This is the best concert of all time.”

A sunbaked crowd kept chill as it grew in anticipation of Disclosure’s Saturday afternoon set. This hot electronic duo is comprised of two English brothers, one of whom is younger than me (sigh). Pulling from the hits off their 2013 debut Settle, they did not do much on-stage but at least kept the rest of the crowd moving. Aluna Francis joined them for “White Noise,” and a merciful breeze complimented the trance bridge of “You & Me.” As my friend and I ducked out early to get a spot for The Strokes, I heard a French girl gushing, “I can’t believe how the music is in my body. It’s amazing.” Call it heavy bass, ecstasy or just really, really good music. Call it all those things.

The Strokes were The Strokes: They were awesome — what more do you want from me? They covered it all: “Reptilia,” “Take It or Leave It,” “Hard to Explain,” “Last Nite,” “You Only Live Once,” which Julian introduced with a laugh when he said, “YOLO, that’s right.” The calibration of the main stage speakers brought out Albert Hammond Jr.’s locked-in rhythm guitar, the secret ingredient to their music’s good vibes. I am still unsure if I like how their recent material sounds like a SEGA video game, but The Strokes of old were on stage late Saturday afternoon and all was good.

Quick sidebar: I did not attend The Naked and The Famous’ Saturday show, but I overheard an anecdote from someone who did. As disembodied hands smacked beach balls across the thousands waiting for Jack White, this guy to my left talked of a stray volleyball blindsiding people at that earlier set. Apparently, the ball bludgeoned a number of heads because the victims were so infuriated that they immediately pegged it in some random direction. The story could be apocryphal, and I do hope it is, but the image (and sound!) of a volleyball ricocheting through a horde of heads is so funny to me that I could care less about investigating if it is actually true.

While Jack White took his time finding his way onto the main stage, this adorable Indian dance troupe performed on the grass, grainy footage of which was projected simultaneously on the Jumbotron. The Hindi lyrics sure confused some, but this little gesture prompted me to look around and realize how I was part of one of the most diverse, in all respects except age, crowds I have ever seen. Jack White united all of us to bleed from our ears, equally, as he let loose a set of rock and roll spanning from Lazaretto, his latest solo album, to White Stripes classics like “Seven Nation Army.” With a stoic face and 19th century goatee, Fats Kaplin proved to be the night’s secret weapon, as he accompanied White on fiddle, pedal steel guitar and it-looks-like-he’s-a-Jedi theremin. At this point, I have seen White’s face on so many Rolling Stone covers that I forgot he was, like, legit. Thanks, bud, for correcting me on that one.

Sunday afternoon boasted an Odd Future double bill, starting with Earl Sweatshirt on the Honda Stage. “Governors Ball has AIDS, bro,” Earl said, because, you know, he’s Earl. Tyler, The Creator and Jasper Dolphin joined him on stage, and the three of them transported across the field to the Big Apple Stage for Tyler’s set immediately following. Although I rarely listen to his music, I dig Tyler’s sense of humor, even if it makes me sick. When he botched the opening for a song, he growled in his deep voice, “Can everyone boo me for fucking up the set? I’m an idiot. I’m sorry.” He then took aim at the VIP section of the field, saying, “Your rich parents pay for this shit? Fuck you guys.” Tyler’s flippant sensibility has led to regrettable moments in the past, and I still have no clue what to do with a song like “My Bitch Suck Dick,” but he’s a man of the people. At the very least, two white girls no taller than five foot four moshing with Jansport backpacks on during “Yonkers” embodied all the contradictions to Odd Future’s appeal.

Buscemi waiting for James Blake, Honda Stage

James Blake was by far the weirdest experience of the weekend. I’ve been a fan of this guy since his debut album dropped my senior year of high school, and yet I totally get why someone would not like him. Blake’s sparse post-dubstep delicacies do not share a lot in common with Disclosure and next to nothing with Skrillex, both acts that graced the Honda Stage before Blake’s Sunday 6:45 set. His music makes use of silence and simple percussive loops, so when the Jumbotron cut to a girl drifting off over the front-row barricade, the crowd erupted in ironic cheers. He won back the lizard brains with a groovy jam called “Voyeur,” off his last album Overgrown, and cut through the disrespectful chatter with hits “Limit To Your Love” and “Retrograde.” He capped his time with an a cappella rendition of “Measurements,” which he prefaced with a plea for silence. Every audience has a few assholes, so there were some catcalls committed to the looping vocals he recorded on the fly, but by the song’s end, when a whole choir emerged from this one man’s voice, Randall’s Island silenced for a few precious seconds to marvel at the rarest of festival phenomena: grace.

The Governors Ball programmers ended the festival with two of New York’s own. First was Interpol, strumming through hits like “Evil” and, fittingly, “NYC” at the Big Apple Stage. Opposite Axwell Λ Ingrosso on the Honda Stage, Vampire Weekend capped the night for a jolly sea of bodies young and old (so here, meaning around 30). Getting “Diane Young” out of the way first, they played pretty much everything a fan would want to hear. Slowed down and augmented for improvisation, “Ya Hey” flaunted the weirdest chorus in indie pop, in case you forgot. Ezra Koenig milked the beauty of “Hannah Hunt” for all it is worth, with a cutesy intro full of suspenseful pauses, just as he should have. In the middle of “Cousins,” a conga line at least one hundred bodies long snaked away from the front rows and onto the grass. I asked my friend, rather boneheadedly, why so many people would do this and forfeit the nicest spots in the audience. A Vampire Weekend skeptic, he nevertheless shut me up with his response, “To be a part of something.”

It was something all right. When the spritely bliss of “Walcott” came to an end, the lights went dark but, without missing a beat, Sinatra crooned “New York, New York” from the speakers. As tens of thousands of us turned our backs to the stage and made our way back to civilization, we sang along. Unexpected musical accompaniment came from the beer cans, littered about the pavement and island grass, that clanged together when our shambling feet kicked into them. The sound of hollow aluminum scraping and crunching against the ground roared louder and louder, nearly drowning out Ol’ Blue Eyes. It was not a pretty sound, but its effect — with Sinatra, the voices singing along, this city we revere, the chemical and communal intoxication of the weekend — moved me terribly.

I looked up to see fireworks lighting up the sky. Later I would discover that they were synced to Axwell Λ Ingrosso’s ongoing DJ set across the lawn, not to “New York, New York,” but the matter of intent made little difference. Here was the lot of us, a collection of know-nothing young people, drunk or high and next to broke after the long weekend, and here we were laughing and singing. It was our filthy Eden for a few days, and it was now time to go home.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

A Million Ways to Die in the West Review

A Million Ways to Die in the West
Directed by Seth MacFarlane
Released in 2014

Albert Stark (Seth MacFarlane) opens the door of his frontier cabin house to find his father reading a book and mother embroidering in their usual chairs. The father looks up to his son and barks, “You’re late!” Cut back to Albert, who responds, “For what?” Cut back to the father who looks down at his book and grumbles, “Fair enough.”

That is the only joke in A Million Ways to Die in the West that works as is. It is not a feat of genius, nor is it in the least bit complex. In fact, it is funny because it is so stupidly simple: We get four shots, assembled in typical shot reverse shot fashion, leading to the punchline that life in the Old West is dull — there is nothing to do. Like any good joke, it is best told through its original form, which, here, is film. It’s better to watch it than read me describe it, you know? Nothing else in this movie can claim that passable distinction.

There are other crippling problems in A Million Ways to Die in the West, but I just cannot get over the incompetency of, if not disregard to its visuals. Why is MacFarlane, who co-wrote and directed this project, riffing on the Western anyhow? From Edwin Porter to John Ford to Sergio Leone to James Mangold (who remade 3:10 to Yuma in 2008), the genre has survived for over a century now, and throughout that time its directors have made names for themselves off the business they put on-screen: Monument Valley, Woody Strode drinking water from his hat, John Wayne walking from the right side of the frame to the left.

The credits for this film overlay old-timey font on top of sweeping shots of Southwestern rocks and desert. Clichéd, but it tries. From there, we first see Albert when he enters an empty stretch of street to face off some gunslinger looking to settle a debt. We get no spatial sense of this classic Western town, or the onlookers who turn out to be significant characters, before a static, distant shot chains us to watch Albert deliver a stand-up routine about the gunslinger’s colloquial language (In response to being called “yellow”: “I mean that’s kind of racist to our hard-working friends in the Far East, right guys?”). Louis C.K. shoots a more dynamic stand-up special on the fly than MacFarlane does with a studio behind him and a $40 million budget. And why, by the way, am I watching stand-up right now? Didn’t I pay to see a movie? The majority of the humor here could be delivered through a podcast.

This should not come as much surprise. MacFarlane has succeeded, commercially at least, as an animator totally uninterested in animation. Family Guy expresses nothing through its infinite possibilities of shapes or color: Most often a Family Guy joke consists of a guy on one side of the frame and another next to him. One delivers an overlong, repetitious pop culture reference or homophonic monologue (Stewie’s “Mama! Mami!” bit) while everything on screen, save for the mouth doing the damage, remains frozen in place. It is anti-visual comedy that looks even worse blown up on the big screen, to say nothing of the bastardization of Western iconography on display here. It explains why we have a graceless dance scene that violates Film School 101 continuity rules, or why an apparent on-location shoot leaves us with outdoor scenes that are laughably underlit. But hey I’m laughing, right?

In his review for Vulture, David Edelstein concedes, “Some of the jokes do land — maybe one in four.” I’d agree with that ratio, and take that for the backhanded praise that it is. Anything with the cranky dad is worthwhile, and when Albert reassures Indians with the “native” phrase “Mila Kunis,” MacFarlane briefly earns his stupidity. I should say that I laugh more often, and at smarter jokes I will not soon forget, when I browse Twitter for one or two minutes. I prefer humor that has some thread, narratively if not thematically, running through it, and the randomness of the delivery guarantees that most of the jokes will enter your one ear and leave out the next without visiting the brain or even the stomach before they’re gone to join the tumbleweeds.

I have not yet covered rudimentary plot summary in this review, so let me get that out of the way: Albert loses girlfriend Louise (Amanda Seyfried) because he’s not manly enough, mopes about that for a bit, and then mysterious Anna (Charlize Theron) enters town to lift his spirits. Anna married the rapey villain (Liam Neeson, in a part written against his strengths) when she was nine because she did not want to be “one of those 15-year-old spinsters” — never mind that the marriage was, in all likelihood, out of her control. Giovanni Ribisi plays a Bible-toting virgin courting a prostitute (Sarah Silverman), while Neil Patrick Harris twirls his moustache. The story is hardly there, which would be okay if this film did not lapse into laugh-free sentimentality when it strains to make a point.

That point being? Seth MacFarlane is awesome. Louise is just a bitch for not appreciating Albert’s soft-spoken goodness, and Anna wants Albert to know that he is “a real catch,” funny, handsome, the perfect man. I like to think I would have taken issue with this by default, but it is hard to ignore this nice-guys-rule-amirite woman shaming in light of the recent violence at University of California, Santa Barbara. That egregious, extratextual parallel notwithstanding, why is MacFarlane using his female characters to congratulate himself? Artists tend to be neurotic creatures, and comedians doubly so. Why, then, is the target on everyone but him? Reading those last two sentences back over, I think I just answered my own question.

Final Verdict:

1.5 Stars Out of 5

*For an entertaining tutorial on how to do visual comedy right, watch Tony Zhou’s essay on the films of Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz).

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

The Immigrant Review

The Immigrant
Directed by James Gray
Released in 2014

A title like The Immigrant, announced in large, white-on-black text that bookends the first and last frames of the film, casts a wide net. America is a nation of immigrants, we are told, and so a movie with such a bold, generic name should aspire to convey that common experience. Thick accents, obscure diseases, the Statue of Liberty. The Immigrant has all that, as would your Hallmark movie or Oscar-tuned period piece. But what makes The Immigrant a great film — certainly a highlight of the year so far, especially amid this artistically bankrupt season — is how it so studiously and tenderly trains it focus on its suffering protagonist. She does not stand in for some broad concept of the archetypal American immigrant; she is only herself, and a tormented, fully realized person full of contradictions she is.

Ewa Cybulski (Marion Cotillard) arrives at Ellis Island after a long voyage from Poland. It is 1921, and the Great War wasted her country and family. All she has is her sister, Magda (Angela Sarafyan), and even then not for long, since Magda looks ill from the moment we first see her and the callous doctors there herd her along into quarantine. Only five minutes in, Ewa has already felt hope and suffered loss, a cycle that will recur throughout the film. We catch a quick shot of Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix) eyeing Ewa from afar, and so we know why he swoops in to sponsor her, before the officials can deport her. The high of finding a friend, with money and resources, gives way to unease when he shames her into dancing at his cabaret club and, quietly but insistently, coerces her into prostitution.

The conflict of this film boils down to a modern woman trying to survive in pre-modern times. To paraphrase Amy Poehler, no one plans on being a prostitute. Before she hits the pillow her first night in Bruno’s apartment, Ewa instinctively grabs a blade from a coal bucket by her bed. The camera follows this movement so naturally, smoothly that we immediately grasp Ewa’s history, fear and sense of self-worth — no dialogue necessary. Ewa stands erect, alert, with her arms to her sides and eyes darting from face to face. She does not enter America fooling herself that she has now found peace; she arms herself from the beginning. As both Bruno and the girls in his company push her to loosen up, and as she faces a steep price to save her ailing sister, she begins to drop her guard. She loses herself in absinthe and sees an advantage in returning Bruno’s clammy gestures of courtship. She opens herself up, and yet she is adamant when she says, “I am not nothing,” to a kowtowing prostitute. Marrying agency with prosperity — in her situation, with her acquaintances, with her looks — is a quixotic dream.

If this all sounds sad, know that the movie is, yeah, quite sad. But it’s not cheap, nor is it fake. Director James Gray (We Own the Night) takes cues from melodrama but restrains himself. Chris Spelman’s emotional score stays quiet, never drowning a moment. Cinematographer Darius Khondji (Amour, Midnight in Paris) absorbs all the rich period detail before him with filmic grain and lots of haze, not unlike Bruno Delbonnel’s work on Inside Llewyn Davis last year. But Gray never force-feeds us this beauty or makes, say, an establishing shot of Manhattan’s Lower East Side an event in itself. Many bustling shots that ostensibly required a lot of planning last no longer than a couple seconds. I am reminded of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, or at least what the great critic Dave Kehr said of it: “A brief glance is all we are given of a particular composition, and then Malick is off to something else, rarely granting us the leisure to contemplate and assimilate the images he puts before us.” Here, this briskness affords this two-hour film a tremendous pace, which never sags and does not seem to waste a frame. Most importantly, this inspired editing style, executed by John Axelrad and Kayla Emter, burrows us into Ewa’s head: The color, noise and stench of the city overpower her, but she can’t be bothered. She’s got other matters to sort out.

Marion Cotillard has long been a captivating screen presence and her Ewa may just be her most lived-in performance yet. There is a moment of transcendence when Ewa, in centered close-up, pours her soul out to a priest during confession. Either the camera lifts slightly up or she drops her head slightly down, but even as we see less of her face and all the business on it, her voice gains volume and we sense all that latent strength inside. The camera flirts with a god’s point of view before returning to its original, centered composition. This incredible cinematic moment takes a stereotypical sign of weakness — a woman baring herself, sins and all — and redirects it back to Ewa, for her to re-affirm her right to happiness without a god thumbing his nose in disapproval. This is how a film earns its sincerity.

With his co-star from The Master no longer with us, Joaquin Phoenix has a claim to the throne of greatest living (and working) actor. “Damaged” is a word applicable to almost any performance of his, and here we are reminded also of how unpredictable he can be. Like Paul Thomas Anderson, Gray lets him move around the frame or else follow him with tracking shots. He explodes one moment and drops to a forlorn whisper the next. Bruno Weiss reminds me of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, in how Phoenix enchants us to sympathize with a psychopath, even while we are fully aware of how manipulative and violent he can be. Bruno, like all memorable literary characters, is complicated.

Bruno’s rage contrasts with the romantic ease of Emil (Jeremy Renner), a handsome magician who falls for Ewa when he firsts see her and throws a life raft, to a perfect life, her way. But where a sappy film would raise him as some angel next to Bruno the brute, Emil boasts in the face of his enemies and believes his own pathological lies. Most worryingly, he never asks Ewa for her input on really anything at all, and certainly not on their plan to run away together to the west. He promises a paradise only possible in his head, an ideal conglomeration of the American Dream and Manifest Destiny that this film patiently, and never snobbishly, disowns.

Ewa will go down as a classic character of the movies. The America before her presents an abundance of options: it’s just that they all seem to barrel down to similar outcomes. Life with Bruno, or life with Emil? That’s not really the question here. She just wants to be happy, something she vocalizes at one point, something we are not sure is even possible. But The Immigrant is open, alive and humble enough that none of this comes across as doom-and-gloom cynicism. It closes with one of those staggeringly perfect final shots, the particulars I will leave for you to discover. Know that it, in my mind, aspires to depict the Heraclitus aphorism that “the path up and down are one and the same.” It surrenders to interpretation, and it is a rare thing when a film can leave so much unfinished and still seal a silencing, spiritual closure.

Final Verdict:

4.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Tropical Malady Review

This is an essay I wrote on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady, a movie I liked so much that this critical analysis sounds more like a laudatory review, by its end.

An Almost Fatal Spell of Tropical Malady

“I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake me up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kinds of films I like.” — Abbas Kiarostami

I like – love – Kiarostami, so I agree with the sentiment behind this quote. I do not think it is a stretch to apply it to the work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and his 2004 film Tropical Malady. Watching it late at night on a comfy loveseat, I cannot deny the soporific quality to a soldier’s wordless journey through a dreary jungle, where rain falls and canopy dwellers drone on and on across a hypnotic aural ambiance. But because this is the second half of the film, following the loose if still narrative-bound and cliché-ridden love story of the first half, this slog does not need to make sense or be exciting to move us terribly, ineffably, irrevocably. The juxtaposition between orthodox tale of courtship and mystical, lyrical allegory affects the viewer on a subconscious level, where the associations can stay and fester and grow in significance for days and weeks after first viewing. That it does without analyzing it, reading it. So while it is not the most natural endeavor to break a movie like this down, paying attention to its visual form and parallels in narrative helps translate a hard-to-place but unforgettable experience into powerful, lasting lessons.

Tropical Malady opens with a scene of merriment, of soldiers smiling and taking proto-selfies. The camera adopts a handheld point of view akin to some unseen participant in the moment. It does not tilt downward so much as walk back a step or two to catch a glimpse of a flailing arm attached to what we realize is most definitely a corpse. A dissonance between emotion and context hits us, and we are not sure how to really react. The falseness of the human face — how it can never convey what we feel within — comes up again and again throughout the film, especially whenever two make eye contact. In that absence, Apichatpong finds truth in nature, landscape and, most crucially, juxtaposition. The film cuts from this embodied perspective to an extreme long shot of the soldiers traversing the heath, corpse in tow. The considerable duration of this shot, as well as its distance, stillness and sonic quietude, allows us to process the soldiers’ demoralizing actions just prior. A naked man, alone, stalks the brush not far away. From the very beginning, we know that things are not as they seem.

The human smile, an icon of romantic cinema, betrays its emptiness in Tropical Malady. When the soldiers eat dinner at Tong’s family house, one of them eyes his sister with blatant intent. She returns the gaze with a suggestive licking of her spoon. Mother looks from man to daughter in disbelief, and we giggle because we know, as she does, that these two aren’t thinking of love —they want something easier. Meanwhile, the film’s protagonist, Keng, looks up to the sky as he occupies the lowest fringes of the frame, and then he does something odd: he looks at us. Well, maybe just over the camera lens, but he seems to enlist us, somehow, in this encounter. This reading only gains more traction with the next shot, of Tong, in profile, averting Keng’s eyes and looking awkward while doing it. We can attest to the intimacy of Keng’s gaze, and Tong avoids it not just because he is shy or confused about his orientation or whatever — he avoids it because he does not think there’s any substance behind that focused stare. Keng is not for real, right now, he thinks. Do not forget that Tong walks around with a forced mask of a smile for most of his screen time, a smile he sticks with because it beats nothing. He sure feels something warm inside when he spends time with Keng — their romance is real — even if that feeling does not come across on his face. But the condescending way he sniffs Keng’s hand, later, and licks it after Keng’s sincere sign of affection, and proceeds to exit the whole movie, confirms Tong’s distrust in genuine, loving two-way contact.

This distrust in intimacy as a sign of love — and, by extension, the existence of true love, itself — emerges as the film’s primary thematic struggle. On first viewing, I may have missed some nuances of the jungle-set half, but I know it culminates in that arresting shot reverse shot sequence between Keng and the tiger. Sensing that the tiger in the tree is a reincarnation of Tong, with the same memories and feelings for him (“I miss you, soldier”), Keng quivers at the sight. His one hand trembles with a knife, while the other shines a flashlight on the tiger’s face, so that Keng can study Tong’s gaze now, in his atavistic form, so direct and uncompromising. The tables have turned, with Tiger-Tong as sincere, to a prelapsarian degree, and Keng as conflicted. Tiger-Tong forces him to play in the gamble that is love, where committing oneself to another requires the destruction of the self, in hopes that it will sublimate to some higher unity. 

Is true love not so? If your devotion is serious, you will embrace your lover not only physically but spiritually: in an intertwining of your mind and soul with his or hers. Baring yourself in such a vulnerable way can lead you to a divine plane of existence, or it could leave you a mess of body parts and shredded clothing in the corner of some tiger’s den. Either way, it is your choice. Either way, you must destroy to create something better. Keng wrestles with this paradox, to some extent, for he bows to the tiger with the words, “Monster, I give you my spirit, my flesh and my memories.” 

Monster. Tiger-Tong returns Keng’s gaze with the severity that long eluded him and Keng responds by calling him a monster. Only a monster could demand such sacrifice. The rest of us are upright and civilized, and have no clue what he means. Thankfully we have this film, for us, in our seated solitude, to tap into and discover, through the irreducible language of cinema, the stakes, beauty and music of human connection. 

Talkin' World War III Blues in Kurosawa's Ran

This is an essay I wrote for a class I took on Shakespeare adaptations. I talk about Akira Kurosawa's unlikely modernization of King Lear via Ran.

Like any non-English adaptation of Shakespeare, Ran has both the privilege and the heavy burden to use the original text as a chassis, not a blueprint. Instead of translating King Lear’s verse to Japanese or condensing the plot to CliffNotes, Akira Kurosawa’s film reimagines the story in a country that has taken part in and suffered the most horrific practices of warfare. While the medieval setting may lend credence to Ben Jonson’s oft-mentioned praise of Shakespeare, that “He was not of an age, but for all time,” Ran derives much of its import from its context. Looking back on the Second World War that Kurosawa lived through, the film condemns the violence of the modern world through advanced, often overwhelming filmmaking techniques.

If King Lear can be boiled down to the idea that the will to power usurps family commitment and basic decency, then Ran goes so far to say that the will to power, and the entrenched systems of power built atop it, breed pure chaos. This theme comes to the fore when Tango, the Kent equivalent, offers provisions to Hidetora, the Lear figure, and his men. In a medium shot, Tango bows before him, hoping to make peace, and raises his eyes after enduring an awkward silence. Instead of cutting to a medium shot of Hidetora, via a typical shot reverse shot sequence, the film frustrates us with an extreme long shot. On the far right of the widescreen frame, Tango continues to raise his head while on the far left, Hidetora stares down the hill, his body frozen like a statue. He does not seem to be processing Tango’s charity. Two umbrellas in the foreground roughly split the frame into thirds, and their presence brings to mind the heat punishing Hidetora’s bald scalp at the moment. The delirious, desiccated Hidetora holds the most tenuous nominal authority over this gathering, and this extreme long shot shrinks him to actual scale. 

Yet Hidetora still has power, for a little longer, on this otherwise beautiful, cloudless day. Those subordinates kneeling on the brittle white gravel look to him, worried by his silence, while miles of forest stretch across the background. Kurosawa’s meticulous framing does not hide the natural splendor of this setting, a huge contrast from Peter Brook’s austere adaptation, but it also stresses the heat and void and lifelessness of this anti-oasis where the humans reside. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki informs this composition and the greater film, where death can be felt before the armies, with their arquebuses and cannons, enter the scene. In the famous sequence of painterly carnage soon after this scene, these forces destroy not only Hidetora’s men but each other, along with their codes of honor. When Hidetora, here on the gravel, waves his hand and rashly orders the destruction of a peasant village, and the blurs of soldier bodies whiz by in front of his face, he perpetuates this chaos, even if, and especially because, he is too oblivious and senile to grasp the consequences of such action. He bombs his own people when one gifts him food, practically razing all circles of life to the ground. This is a film sadly indebted to World War II and its paranoid Cold War legacy. 

The weight of war only hits Hidetora after Tango breaks the news that his son, Taro, decreed that anyone who assists him will be executed. Hidetora collapses onto his seat, and even in a medium shot, we can feel the unbearable anguish that fills his face. He sits there for over thirty seconds processing this information, that his child has sentenced him to death, and instead of asking us to “make sense” of this revelation and Hidetora’s reaction to it, the film floods its soundtrack with the shrill calls of birds. The film calls this what it is: chaos. The sonic dissonance speaks to the cognitive dissonance in Hidetora’s mind, at this moment, and the sheer volume of these clashing noises attempts to give voice to entropy, the most ineffable of phenomena. Kurosawa’s sound design graduates from monaural, 1950s art house minimums to overpowering, crippling stereo. It is fitting that the film uses this modern technology to assault its audience’s ears, to commit violence against them. In Ran, everything that can be used as a weapon is, from arrows to words to gestures to recording microphones. 

This scene leads into the film’s centerpiece, the Third Castle massacre, where sound cannot do justice to the bloodshed on-screen and, so, the film dives into abstraction. Toru Takemitsu’s score pairs corpses and soon-to-be corpses with elegiac accompaniment. The spattering blood resembles that of a Goya painting, especially under the hazy, somber quality of the lighting. No one enjoys a dignified death: soldiers splay their arms, fall on the arrows piercing their backs and get trampled by horses. The film does not center its violence in one location but emphasizes its omnipresence. For instance, a centered shot of a tower burning, with a corpse hanging over the bannister, cuts to a long shot of enemy forces galloping past the tower, which is now only visible in the background. From here, an extreme long shot of the fortress’ destruction shows a glimpse of the burning tower, obscured by haze, in the far distance. Finally, the film cuts to a shot of another tower, where Hidetora’s few remaining soldiers are fired upon, with their backs to the camera, by a line of enemy infantryman in the background. The scale of this massacre is massive. Hidetora’s men and women, implicit in their leader’s savage colonialist past, cannot hide from the agents of mass destruction now raining down on them.

Neither this scene nor the other is analogous to any scene from the King Lear text. Ran stakes out its own artistic territory by building off and tweaking the themes of that play. It is a film fearful of a world obsessed with destruction, where the will to power carries with it a drive toward death. It is a film that judges Lear’s famous plea, “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning,” with the derisive laughs it deserves (III.2.57-8).

Allegory of the Man Cave

The boy loves music. He does not have the words to describe this love, nor does he know many words at all. He just listens to what his parents play in the car, at home, on the patio. He plays some of these songs, by ear, on the family’s grand piano, takes music lessons and learns the alto saxophone. He grows up and curates his own playlists, filled with songs his family and friends cannot stand. He loves this music and likes that he does not have to justify this love with words, even now. To him, music just is.

Meanwhile, he watches movies. He loved Star Wars as a kid because, sheesh, how can you not. He enters high school with a curiosity to catch up with the rest, so he looks to the IMDb Top 250. He checks out Platoon, Fight Club, Saving Private Ryan, Gladiator — guy flicks. He cannot believe how much blood and guts he sees. He knows these are not horror movies, where such cheap “splatter” is expected. He is watching serious stuff, with real carnage and no discernible continuity errors.

He lets himself be taken away by the experience of these movies, with their breathless battle scenes, plot twists and Hans Zimmer soundtracks. He declares a movie to be the best ever made if it gives him uncountable goose bumps by the end. He finishes watching a movie and knows, like that, whether he loves it or hates it — especially if he hates it. He hates movies that bore him or do not “make sense.” He hates movies that do not show their violence in slow motion, limbs-flying glory. He also plays a lot of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare around this time, by the way.

He goes to college. He realizes how wrong he was, though not before falling asleep during a few silent films. Okay, he realizes how wrong he was and still sleeps through some silent films since he always manages to watch them at like three in the afternoon in a stuffy room with comfy chairs and always insists he does not need coffee, since his love of cinema will valiantly get him, sans chemicals, through the classics.

But he loves the classics. He loves the purity of this kind of storytelling, which treats plot as a means to engage with themes and not the other way around. He picks up on some radical ideas, on religion, suicide, sex and so on, these filmmakers subtly and persistently floated without bucking the strict censorship codes of their time. He takes notice of how Hitchcock moved his camera or how Kurosawa arranged characters within a frame or how Murnau laid images on top of one another. He does not just “take in” a movie but searches, while watching it, for a system of form, theme and inter-textual reference to tie everything together. He often fails to unite all these strands when transcribing an argument to print, but at least he feels this whole mental process has gotten easier.

He cannot watch the movies he once loved without jamming them through this intellectual crucible. He concludes, with arrogant certainty, that some of these movies, like American History X, are jejune, melodramatic slogs. He is relieved to see Total Recall again and discover a deliberate, gleeful deconstruction of action movie tropes. He is incredibly happy to report that Non-Stop, the latest Liam Neeson anti-AARP advertisement, is not only badass but also an intelligent and measured commentary on post-9/11 security. He knows, now, that some of this entry-level cinema is genius and much of it is overrated crap. He takes comfort in that.

He enjoys what once bored him. He would rather sit through a four-hour documentary about University of California Berkeley than that new Spider-Man movie, though he cannot and will not resist the chance to spin stupid jokes out of the latter. He appreciates the artists out there who see things that provoke them and probe back, whether through documentary or fiction modes. He watches Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up and wraps his head around the fact that perhaps the greatest movie he has ever seen was made for less than Simon Pegg’s Star Trek Into Darkness salary. He cherishes the original, coherent philosophy behind such a film. He esteems, above all else, how filmic the work ultimately is, unable to be replicated in another medium or summarized in a Wikipedia article.

He demands more and forgives easier, like when a film meets those demands only halfway. He believes that effort, effort to elevate thought and raise questions, is what makes the world a progressive and livable place. He sees this as the highest function of film, due to its narrative, humans-telling-stories nature. He continues to love music, all this time, without devising some elaborate theoretical framework in which to place it. He needs some time off, when he can just close his eyes and see something beautiful for what it is.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.