Last Column for The Cornell Daily Sun

Today's Cornell Daily Sun issue is the last of the semester, and considering I'm about to graduate, it's also the last chance for me to write for this paper. As luck would have it, my biweekly column coincided with this day. For sentimental purposes, I won't be copy-pasting it here, but I direct you to read my final column — the 46th, since January, 2012 — here.

Modest Mouse Concert Review

Modest Mouse
Barton Hall, Cornell University
April 19, 2015

Courtesy of Michelle Feldman // The Cornell Daily Sun

I wrote a review of Modest Mouse's concert at Barton Hall here. Of the three shows I've seen from them (also 2012 Governors Ball and 2014 at The Capitol Theatre in Port Chester), this was the best, though I've been arguing with a few people who disagree...

Ravi Coltrane Quartet Concert Review

Courtesy of Jasmine Curtis / The Cornell Daily Sun

I reviewed the Ravi Coltrane Quartet's Friday night set at Bailey Hall, which will surely be the last time I cover a concert in one of my favorite venues, at least for The Sun. I rarely take up the opportunity to write about jazz, but with this piece and last week's column so close to each other, you might be able to guess that this music has been on mind as of late. Link to the story above as well as here.

Cornell's Critical History: Whitney Balliett '51

I dug into The Cornell Daily Sun archives this week to discover dozens of great clips by one Whitney Balliett '51, the long-time New Yorker critic regarded for his writing on jazz. Except when he was a Cornell student, during the late 40s and early 50s, he wrote predominantly about film. And his prose, even at such a young age, was vital, terse and precociously sharp. It rewards reading all these years later. I invite you to check out my piece, which includes plenty of vintage Balliett excerpts, here.

Real Estate Concert Review

Real Estate
The Haunt, Ithaca, N.Y.
September 30, 2014

To put to bed the recurring complaint that all Real Estate songs sound the same (and the New Jersey quintet naming one of their best “All the Same” surely didn’t help), just look at the crowd that filled The Haunt Tuesday night to see them. Or, rather, look how it moved.

There was a lot of the head- and waist-swaying you could expect for a band whose signature guitar sound is shimmery, entrancing and quintessentially “chill.” Tellingly, however, the movements of the college students and townies in attendance varied throughout the night: Some songs called for eyes to the floor as fists air drummed along, and others sparked a no-contact variant of moshing that, while respectful, still fueled a most entropic display. During the slowed-down breakdown at the end of “The Bend,” a key track off this year’s Atlas, almost everyone bobbed their heads back a foot and forward a few more, like loyal pumpjacks on an oil field.

A Real Estate concert demands more energy than you might think. For an hour and a half set of spritely indie rock to not just stay interesting but engage every soul in the room says more about a band’s intimacy with its fans than any technical skill. It’s not even a matter of sobriety, or lack thereof, for the parking lots were packed and plenty of friends before the show spoke in hushed tones about how much work they had to do when they got home. But once the show, which was organized by Dan Smalls Presents, got going, it was as if all that baggage fell to the floor and a mid-week respite took on a more powerful, albeit different meaning for each person there. I heard friends and total strangers gush, after the show or mid-song, how isn’t this just the greatest?

Like the night’s headliner, opener Regal Degal exercised surprising control over the audience with their loud, loose and very ’80s post-punk. Frontman Josh da Costa, sporting a possibly ironic mullet, did the typical opener thing where he introduced his band’s name and place of origin (“New York City!”) between every song, which became a running joke that worked because he kept a straight face. He also dropped the vivid titles of their songs, such as “Eaten Alive in Front of Stained Glass,” “I Sit Like a Chair” and “Ruining My Life.” If these guys lack the sincerity of Real Estate, they also boast a crazy sound that shifts with each song, where you get drum machines on one track and Peter Buck-esque guitars on another, with macabre confessionals as the only throughline. My friend Ana Niño ’15 summed them up: “They’re like The Smiths plus The Cure … but adolescent.”

Fading in their performance with “Green River,” a breezy song off their 2009 debut, Real Estate started small in order to build to something big, like the hypnotic “Kinder Blumen” or an energized update of “Beach Comber.” About a third through, bassist Alex Bleeker said as such, “I feel like we can go farther, and push this show into legendary territory.” And they sure came close. That is not to shortchange some of the great songs early on, like “Had to Hear,” “Crime” and “Green Aisles,” which I scrawled in all caps in my notes upon recognizing that opening arpeggio. But once the band got a feel for the audience and their many microphone levels in order, the songs flowed blissfully from one to the next and raised us with them higher and higher, to the point that when it was all over, the band looked sad to go.

The individual members of Real Estate do not appear to carbon copies of one another, in look or temperament, which made watching them live that much easier. Though I could not see Matt Kallman at the keyboard, drummer Jackson Pollis held the rear of the stage with an intensity that matched the deliberate, slightly slower tempo he set and stuck to for the night. Lead singer and guitarist Martin Courtney carried a similar introverted presence, opting to stare into the middle distance as he sang halcyon or else mournful lyrics rather than goof off or move about the stage.

Bleeker fulfilled those duties, being the gregarious one who saw fit to poll the audience for Grateful Dead fans and schmooze about the beauty of Ithaca. Guitarist Matt Mondanile, meanwhile, looked lost in thought during the verses of “Talking Backwards,” where he does not play, and considering he helms a separate band, Ducktails, one can imagine that thought was fruitful. But most of the time he was on the verge of stealing the show, like when he closed his eyes and tore into the simple but lush chords of “It’s Real.”

I’d be remiss not to mention an unexpected star of the night, who happens to not even be a member of the band, though maybe an honorary one at this point. The name “Josh Kay” was shouted right before “Horizon” and popped up every so often to the very end, even serving as the chant that summoned the band’s encore. Like Real Estate and, it so happens, myself, Josh Kay hails from Bergen County, New Jersey, and in an interesting twist of journalistic disclosure, I must admit I’ve known him since high school. He is a senior at Ithaca College with many friends, and while we are not close, we’ve exchanged too many niceties at too many parties, in too many states, for me to not say it was pretty surreal seeing him invited on-stage for the encore.

The band knows and clearly likes Josh, for this was his tenth Real Estate show. I caught up with him briefly after the show and he counted this as one of the best because “they resonated with the crowd.” I’d say that’s accurate, for it is the main reason why a sold-out audience familiar with Atlas and Days ended up, still, so surprised and pleased this great band could be so much better in the flesh.

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

Spoon Concert Review

Spoon
State Theatre, Ithaca, N.Y.
August 29, 2014

Is there a better live band than Spoon? If you attend concerts often, you likely have seen shows as great as theirs; for me, TV on the Radio at this year’s Governors Ball and The National at State Theatre last May come to mind. These bands, and very few others, are the best of the best, having hit a peak of skill, presence and professionalism in their performances that defies even the most hairsplitting criticism. If you were one of the many buzzing students, locals or out-of-towners packed into the State Friday night, you’d agree that Spoon, brought here by Dan Smalls Presents, treated Ithaca to a couple of perfect hours of spirited music that permitted only one response, and that is love.

This warm, communal feeling settled over the crowd once the opener, Eric Harvey, walked on stage. Harvey, Spoon’s keyboard player and a multi-instrumentalist in his own right, hails from the region and recruited some of Ithaca’s most talented musicians to join him for a varied, though consistently beautiful 45-minute performance. “Varnishing Day” — a shimmering acoustic ballad with the refrain, “Better hold your head up high” — showcased Ithaca cellist Hank Roberts, who dialed the song down to a hushed whisper and then crescendoed for a stirring finish.

During a cover of Jackson Browne’s “These Days,” which featured Mary Lorson on harmonies, Harvey forgot to retune his guitar and said of the slip, “[This is] just a coffee shop gig, for a forgiving audience.” His low-key, forthright music fosters that kind of intimate atmosphere, and indeed the whoops and applause from the crowd assured him this was a night for building up, not breaking down. Rock-oriented instrumentalists closed Harvey’s set with a few basic, effective numbers, one of which ended with a ridiculous keyboard solo by Mike Stark. The local revue spirit of Eric Harvey’s group made it the rare opener that was impossible to ignore, and even rarer, one of which to feel proud.

A short 30 minutes and drastic stage redressing later, guitarist Alex Fischel, drummer Jim Eno, bassist Rob Pope, Harvey and Spoon mastermind Britt Daniel sent the orchestra audience out of their seats and rushing toward the stage as they launched into “They Want My Soul,” the title track off their excellent new album. Daniel, Fischel and Eno wore all black while the rest beamed in all white, a simple color dichotomy that complemented the simplicity of the stage arrangement (just a few tall, white fabric walls) and the dazzling array of lighting set-ups. Some songs rolled by in near darkness, like the second, “Rent I Pay,” where blue spotlights threw Daniel’s spindly shadow onto the surrounding walls. Others went all out with strobes or a spinning disco pyramid (like the ball, but a pyramid), while a few songs illuminated a specific mood, such as “The Beast and Dragon, Adored,” with its fitting blood red colors.

Daniel announced early on that this was the first show of their tour, which is an honor that sometimes comes with taxing handicaps, especially in an insular town like ours. There was no dress rehearsal throat-clearing Friday night — just a spectacular, undeniably complicated production fastened to the ground by Spoon’s confidence and likability. “Confident” and “likable” could also be used to describe the most naïve of mainstream rock bands, but Spoon brings too much carnal energy to the stage to be written off as some fleeting confection. The locked-in rhythm guitar of “Who Makes Your Money” or foot-tapping bass of “I Turn My Camera On” belies Fischel’s spontaneous guitar freak-outs and Daniel’s ronin wanderings about the stage. The band fields nothing but pleasure through its individual elements, but taken together, it swerves through a show that is surprising, atomic, unhinged.

If there is a simple way to explain this quality of Spoon’s art, it is this: Britt Daniel is cooler than you. His sandpaper voice must be one of the most indestructible instruments in the business. He sounds like John Lennon did in “Twist and Shout,” except Lennon could only log one (amazing) take before going hoarse and somehow Daniel just stands firm at that precipice, unchanged, throughout a two-hour set.

He also harbors a more punkish, experimental sensibility than his band’s popularity may imply. At the end of “Inside Out,” a recent cut, he milked a minute of Flaming Lips-esque ambience through spacey keyboards, and at the close of “The Beast and Dragon, Adored,” he did something similar with raw guitar feedback, manipulating it while on his knees. This was not one of those play, finish, “1-2-3-4!” play again concerts, for Spoon engineered a most entrancing flow.

A brickish thud and a sound engineer’s muffled cries were heard (OK: probably, regarding the second item) when Daniel dropped his mic so that he could fetch a beer during the overplayed “The Way We Get By,” the third song of the encore. Suddenly, those much-copied piano chords did not sound so twee; Daniel somehow found an edge to that one. He pulled a Bob Dylan when it came time for the band’s biggest hit, “The Underdog,” by improvising new rhythms and lagging behind the audience’s enthusiastic downbeat claps. Old becomes new yet again.

These antics were all playful, for Daniel was — and I imagine thoroughly is — not the least bit contemptuous. He thanked his crew, of all moves. The most charming moments of the evening came whenever Daniel acknowledged the demonstrably excited man flailing about just below his microphone stand. Instead of ignoring or avoiding him, Daniel, in his typically inclusive way, sang to him on his knees, let him snap a picture and, after the man briefly disappeared at the start of the encore, heralded his return to the front row. He turned what could have been a visible distraction (the guy enjoyed shaking his fist like it was a maraca, which is, like, mesmerizing) into part of the show, part of the Spoon family.

Near the end, Pope announced, “This is the only time we’ve seen a theater crowd standing the whole time.” Who knows if that is actually true, but the unceasing gratitude, heard not only through whistles and applause but actually seen through an absence of smartphone screens, camera flashes and crowd disturbances, grew out of the preternatural brilliance of Spoon’s performance. It was a concert good enough to bring the audience, like Daniel, to its knees; but then again, we didn’t because we’d be missing the show.

This article was 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).

Still Life's Uncanny Distractions

Below is a short blog post I wrote for my Global Cinema II class. I talk about Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life (2006).

Still Life commits to such an elegiac, slow burn style of realism that it shocks us when it does not. A digital video camera pans to the right, capturing passerby against the backdrop of a river. A man drives a sledgehammer into crumbling concrete, over and over. A Brutalist façade rockets into space—wait, what? Jia Zhang-ke throws us off at these moments, when the quiet misery of his characters butts against unplanned bouts of surrealism. He pursues the “uncanny” to alienating, politicized ends.

Almost midway through the film, Jia passes the baton from Sanming, the down-and-out miner looking for his wife, to Hong, the reticent nurse looking for her husband. He does so in about the strangest way possible: Sanming rests by a riverside bannister as the camera pans left, capturing mountains about a mile away in what is now an extreme long shot, save for a bannister chassis at the bottom of the frame. A hollow din is heard on the soundtrack as a heavenly light appears over the mountain, floats over the river and then shoots out the frame. Jia’s slow-moving camera carries the motion to the next shot, where Hong stands downstream, with only river, mountains and some buildings visible in the background, and follows the sight of the UFO. The apparition jets over the mountains, where it is never seen or spoken of again, but we sure remember it. 

This random burst of sci-fi, replete with an ominous, purposeful soundtrack, tears Still Life’s world from its muted reality. Considering that Americans may be the demographic most enchanted with UFOs, this is not a bad thing. We want to make sense of that sequence, which is a productive urge so long as we do not get obsessed with banal, irrelevant topics like plausibility, origins and so on. To me, the UFO signals an environmentalist message, in that an alien creature skirts just by Earth only to disappear because all it sees is decay. If the alien was set on destruction, in keeping with sci-fi genre tradition, it sees that its job is nearly complete without any input at all. The strangeness of its appearance, to us, mirrors the strangeness of what it must be seeing, from above.

And yet the UFO’s symbolism must speak to the characters lives, as well, considering it swaps the narrative perspective in one fell swoop. The camera leaves Sanming out of frame when the UFO first appears, so we are unsure if he actually sees it or registers shock at the sight. The camera rotates around Hong, however, emphasizing that she sees it and finds it intriguing. The juxtaposition between Sanming’s resting posture, with his back to the river, and Hong’s erect, attentive stance stresses the latter’s agency. In that previous masterful, unbroken shot set on a boat, where Sanming holds liquor with outstretched hands to no one’s notice, we notice his utter ineffectiveness. His invisibility becomes almost a surreal device on its own, and so it is fitting that he vanishes from the frame when a moment of life-changing consequence occurs. Hong may be the only human who notices the spaceship, and yet she continues about her day. The matters of extraterrestrial life mean nothing to her, for she has too much, too close to the ground, to fix first. 

Dancing Around Misogyny

Below is a short blog post I wrote for my Global Cinema II class. I talk about Frederick Wiseman's High School (1968).

Frederick Wiseman makes movies for people who read into movies. His fascination with American institutions means that most professors should feel comfortable screening a Wiseman film for their class, assured that their students will take away a message or two since, well, you’ll either learn or sleep when watching a movie called High School. You learn a great deal from Wiseman’s deconstruction of public secondary education — far more than a draconian or worse, boring teacher might want you to. To glean something from High School, you must take an active role while watching it. As a result, High School not only heightens your awareness of the flaws in a school you went to or currently attend; it implants its messages into the very construction of the film, teaching you how to unpack it as you do the unpacking.

If you ride passively along with the film for its first few minutes, you have little choice but to take action once the girls in gym dance to “Simple Simon.” These medium-to-close shots of girls from the waist down are uncomfortable, to say the least. They fixate on the gyrations of these girls without affording the slightest glimpse of their faces — textbook misogyny, you know. A modern viewer may be tempted to call out Wiseman as a chauvinist on the evidence of these shots alone, but first consider the rest of the movie he builds around this awkward interlude. 

The shot immediately prior to the gym dance is of a hall monitor, whose back we only see in a sustained, handheld tracking shot. You do not see his face, either, but Wiseman gives us a sense of his lumbering physique as he prowls around the halls and makes quibbles with loitering students. He walks toward the gym doors and looks through their window, when Wiseman cuts to the girls dancing. That cut implies the shots following belong to the hall monitor’s point of view, yet Wiseman does not personalize the hall monitor in any way — withholding his name, as is typical for Wiseman, and hiding his face, which is not — so he stands in, instead, as a manifestation of the school’s male authority. Wiseman does not so much accuse that individual hall monitor of peeping on female students as call out the entire male-centered educational system for seeing the girls under its care through that inappropriate, objectified lens.

As Wiseman stresses, however, the system in place only works because the women in control have bought into it, too. The “Simple Simon” scene foregrounds the matter of adolescent female sexuality, so that we keep it in mind. Just a couple minutes later, Wiseman shows us an older woman lecturing girls about fashion, posture and body image, or, rather, insulting every one of them for falling short of her idealized, depersonalized standards. With close-ups on her face, in contrast to long shots of the silent girls, Wiseman lets us witness the confidence and shocking disregard for self-reflection that characterizes an influential female administrator in public high school. She is supposed to be a role model for the girls under her stead, girls who, like their male peers, have not developed the critical facilities just yet to take their teacher’s words with a grain of salt, or, better yet, start a feminist revolution. 

In their place, Wiseman applies a discerning, critical eye onto the happenings in high school, where bad teaching leads to harmful conditioning, societal injustice and deep-seated unhappiness. It says a lot of good that, in 2014, we laughed at the fashion show rehearsal. Wiseman and the rest of the world’s progressive filmmakers, writers and thinkers have done a good job indoctrinating us into questioning indoctrination. 

Eyes Left to Wander

Below is a short blog post I submitted for my Global Cinema II class. I talk about Stan Brakhage’s Desistfilm (1954) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966).

The essence of art cinema is ambiguity. Some art films lead you down winding narratives, lining up different perspectives for scrutiny (a la Rashomon) or throwing out much semblance of a plot altogether (a la Mulholland Drive). Others leave the morals of their characters up in the air, forcing the viewer to render a verdict (Bicycle Thieves). Most art films play with perspective, trying to undermine the sanctity of the disembodied camera recording unnoticed that Hollywood ascribes to. Very often, the camera adopts a disorienting or subtly prejudiced view of an art film’s characters, or otherwise encourages a meta-cinematic reading, meaning that terms like “voyeurism” and “the gaze” enter the conversation.

Brakhage, of course, aspired to convey a new way of seeing throughout his life. An early effort like Desistfilm has the the capacity to shock today, over 60 years later, because it disorients us in a familiar space. Who thought we could find a college party more nauseating through film than through actual witness and participation? Yet the energy of Brakhage’s buzzing, flying camera not only throws the visual plane in scrambles but also leaves the possessor of such a perspective unclear. Is he trying to simulate the revelry of the twentysomethings of his time, or trick us with a visceral satire of how alarmist adults viewed the rebellioius James Deans and Natalie Woods that were their children in the 1950s? It is difficult to depart with a final answer, yet the meta-cinematic style assures us we keep asking these questions. As Brakhage puts it, “Very often people look directly at the camera and sometimes even flash a smile. Or I would include references to the fact that it was a film—flares, scratched titles, etc. ... I believe most artists whose work has any lasting value to a culture put out warning signs like these to say this is not a window into reality but an art work” (Ganguly 141).

Antonioni based the foundation of his art on the act of seeing: “My narratives are documents built not on a suite of coherent ideas, but rather on flashes, ideas that come forth every other moment” (91). He knows a disciplined, inquisitive viewer will question the images shown on screen, accepting each shot not as some objective truth of a diegetic moment but more a revealing or a concealing in service of mood and theme. Story as well, but in such a plot-light film as Blow-Up, we do not decode what happens so much as how it happens.

In fact, Antonioni seems to deliberately flaunt any forward progression of narrative throughout most of Blow-Up. When the photographer shoots a few models, he gets bored and does something else. When he gets Vanessa Redgrave to come over and undress, he leaves the room to spend time retrieving a useless boat propellor. Seymour Chantman says, “In Blow-Up, distraction is no longer simply a bad habit: it has become a way of life” (140). The fleeting impermeance of the events leads us to grasp onto the mostly staid, contemplative cinematography to find our meaning. Yet “even the surfaces have become deceptive,” as the memorable fade-out in the last shot proves (Chantman 142). The photographer and the epiphany he reaches — I personally think he is seduced back to the fantasy life, away from the worrisome burden of vigilante investigation — matters less than the conclusion the viewer reaches, regarding the act of watching Blow-Up.

“I just watched a film that tricked me,” a viewer can conclude, “yet the arrogance to which it meets that goal astounds me.” We are seduced by naked bodies that are “neither erotic nor vulgar” (Antonioni 91). We are riveted by a murder story that goes nowhere. We are pulled in yet left at a distance. The clinicality of Antonioni’s images contain meaning on their own, as we have discussed in class already. But these images ultimately prove the power of cinema — art cinema, specifically — lies in the potency we presume all cinematographic images to have, even as we never think twice about what we see through our very eyes.


Works Cited:
Antonioni, Michelangelo. The Architecture of Vision: Writing and Interviews on Cinema.

Chatman, Seymour. Antonioni or, The Surface of the World.

Ganguly, Suranjan. "Stan Brakhage: The 60th Birthday Interview." Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader.

Up on Lavender Hill

Consider Lavender Hill as a needed counterpoint to Glee, Modern Family and other mainstream films and television shows that feature out and proud LGBT characters. While the creators and financiers behind these shows deserve (and have adequately received) praise for representing a long-neglected chunk of the population, aren’t these representations fairly one-note? Some gay men are flamboyant and fashion-minded, yes, but not all — not even half of them. In this sense, Lavender Hill, with its moving and honest documentation of LGBT life, past and present, should hit any sensible human being like a clarifying tonic.

In this 26-minute documentary, filmmakers Bob Hazen and our very own Prof. Austin Bunn, performing and media arts, resurrect a slice of unsung local history that could hardly be more relevant today. This lovely little film looks at a commune that thrived in the ’70s, just 15 minutes south of Ithaca on a wild patch of land in West Danby, NY. The commune, named “Lavender Hill” after its abundant flora, housed a self-sustaining population of gay men and women, a pairing former resident Mitchell Karp now remarks was “quite unusual” for its time. There, they enjoyed a hedonist lifestyle that involved drugs, music and “love fests” (Yvonne Fisher, another former member, admits the current nomenclature would call “orgies”), challenged by punishing winters and the austerity of such an isolated environment.

Cutting between 8mm home videos shot by Sunny Bat-Or, a resident who passed in 2001, archive footage, contemporary interviews and B-roll of Lavender Hill today, writer-producer Bunn and editor-cinematographer Hazen ground their story in LGBT history yet prioritize the humanity of their subjects over any politics or polemics. Opening with a quote from author Larry Mitchell — “Romantic love, the last illusion, keeps us alive until the revolutions come” — and billed with the lowercase subtitle, “a love story,” this film takes interest in the time before anything resembling today’s current LGBT landscape. Back then, the lives of those who sought their peers and nature for a comfortable existence skirted somewhere between fantasy and tragedy. Some of their problems were humorous inconveniences — the winters were so cold and the outhouse so far away, that “people burned shit” on the stove — and romance faced its universal obstacles, such as infidelity. But others overwhelmingly discriminated against gays and lesbians, like when Lazar Mintz, the twin brother of surviving member Zelik, perished of AIDS in 1988. It was his death that marked the end of Lavender Hill; the real world demanded their return. 

The past is past, so what makes this documentary special is how Hazen and Bunn inform the lives of the members today with what happened all those years ago. For one, closing subtitles clue us in to what they’ve done with the time since Lavender Hill: Zelik Mintz is a psychoanalyst in New York City, and David Hirsch co-founded Ithaca’s Moosewood Restaurant, co-owned by fellow member Ned Asta. Near the end, Yvonne Fisher, today a psychotherapist, wonders aloud whether she regrets not marrying a man and having children. She then pauses before speaking, with a measured calm, about how Lavender Hill taught her to embrace her own identity, with its set of atypical but conducive norms. The many close-ups, particularly those of Fisher and retired Ithaca real estate broker Allan Warshawsky, capture both the grace and hard-won life experience that the years on Lavender Hill instilled in its members. Today, these men and women may not look like or act in the manner of most LGBT icons in pop culture, but they carry the screen nonetheless. They stand for nothing more than themselves, which is all one person can stand to bear.

Prior to Lavender Hill’s Thursday screening at the Schwartz Center, I spoke with Prof. Bunn — who also co-wrote the Sundance hit Kill Your Darlings, starring Daniel Radcliffe — about what he learned from his work. When asked about the precarious conditions these commune members lived in, he turned the question onto me, and I will, in turn, pass his questions onto you.

“Can you imagine building a house with your best friends, right now? They were you. That was part of it, building a house, believing you could live off the land. The downsides? The winter, burning your own shit to survive, discovering that your friends have limitations as to how much they can cope with you. There are things that were pretty hard for those people. Communes have cults of personality and they have centers, and in this experience there were two guys who fell in love who were the parents of the experience, and their breakup split the whole thing apart.

“One question that has been on my mind is, could this happen again? I think your generation, the millennial generation, has all the energy and wherewithal, but is way too technological and media-oriented to give it up. Could you live without your phone?”

Lavender Hill will accompany Bryan Horch’s award-winning short Spooners at the Film Forum in the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts this Thursday at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free, and Bunn, Hazen and former commune members will conduct a Q&A afterwards.

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

Bob Dylan Concert Review

Bob Dylan
At Barton Hall, Cornell University
On Sunday, April 14, 2013

If there is one lesson to take from Bob Dylan’s Sunday night performance at Barton Hall, it is pretty simple: Bob Dylan isn’t a folk singer anymore. To those familiar with any of Dylan’s output from the past 35-odd years, this is old news. But for those expecting the mythological man and his guitar of the 1960s, the film I’m Not There or his own memoir Chronicles, the Dylan of 2013 might have been an unwelcome surprise. To enjoy any Dylan concert, you have to throw out all expectations and just go with the flow. No, he’s not going to play “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and even if he somehow did, he’d morph it into some unrecognizable blues number with a slower tempo and steel guitar solos. There’s a reason Dylan concerts have reeked of weed since the early ’60s, you know?

Due credit must first be paid to Dawes for starting precisely at 7 p.m. and delivering a truly professional 40 minutes of music. The band’s arena rock stylings, with clean guitar chords and repeated arpeggios, worked in Barton’s otherwise awful acoustic environment. In “A Little Bit of Everything,” lead singer Taylor Goldsmith pulled off his best Springsteen while flexing his guitar muscle with southern fried fretwork. The band did not overstay its welcome and left that huge stage with earned cheers and hollers.

Before Dylan took to the stage 20 minutes later, the thousands standing (in contrast to those who filled Barton’s bleachers) squirmed and packed closer and closer to one another. Viewing the stage became problematic, but this is Barton after all, and I am 5’7” (as is Dylan). To my left, a conga line of concertgoers pushed past; the hooligans must have been around the age of my parents. Many non-students attended Sunday’s show, and I have a feeling that the level of satisfaction only increased with age. Dylan might as well be the anti-Avicii, and I tip my hat to the Cornell Concert Commission for mixing things up with class.

But regardless of how many Dylanologists were in attendance, few were enthused about the first five songs of his set, mostly picks from last year’s album Tempest. In retrospect, they served as a preamble of sorts, toppling our preconceived notions of Dylan and reinstating another side. The opener, Oscar-winning cut “Things Have Changed,” could not be more nu-Dylan, with a shuffle feel and his notoriously raspy voice accenting every line’s last downbeat. People have been complaining about his voice for over half a century now, so it’d be silly to criticize his performance on the basis of it, but let it be known that today’s Dylan jumps at any chance to throw in a harmonica solo or duet with the electric guitar. In “Soon After Midnight,” we found Dylan at the keyboards to croon a sweet love ballad, while his band had fun with the bluesy “Early Roman Kings,” with its Bo Diddley riff that piqued the audience’s attention because George Thorogood also ripped it off in “Bad to the Bone.” These songs did segue into greater, more famous material, but his experimentations with genre set the stage for how those supposedly familiar songs would be wholly reimagined.

Case in point: I would assume most attendees know “Tangled Up in Blue,” but with this slowed-down, less guitar-driven arrangement, a calculable audience response did not register until the chorus (when, of course, he sings the name of the song). The timeless “Visions of Johanna” picked up some sunshine when played faster, although this and his propensity to string together lines in quick triplets presented some difficulty in understanding the lyrics (more than usual, at least). “Blind Willie McTell,” perhaps Dylan’s most revered song from the past 30 years, benefitted greatly from its new arrangement, morphing from a barren piano ballad into a sexy tango that lost none of its original melancholy. Attribute this to the song’s final, chilling harmonica solo that snaked up and then down, down, down like a scenic train ride into Hades.

Perhaps the least-modified song was also one of his most recent: “Thunder on a Mountain,” from 2006’s Modern Times. The lights turned off and built back up one at a time in tandem with the intro’s glorious chord progression. For its energy and Alicia Keys namecheck, “Thunder on a Mountain” has settled in as a live favorite, and this performance introduced an element of swing, where the musicians improvised solos over a sweet vamping loop. “All Along the Watchtower” followed suit, with similar improvisational juices flowing. After Dylan finished singing, the instrumentalists softened and softened until the audience thought the songwas over, only to come roaring back on a thrilling crescendo that met one of the most enthusiastic cheers of the night. Here was Bob Dylan and his band, playing with the same devices employed by the dubstep “drop,” only with more nuance, less predictability and without probably knowing what the hell a “drop” is.

As an encore, Dylan treated us to one last song, one of his most personal. With its solemn pianos and themes of misunderstanding and alienation, “Ballad of a Thin Man” has long lived in the dark, and Sunday’s moody harmonica solo only bolded in its true colors. In a way, the song was a culmination of the night’s efforts, or those of all his live performances: add new voices, mix up the rhythm, but keep the soul of the song intact. When it was over, he walked in front of his microphone and just stood there, flanked by his bandmates. No bowing, no speeches, no nothing — with the incandescent spotlights above and his hands at his side he looked like a turn-of-the-century gunslinger. This is a man who has nothing left to prove to anybody but himself. Sharing a room with him should be enough to cross a number off of everyone’s bucket list, but seeing him move about, listening to what he’s doing and witnessing how he continues to reinvent himself at 71 years young — how about that for inspiration?

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

Visual Collision in Ménilmontant

The following is a paper I wrote for a film class I am taking this semester. Academic writing requires more patience than journalistic writing, both for the reader and the writer. In this case, my aim was to deconstruct a few scenes from a film while also presenting a readable, mildly amusing argument connecting all the film theory jargon. The film in question is called Ménilmontant, a little-known and silent avant-garde film by Soviet-French director Dimitri Kirsanoff. You can watch this beautiful, 37-minute film in full on YouTube.

Stuck in a Nightmare You Can't Get Out of:

Visual Collision in Dimitri Kirsanoff's Ménilmontant

For all the romantic analogies between dreams and movies, is it not rare for us to even remember our dreams? In Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, Georges Méliès nods to a young boy in his studio and says, “If you’ve ever wondered where your dreams come from, you look around … this is where they’re made.” Most of us have difficulty recalling the specifics of our most recent ‘sweet’ dream. Less problematic, however, is reliving our nightmares (Suddenly, Méliès’ quote transforms into a creepy omen). The fragmentary structure of nightmares, as we piece them together after the fact, lends itself to film well and has undoubtedly influenced countless filmmakers. One of them is Dimitri Kirsanoff, the Soviet-French director of the 1926 masterpiece Ménilmontant. The silent Ménilmontant stresses filmic storytelling through its montage editing à la Sergei Eisenstein, yet also warps the gap between cuts with an innovative use of protracted dissolves and double exposure. The eminence of colliding images, whether adjacent or superimposed, makes for a very visual, dreamlike editing technique.

The scenes in Ménilmontant that prescribe to a strict Soviet montage style may follow an established set of cinematic rules, but they use this framework to build an intimate series of images aimed at arousing intense emotion from the viewer. The film opens with a brutal struggle: An unknown, and practically unseen, man brandishing an axe hacks the protagonists’ mother and father to death. Those protagonists are two sisters — the younger, more prominent one played by Nadia Sibirskaïa and Yolande Beaulieu as the older, ancillary sister — frolicking in the forest down the road, giggling as a cat scales a tall tree. Thus, their parents’ horror proves a stark juxtaposition; Kirsanoff likely wielded montage editing for this reason. Eisenstein asked the question, “What characterizes montage and, consequently, its embryo, the shot?” and answered it with, “Collision” (21). “Conflict lies at the basis of every art,” he declared (21). This concept takes on social dimensions when imbued with the Marxist class struggle he and his pro-Soviet intellectuals preached (before Kirsanoff left the U.S.S.R., that is). But, for the aesthetic and apolitical analysis of this essay, the Soviet montage method generates action, tone and meaning.

Ménilmontant opens with a close-up of a cottage door and its glass shattering from an unseen force. This shot orients at about 45 degrees from the door’s parallel, and cuts to a perpendicular view of the door and the violence behind it (with a continuity error of the glass intact). We see very little besides a blur of faces and hands. Cut to the doorknob twisting, back to the door, back to the knob — cut to the wife opening and running out the door as the assailant grabs her hair, with the camera framing her face in a startling close-up. Cut then to the husband opening the door (in another apparent continuity error), and the killer following him as he walks out. It then cuts to a strange low angle shot of the wife stumbling out the door, with her white dress covering the screen for a seamless natural wipe into a shot about 180 degrees around, of the killer’s and wife’s feet stepping forward out of frame. In yet another continuity issue, the next shot frames the attacker in a blurry close-up with the open door behind him and the couple completely absent. The husband has his back against a wall in the next shot, while the subsequent shot cuts back to the killer shaking his head side to side in a vigorous, rabid motion. One of the more unforgettable images follows, with the wife jutting into the frame from its left side, only to be pulled in and out of it by the man who is messily murdering her. After two more shots of this repeated action, we see the axe propped against a log and cut to a reverse eyeline match of the husband who recognizes its presence. So does the killer, as Kirsanoff cuts to him in a grinning close-up. The two men wrestle in the next shot, which then cuts on action to the husband’s hand reaching for the weapon in a close-up of the axe. About four more back-and-forth shots like this repeat, and then we see the bloodied wife in a close-up, reaching out her hand and pleading for her life. The most memorable image — the extreme close-up of the husband and his agape gaze of terror — soon follows, as does a still, high contrast image of the axe held high in the air. We then see the killer hack away, only to disappear through the bottom of the frame where our imagination finishes the rest.

This all times in at right under 40 seconds, with 34 shots, making an average shot length of 1.17 seconds. The swift editing overwhelms the viewer with the power of these images, while the increasing acceleration of cuts builds tension. Kirsanoff communicates ideas both simple and profound through the “assembly of [the] elements” “of montage” (20). Cutting back and forth, multiple times, from door to doorknob demonstrates the time it takes to open the door; the escalating speed of these cuts, as well as the confused swirl of limbs behind the windowpane, instills in the viewer the desperation this husband and wife must have felt. With the exception of the quick still image of the raised axe, the editing in the opening sustains its invisibility and only seeks to communicate a subjective perspective of a violent event, in hopes that this scene will arrest the viewer. Technical limitations may have stripped dissolves and double exposure from the opening, but the disjointed barrage of this opening scene (rife with perhaps purposeful continuity errors) infuses a nightmarish quality that is achieved through its montage style above all other factors.

But just as some dreams frighten us with confusion and speed, others wring us of energy through lingering images and sensations. Kirsanoff inverts the montage technique in several key scenes, placing one image over another. These overlaps span a breath of time to numerous seconds, with the intent to convey internal character struggle. There are a few, more stylistic touches in this vein, such as when the girls leave home and head for the city: A continued shot of a long, tree-studded dirt road holds steady while the subject — the girls — of the image transports down the road in a series of jump cuts masked by long dissolves. The same technique casts the younger sister and her rapist across his apartment in an effort to expedite narrative and establish an unsettling mood to his abode. 

Multiple pre-Vertov city montages with a liberal use of superimposition occur throughout Ménilmontant; the most powerful sequence would be when the younger sister walks by the river with her illegitimate child. An unsettling point of view shot drifting alongside a concrete sidewalk barrier, focusing on its sharp edges before panning left to reveal the lethal tides just yards away, commences this series. Kirsanoff cuts to a reaction shot of the girl, who keeps on staring into the inviting waters as seen through POV pans down the stream and distorted close-ups of the waves. A shot of the water then lays over a close-up of the girl throughout a lengthy dissolve; as she closes her eyes, the frame becomes solely hers once more. Her exact immoral fantasy remains unclear, — Does she want to throw herself into the water? Her baby? — but the potential of utilizing the river weighs down on her, quite literally, through editing. As her baby wails and she puts her ear to the child in a vain attempt for comprehension, the city begins to meld into her torment. Double (and often greater) exposure centers a close-up of the girl in the frame as blurs of cars and faceless pedestrians layer over. An even closer shot of the girl seamlessly follows as the frenetic metropolitan superimposition continues. Kirsanoff goes so far as to take the girl out of the frame completely and let us see and — through Paul Mercer’s eerie music — hear her agony, one steeped by rape, murder, betrayal and abandonment. An innocuous establishing shot of a bridge now deforms into an indictment of modernity and the toll it takes on the innocent and vulnerable. The girl walks dejectedly through the city as these thoughts continue to wash over and fight within her. What is a nightmare to us cements as a cold, harsh reality to this girl. She wants to wake up from it all but cannot, for the only escape is ending herself, once and for all.

In Ménilmontant, Kirsanoff balances his homeland’s established editing school with a new one very much his own. The “collision” of moving images rooted in Soviet theory creates a bloody collision of axe and human skin, as well as all the victims’ fears piling up until that final point. Superimposition of disparate visual icons expresses one young girl’s inner pain and its underlying cause. Despite colliding these techniques not only in the same film but also often in the same scene, Kirsanoff builds a consistent, surreal mystique to the whole film. Ménilmontant hits so close to home, so often, that the dreamlike feel teeters on raw realism. When that sick awareness creeps upon you, however, it is wise to pinch yourself and be thankful you have the option to walk out of the theater.

John Oliver Stand-Up Review

Courtesy of Fiona Modrak

John Oliver

At Bailey Hall, Cornell University

On Saturday, September 8, 2012

Only at Cornell will you find a crowd equally receptive to a dorky (but irresistible) rendition of R. Kelly’s “Ignition” and a joke about the Expressionist painter Edvard Munch. John Oliver, the unmistakably British veteran correspondent from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,knew exactly who his audience was and won over the sold-out crowd at Bailey Hall with his kinetic, literary and utterly shameless brand of comedic delivery Saturday night.

Oliver’s homeless — err, I mean homeless-looking friend, Mike Lawrence, opened the Cornell University Program Board-sponsored show. Lawrence’s disheveled appearance and little-known history made every story worryingly believable. There were few lines he did not cross; his dark spectrum of jokes covered Alzheimer’s, homophobia, domestic violence, AIDS (or “GLAIDS,” the Glee version) and the KKK (“Nothing says master race like minimum wage!”). He drew the expected “ooo’s” for the most offensive material (his Adele miscarriage joke dropped jaws), but he won far more laughs with his shock-and-awe style. His take on a conservative Batman displeased with Obamacare ("I'm going to give Gotham the health care it deserves...") brought down the house. He found an instant fan in me with his gag about groveling for money in the subway in order to buy The Criterion Collection Blu-ray of The Royal Tenenbaums — the specificity of that joke expresses the range of pop culture trivia he chose to probe.

A very rich ovation welcomed Oliver, though he noted once the applause quieted that nothing could top returning from work to get pissed on by his new puppy. Fresh off the presidential campaign trail (he finished covering the DNC less than 24 hours prior), Oliver wove his love and hate — but mostly love — for politics and America into a nearly 90-minute set that touched upon myriad cultural observations. He reflected upon his “out-of-body experience” while witnessing firsthand Clint Eastwood’s stool speech two weeks ago (Lawrence also deigned to pluck this fresh comedic fruit). However, the majority of his material barely connected with his Daily Show experience, which was a wise and risky choice.

Many of Oliver’s jokes were inspired by his outsider’s perspective on American quirks. His three-question survey on the status of our country — “Have they stopped caring about how they look?” “Do they have poor eating habits?” “Have they run out of money?” — drew laughs when he made an analogy comparing the KFC Double Down to “legally-attempted suicide.” He also teased the audience when a loud “Woo!” greeted his sobering declaration that the U.S. is $15 trillion in debt. When he repeated the statistic near the end of his show, a catcall greeted its return; both the crowd and Oliver commended the other jokester in the room.

Ever the seasoned comedian, Oliver practiced the satisfying technique of referring to an element of an earlier joke within a later, seemingly unrelated joke. The alarmingly confident pigeon capable of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict made a well-received return, as did Oliver’s concession that he may have read some Paul Ryan “slash fiction” after being humiliated in its Daily Show variants. Despite some platitudinous observations, it was how Oliver progressed from the initial set-up that sealed the deal. He jabbed at Mitt Romney’s oft-mentioned elitism by running and jumping across the stage, mimicking a Dickensian villain whacking poor children. One of the night’s best jokes: Oliver noted that Romney’s go-to phrase when entering diners — “What’s going on here, then?” — is a genuine question.

But throughout the night, Oliver’s main narrative was one of optimism. His mocking of Americana clearly comes from a warm heart. He recalled his confusion when an American traveler complained about a hurricane delaying his flight, asking, “Why can’t we just fly through it?” “We’d love to but they won’t let us!” replied the airline attendant. Oliver’s confusion melted into admiration. Championing our country as “built on overconfidence,” he broke into an impassioned version of the national anthem, finishing with the line, “And the home of jet skis!” amid tumultuous applause. “Everything’s going to be fine,” he often repeated. With you around, John Oliver, I think you’re right.

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

Modern Times

This is the second post in Film Stock, a series of reviews appreciating the greatest films of all time. Charlie Chaplin's 1936 classic Modern Times is the selection this time around, as it was screened at Cornell Cinema last Thursday. The following article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location via this link.

Modern Times

Directed by Charlie Chaplin

Released in 1936

The sun had already set, but a maroon warmth lingered along the horizon long enough to defy the encroaching darkness for a few precious moments. In these minutes leading up to Cornell Cinema’s outdoor screening of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times last Thursday night, the view from the Terrace of Willard Straight Hall afforded a stunning panorama of downtown Ithaca at dusk, as well as a powerful metaphor, forced though it may be, on the film’s legacy.

When Chaplin released Modern Times in 1936, silent films had run aground about seven years before (see Singin’ in the Rain or The Artist for the romanticized history). His preceding masterpiece, City Lights, resisted the “talkie” push back in 1931. Modern Times is not completely silent (more on that later), but it is set in the silent film mode Chaplin and his iconic character, The Little Tramp, pioneered. Chaplin had the money, fame and gall to return to the ghost town of silent film and not only put on a show but bring millions around the world back with him. Successful as The Tramp’s swan song was, however, the paradigm had shifted and he had to finally conform, as he did with his talkie, The Great Dictator, four years later. Modern Times survives as the last beautiful respite of a form that faded into the distance.

Chaplin told simple stories with sincerity and certainty, two qualities lost in our nebulous modern times. Like many of his other works, Modern Times propels forward on the familiar romantic comedy tracks Chaplin himself long ago put into place. Our hero, Chaplin’s Little Tramp (listed as “a factory worker” in the credits), falls for the homeless “gamine,” played by Paulette Goddard. She is an orphaned, broke yet defiant girl, and shares a resourceful mischief with The Tramp. They meet when she steals a baguette and clumsily tackles The Tramp to the ground in mid-escape. The Tramp has not a penny more to his name than her but, ever the gentleman, takes the blame for her theft. As a policeman arrests him, he grins and tips his hat to the girl, embodying gentility long lost.

There is a greater purpose to this film, however, than imparting an exemplary love story. Current viewers are likely struck with the immediacy to the images and the ideas Chaplin crafted here. Modern Times is unapologetically political, decrying the strain of industry as deleterious to physical and mental health. The conveyor belts and twirling gears where Chaplin stages some of his most memorable slapstick are instruments of indoctrination. The factory boss — fiddling with a puzzle in his oversized office — commands the bare-chested gear operator, “Section Five, speed her up!” over and over. As production accelerates to breakneck speed, the workers are stripped of any semblance of free will or dignity. Today, we criticize technology on philosophical grounds — What does it mean to be human? Does this implant change me? — but its abuse as satirized through this film is clear and corporeal.

Every scene speaks on multiple planes; comedy doubles as commentary, fantasy as criticism and so on. The Tramp’s monotonous assembly line task of screwing in bolts inspires a nervous breakdown where he turns foolishly daring (famously sliding through the factory’s gears), sexually devious (fixated on ‘screwing’ the buttons on women’s blouses) and joyously mad (wrecking the factory in a flurry of dance). His full-body spasms betray a man turning into a machine, one uncaring and ready to crash. After being subjected to the iconic “Billows Feeding Machine,” which malfunctions and flings food at his face in a still-hilarious frenzy, there is a brilliant moment later on when he sits down in a prison dining hall. As he bends under the table to fix his shoe, the chef walks by and ladles a serving of stew into his bowl. When The Tramp gets up, he looks to the ceiling for a shaft and just shrugs off the instant materialization of his food. Mechanized food dispersal is a little too plausible for him.

Modern Times obviously reflects the sentiments of the working class during The Great Depression, though Chaplin settles for an optimism absent at that time. His critique of the American Dream ends in a caustic embrace, with The Tramp’s last lines — “Buck up, never say die. We’ll get along.” — arriving when all seems lost. Chaplin, a wealthy man at the time and supported by Hollywood studios, could have come across as disingenuous in speaking to the huddled masses. Viewing the movie today through my skewed image of that era and comfortable position in today’s, I nonetheless find his picture bittersweet. As The Tramp and the girl claim a dilapidated shack by the highway their own “paradise,” there is the blatant irony in the disconnect between fantasy (he dreams earlier of them in a comfy house with a stocked kitchen) and reality. But the scene is less a joke than a touching instance of believing your own dreams.

Throughout it all, Chaplin gets away without saying a word. That is not to say he is entirely silent; the climax of the film consists of the Tramp’s famous song, sung in gibberish and expressed through pantomime. But with clever use of diegetic sound — the feeding machine’s instructions are told through a record player, the factory boss speaks through television monitors — Chaplin retains the mystery of his Tramp, which he feared would be lost if he had to speak. He appeases the audience’s expectations by subverting them at every turn.

I can speak with certainty that the magic of this film was only fully retained through Cornell Cinema’s special nighttime open-air screening. I watched it for the first time on a lazy day over the summer. The disc was The Criterion Collection Blu-ray (which the Cinema also used), yet the afternoon glare clashed with the LCD television’s projection. What a difference to watch it under the stars, surrounded by some hundred students and professors resting from their own stress and labor. The audience Cornell Cinema attracts is one of love, patience and respect. I think back to our generation’s beloved Amélie, when the eponymous protagonist looks behind her at the faces of bliss populating a movie theater. This type of cinema transcends art, propaganda or entertainment — it shoots, hits and sinks right into the soul.