Movie Diary: The Master

SM and I finally went to see The Master on December 22, and the wait paid off because we got to see it in 70mm. Needless to say, it was a gorgeous movie, but I would have to say it was not my favorite P.T. Anderson film.

Don't get me wrong, I thought the film was great, but I found myself a bit less enthusiastic as I left the theater, perhaps just be because it was a less obvious character study than, say There Will Be Blood, and more of a theoretical exploration of leaders and followers. I will say that once I theorized a bit, though, I found the premise really intriguing, if a bit hard to grasp right away.

Let me back up and submit what I think the movie is about. Less focused on religious sects or cults than I'd anticipated, I found the real struggle to be the tension between those who lead and those who refuse to be led. The way SM and I discussed it afterward, believers seem to be set on their own spectrums, on which they have two markers connected by a tether. The first marker is their current position; the second marker is the placed where they want to be spiritually; and their religious life consists of striving to get to that second marker. It seems the stronger the believer, the tighter that tether. This might be true for any religion, but it was certainly so for Amy Adams' character, Laura Dern's character, and the other believers in the group: they saw in the distance a goal they wanted to achieve — whatever The Master wanted it to be — and they believed themselves moving their first marker along their tether to it, picking up slack as they went along.

I posit that Philip Seymour Hoffman's character, group/cult leader Lancaster Dodd, is continually moving not his current marker, but his goal marker (according to his prerogative as leader), and thus the goals of the entire believing congregation. If the controversy surrounding a cult or group of believers is whether or not those set goals are legitimate, attainable, and consistent, as the viewer of the film is given a vantage point outside of the group, it becomes questionable whether Dodd's goals pass this test. But to those following him, if they are invested in their own goal marker, they will be invested in him, and vice versa. Isn't this always so for any religion? You must be sold on the goals and believe you are moving forward (despite struggles to do so; the struggle to stay focused on moving forward is always incorporated into religious doctrine) to keep your faith.

Now, Joaquin Phoenix's character, WWII veteran Freddie Quell, is plagued with all sorts of problems, but the one that is most vexing to Dodd's followers is his lack of a goal marker. If the two markers are tethered, Quell's goal marker trails behind him as he moves along. It makes him directionless in more ways than one, but religiously it makes him unpredictable and worse than a skeptic. A skeptic may have their goal marker set in a different place, perhaps more tied down to this world or perhaps more attainable, but it's still there. Freddie, though, isn't even capable of being convinced of the investment, and thus his current marker can run parallel to the others, but to what end and for how long? For Dodd's followers, Quell inspires fear; for Dodd himself, Quell inspires the utmost interest — he is an enigma. While Dodd has ultimate control over his goal marker and may or may not be yanking it around at will or whim, his faithful followers barely deigning to question, Quell barely even knows he has a goal marker to swing around. Quell may be seen as an challenge to Dodd: he may be the most manipulatable one of the bunch, if only he could tie him down.

The cinematography was beautiful, the performances were impeccable, the story was rich, but a bit hard to pin down. I give this movie an A-.

The Ken Burns Effect

When I was maybe 10 years old, I started watching documentaries for fun. The first ones I watched were those by Ken Burns, shown on PBS. When I started making documentaries of my own, the fact that I could bring stills to life like Ken Burns did was incredibly cool, and I was really proud of myself. Ken Burns talked about his signature "moves" on POV recently. Enjoy.

Movie Diary: Argo, Cloud Atlas, and Flight

This entry would have packed more punch had I not procrastinated writing it for over a week. Alas, the information is the same.

Two weeks ago, SM and I went to three movies in 6 days, after a theater drought lasting a month or two. There are lots of movies out that I actually want to see, which doesn't always happen, so I'm glad to be able to take in at least a few of them.

Friday: Argo We've started somewhat of a tradition or habit with our friend JRF that involves us hanging out for a time at a bar — catching up, watching a game, what have you — and then getting the hankering to see a movie. The past two times we've done it, it was almost like we were daring each other, calling each other's bluff to stop everything and go see it now. The last movie was Looper; a solid and thrilling effort all around that we rushed to at 11:30pm on a Saturday night. I'd give it a B+. This time, we were watching the Bulls game along with JRF and our friend VP and decided on the 10:30 showing of Argo.

Argo was good. I loved the commitment to the time period throughout: even the opening production company credits were from the 1970s. The acting was great by all of those involved. I was especially happy to see Clea DuVall, an actress I've rarely seen outside of Carnivale and that one Buffy episode where she's invisible because no one noticed her. I've also been a Chris Messina fan since Six Feet Under, and, while I think The Mindy Project is too meh for me to actually stick to watching it, I'm glad he's popping up in more places. (Yeah, yeah, the bigger-name actors great too, and I was happy to see John Goodman, Bryan Cranston, etc, etc...) People complain about Ben Affleck, but I thought gave a solid performance, in front of and behind the camera. SM and I had a conversation about his range, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I do really want to see the other projects he's helmed, but I think we've calculated that it takes us 3 years to get completely through our Netflix queue, from bottom to top. Good movie - B+.

Saturday: Cloud Atlas Our friends J&C had asked us to form some sort of book club to read Cloud Atlas before the movie's release at the end of October. SM missed out, but the three of us were all read up by the time we reunited after Hurricane Sandy and celebrated both our power being back on and their recent engagement by going to a movie and dinner.

I have this problem where, if one of these things is not like the other and someone is experiencing something under different circumstances from me, I'm taken out of my experience and spend most of my time fretting about how that someone is handling it. I worry about a parent in a theater full of teens, or a co-worker among my friends, etc. In this case, I spent the entire movie trying to get outside of myself and see the movie how SM must have been seeing it, without the context of the book. As a result, I concluded that it was much too confusing to take in without the background of the novel. Afterward, SM said that he could follow along fine, and he really liked the movie, but that was after I'd given up hope that he'd been enjoying himself. All that said, I really liked what the Wachowskis did to the story. I am always thinking about media being the best whatever it is they are that they can be (the best novel, the best movie, regardless of them being based on the same story), so I appreciated the choices and cuts they made to the stories. I actually thought the film did a much neater job than the book ever did of tying up loose ends and putting fine points on each story as well as on how they all connect. It was this aspect of the movie that SM said came across as heavy-handed, but I guess since I knew what I was missing, I was rather satisfied. I'd like to watch the movie again without all of the pressure of thinking and feeling for my company, but for now, I'd give the movie a B.

Thursday: Flight GC and AW emailed us and VP about going to see Flight, and we saw no reason to say no. The power of the Denzel picture has certainly diminished in my eyes, but not to a point where I'll refuse to see his work. I'm really glad we decided to go, and not just for the bonus of seeing John Goodman in two pictures in 6 days.

First of all, the story was more unique than I'd acknowledged before. True, it's just a good old fashioned redemption story, but the nature of the obstacles the protagonist encounters — beyond alcoholism — aren't your normal movie fodder. Granted, I haven't seen many addiction stories that are purely about addiction, so maybe I'm just ignorant of the genre. The aspect of them film I liked best was that it was first and foremost about a man and his demon. Friendship, love, occupation, etc. are all parts of the film, as they are parts of our lives, but they don't triumph over the man's problems. He is given so many chances, and you see so many points at which you expect him to bottom out, at which another movie would give in for him and sober him up. But then you realize that it's gotten bad for us and bad for his friends on his behalf, but it hasn't gotten bad enough for him. And he's the only one who can really decide that enough is enough. The denouement is perhaps a little too overwrought, but I did like the very end. One last aspect I would be remiss to mention is that he reminded me a lot of my dad. Not that my dad has a problem with addiction or anything, but the relationship Denzel has with his son is reminiscent of what I saw between my dad and my siblings. It actually made me uncomfortable throughout the movie, and seeing middle-aged Denzel in general might cause discomfort for similar reasons. I think that's one reason the very end spoke to me more-so than it did to SM. A-.

Calling out the Bullshit

DS gave me this essay by Jonathan Franzen to read, and I thought it was fabulous. I recommend it. I've never read Franzen's work because I was afraid I'd encounter the post-modern headaches he so aptly rails against in the piece. After this, I think I'm more willing to give him a try.

Here are my favorite parts:

Fiction is the most fundamental human art. Fiction is storytelling, and our reality arguably consists of the stories we tell about ourselves. Fiction is also conservative and conventional, because the structure of its market is relatively democratic (novelists make a living one book at a time, bringing pleasure to large audiences), and because a novel asks for ten or twenty hours of solitary attentiveness from each member of its audience. You can walk past a painting fifty times before you begin to appreciate it. You can drift in and out of a Bartok sonata until its structures dawn on you, but a difficult novel just sits there on your shelf unread — unless you happen to be a student, in which case you're obliged to turn the pages of Woolf and Beckett. This may make you a better reader. But to wrest the novel away from its original owner, the bourgeois reader, requires strenuous effort from theoreticians. And once literature and its criticism become co-dependent the fallacies set in.

For example, the Fallacy of Capture, as in the frequent praise of "Finnegans Wake" for its "capturing" of human consciousness, or in the justification of "J R" 's longueurs by its "capture" of an elusive "postwar American reality"; as if a novel were primarily an ethnographic recording, as if the point of reading fiction were not to go fishing but to admire somebody else's catch. Or the Fallacy of the Symphonic, in which a book's motifs and voices are described as "washing over" the reader in orchestral fashion; as if, when you're reading "J R," its pages just turn themselves, words wafting up into your head like arpeggios. Or the Fallacy of Art Historicism, a pedagogical convenience borrowed from the moneyed world of visual art, where a work's value substantially depends on its novelty; as if fiction were as formally free as painting, as if what makes "The Great Gatsby" and "O Pioneers!" good novels were primarily their technical innovations. Or the epidemic Fallacy of the Stupid Reader, implicit in every modern "aesthetics of difficulty," wherein difficulty is a "strategy" to protect art from cooptation and the purpose of this art is to "upset" or "compel" or "challenge" or "subvert" or "scar" the unsuspecting reader; as if the writer's audience somehow consisted, again and again, of Charlie Browns running to kick Lucy's football; as if it were a virtue in a novelist to be the kind of boor who propagandizes at friendly social gatherings.

And near the end:

I know the pleasures of a book aren't always easy. I expect to work; I want to work. It's also in my Protestant nature, however, to expect some reward for this work. And, although critics can give me pastoral guidance as I seek this reward, ultimately I think each individual is alone with his or her conscience. As a reader, I seek a direct personal relationship with art. The books I love, the books on which my faith in literature rests, are the ones with which I can have this kind of relationship.

Why I Joined Twitter: Part 2

What a time to join a micro-blogging network! I'd composed a few Tweets before Hurricane Sandy, but what a great tool for breaking news! As soon as the danger of the storm became real, I was able to email concerned family and friends with the URL to my Twitter account and give them a play by play of how we were experiencing the storm. Facebook seems to hold this gravitas of Announcement to me, a declaration that "I am doing this, and I stand for these things as a person", whereas Twitter seems a bit more forgiving and only declarative of current circumstances. While Facebook has moved to viewing posts through a more historic lens, emphasizing life events and the changes one goes through in their lives (see: timeline), each Tweet supersedes the last.

Of course I'm over-thinking this just a bit, but I was really pleased with how easy it was and how it was the perfect communication tool for getting information out to my family. Instead of wasting texts and battery power briefing every family member keeping tabs on me in the Midwest, I was able to point them to a single source from me as well as other, more professional sources from those I follow, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Nate Silver, Ezra Klein, WNYC, etc. for both local and national views on the developments.

In short, I think I'm hooked. I have yet to see whether my actual Tweeting will be of any import, but at the very least I love sharing articles and opinions of those I'm following without having it feel like I have something to prove to all of my high school classmates and far-flung relatives. Facebook certainly does have a place in my social network existence, but I'm really enjoying this new discovery. For now.

P.S. SM and I are still without power or running water (day 4...we expect everything to be on tomorrow), but our friends have been kind enough to give us access to their apartment for showers and Internet. Everyone has been really great through this whole thing, and I'm grateful to have so many great friends and family in my life. Also, I called and emailed my dad, so there's that.