Month: June 2018

Week in Review: May 7th – 13th, 2018

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Can It Happen Here? Authoritarianism in America – A collection of essays pertaining to the topic of authoritarianism in the Age of Trump. Edited together by Cass R. Sunstein, formerly the Obama Administration’s regulatory czar, the collection includes thinkers from across the political spectrum. There is no straight answer to the book’s title question, and not all of the essays even try to attempt answer it. What is starkly clear after reading this book is that forms of authoritarianism have existed in this country before, are existing now, and will exist in the future. The degree of authoritarianism is a constant battle, for now being waged within judicial system and the vast government bureaucracy. The most shocking essay here is by Jonathan Haidt and Karen Stenner. Together they show, through a series of graphs and tables compiling behavioral surveys and the recent election results in the USA, the UK and France, that there is statistical evidence for a large authoritarian receptive group within our modern populations. Basically, ~35% of people tend to have these authoritarian dispositions and this number does not go away. It has been sitting under all of our liberal democracies for as long as the data is available. This population is not always a threat to democracy, but pending the types of stimuli (geopolitics, domestic social issues, economic variables) the group can be activated. Trump’s approval rating is completely stable at around ~40%, and the reason for this can also be explained by Haidt’s and Stenner’s analysis. Even if issues and leaders that activate the authoritarian response in that third of our population continue to maximize a negative response, it is still possible to win back democratic majorities; but the threat that this irrational group poses to liberal democracy will be ever-present.

Spider-Man: Homecoming – Probably the funniest Marvel film I’ve seen. Thor: Ragnarok is it’s closest competition. A lot of the fun comes from the fact that Peter Parker is a 15-year old, a notion that is fully baked into the plot. For example, at one point near the end Peter is giving chase to the Vulture, played by a scene chomping Michael Keaton. Peter ‘borrows’ a sports car to catch up and he’s driving really poorly, wrecking the car along the way. We’ve spent the majority of the film watching him train with his powers in his new suit, developing fighting proficiency and learning to problem solve on the fly, and then we get these funny little reminders that, “oh yeah”, he’s a kid and he doesn’t even have a driver’s license! This is also a good New York movie and the best recent blockbuster about puberty.

Dust in the Wind – The third and final installment in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s coming of age trilogy, this 1986 film deals most overtly with the opening urban/rural divide that resulted from Taiwan’s rapid industrialization. Train rides, tunnels and stations across the island feature heavily in the film, as its two young protagonists, Ah-yuan and Ah-yun, move to Taipei to earn money for their respective families in their rural village. The uncertainty and lack of direction in their new urban environment confuse and alienate their relationship, one that could otherwise blossom into a romance. Matters are complicated even further when Ah-yuan is called up for his conscription. Hou seems intent on showing the limits of agency afforded to these youths and their distant families. Fittingly, the final shot of the film lingers over the green valley of the village, as grey clouds blow above in the wind.

Week in Review: April 30th – May 6th, 2018

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La Jetée – Chris Marker’s experimental classic. I was curious to re-watch this due to my burgeoning interest in photography. Constructed entirely of photographs and voice-over, with the exception of ~3 seconds of film, this is certainly an unorthodox way to construct a 30 minute science fiction time travel story. Marker utilizes the medium he’s chosen and various visual motifs within his photography to explore how different objects or ideas – a photograph, a memory, taxidermy, fossils, history, love, a film – function as imperfect vessels of meaning through time. If you haven’t seen this gem, it is on YouTube here: La Jetée

Zama – As mentioned in the previous Week in Review, I also read Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 novel, Zama. Di Benedetto stated openly that the biggest influence on his career was Dostoevsky. The first part of this book is sort of like Notes from Underground set in colonial Asunción, layered with the complicated racial hierarchy of the region; like the narrator of that novel, the titular Don Diego de Zama is a conniving, neurotic type who’s overwrought inner dialogue moves the story along. As an official in the Spanish Empire, Zama aspires to a more central position of importance, ideally in Buenos Aires with his family, or better yet, in Spain. As an americano though (one of Spanish heritage but born in the Americas) his pull is weaker than any Spaniard’s and his plans are repeatedly thwarted. In parts 2 and 3, the parameters of Zama’s stasis take on a Kafkaesque quality. Questions of who he is, where he is, and what is keeping him in Asunción become more ambiguous. I found that the initial disdain I felt for Zama slowly turned to sympathy and then to something more mysterious. Very much recommended.

Hamlet – London’s Royal Shakespeare Company came to town with their wildly successful production of Hamlet featuring a nearly all black cast replete with numerous pan-African influences. Though this production had its cultural moment long before 2018’s Black Panther film, this did not stop the Wakanda Forever salute from being incorporated for good fun (and for good reason). On a scene to scene, character to character level, this show was better acted, better produced and more visually interesting than D.C.’s Shakespeare Theater Company rendition earlier this year. Part of it is talent and budget, but part of it is that the RSC show is able to go places through its cross-cultural pollination that are simply inaccessible to a majority white American cast. For example, Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost of his late father is preempted by, what I can only describe as, a solo African dream dance featuring live drummers on stage, encircling fog machines, and flashing strobe lights. The question of whether Hamlet is really seeing his father, some other spirit, or simply going insane always existed within the text; what this production adds is a historical and cultural ambiguity that refocuses the scope of the play. To its credit, the D.C. show wisely leaned into the latent political interpretations offered by current events: Claudius as an authoritarian leader in charge of a secret police; Hamlet as a liberal hipster driven to radical protest. Here again though, the RSC production essentially runs a circle around that take, while offering larger readings. Notably, this play still takes place in a Denmark, a country that is ethnically over 90% caucasian and one of the many western European countries with a dark legacy in the Atlantic slave trade.

To The Back of Beyond – What if you just stood up and walked away from your entire life? Home, career, partner, children, everything. It’s an extreme, partially unbelievable conceit for a novel that author Peter Stamm makes not only believable but emotionally resonant. Thomas, a husband to Astrid, and father of two children, does exactly that at the start of this book. He walks away one evening on what begins as a stroll and slowly becomes a much larger choice to continue to hike through the Swiss countryside without end. The perspective alternates from Astrid to Thomas as they both slowly accept that Thomas will not be returning. Stamm’s prose, which is quite elegant but never dazzling, keeps the story within the quotidian. Thomas’s decisions to keep going, like most things in life, just sort of happen, revolving around the practical needs one would face in such a scenario. Ultimately the story is about the distant relationship between the two protagonists, and though Stamm never drifts into abstraction, the distancing itself is pregnant with more relatable interpretations. The need for freedom, space, change in a relationship are all on the table, and in many ways it’s Astrid’s, not Thomas’s, pained yet quiet acceptance of this that will have most readers reeling.

Thor: Ragnarok – In the wake of Infinity War, I felt compelled to fill in some personal blind spots in the MCU. I am also a huge Taika Waititi fan and was excited what he could do with a massive budget. I was mostly not disappointed, with the caveat that this film looks and moves like any of the magical/space operatic entries. Waititi’s unique contribution here is the comedy, which has the dual function of making Ragnarok wildly funny and of finally (3 solo films in!) fleshing out Hemsworth’s Thor into a three-dimensional character. The contrast with the piece of cardboard with the stapled blonde wig on top that plays Thor in Age of Ultron is stark to say the least. Allegedly, there are numerous Maori influences throughout visuals but I am sadly uninformed in that area. The significance these references likely have with the film’s broad post-colonial themes makes sense, but unfortunately said themes are under-developed anyway.

Face / Off – In John Woo’s ludicrous but highly entertaining film, FBI agent Sean Archer, played by John Travolta, decides to swap faces with terrorist Caster Troy, played by Nicholas Cage, in order to go deep undercover in a high security prison and learn from Troy’s brother the key to stopping a terror attack in downtown Los Angeles. Obviously, Troy wakes up without his face, finds Archer’s face lying around and attaches that face. . . If this premise isn’t enough for you, there is also a sequence where Archer, with Cage’s face, is pointing a gun at a mirror seeing the reflection of the terrorist he’s after, while on the other side of this mirror is another mirror(!) where Troy, with Travolta’s face, is pointing a gun at the reflection of the FBI agent he despises.

Avengers: Age of Ultron – I had heard that this was one of the worst MCU films, and its possible that that low bar made me mostly enjoy it despite its many shortcomings. This film is excellent at illustrating the power discrepancies between the team members, the importance of cooperation and knowing your role. Surprisingly, Hawkeye, the weakest Avenger by far, steals the show and may be the only three-dimensional character in the film. Besides that, I was unable to extract an intelligible political message, other than that Artificial Intelligence is dangerous if we don’t do it right. Ultron has an eye for the theatrical, at one point taking great joy in destroying an older version of himself, but too low an IQ to make this portrayal of the future worth thinking about.

Week in Review: April 23rd – 29th, 2018

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The Time to Live and the Time to Die – Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1985 coming of age picture set in a remote rural Taiwanese town. Released the same year that Hou stared in, and co-wrote, Taipei Story, it feels part of the same conversation that Edward Yang is directing in that film, and later in A Brighter Summer Day. This is not an accident. Chu Tien Wen, a co-writer of Taipei Story and all of Hou’s subsequent films, is a co-writer here and these close friends aspired to forge a new Taiwanese cinema, one that dealt with the problem of Taiwanese national identity whilst exploring new aesthetic ground through film. The Time to Live and the Time to Die was a personal film for Hou, and it’s possible the events are entirely memoir; its Hou’s voice who narrates the film. Hou’s signature long takes and rural seated vantage point make this early film distinct for the time and the environment, but it never achieves the meditative focus or the thematic vastness of his later work.

Art Gallery of Ontario – A first time visit, this is a beautiful, though unintentionally funny building. If you have seen The Square and its X-Royal Art Museum you’ll know why. There were two highlights of this visit, the first being the Henry Moore gallery. It features around two-dozen original plaster sculptures, gifted by Moore to the AGO, populating a single large gallery and placed in scattered positions. The room itself is sanitized by filtered, natural light, giving the grey tones of the marble floor, off-white walls and concrete ceiling an antiseptic feeling. The aging, discolored plaster of the forms Moore created thrive like alien mutations in this atmosphere. Like the later two artists mentioned below, this was my first time encountering a compendium of Moore’s work and I was impressed at his ability to generate tension in the spatial voids of his work, often sculpting the air as much as the material. The second highlight was an exhibit called Mitchell/Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation which focused on the unique relationship between abstract expressionist painters Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle. The exhibit traces their work before, during and after their long romance, plotting how their work mirrored their relationship. Starting at two distinct points, their compositions slowly begin to resemble each other up until they don’t, at which point the couple were splitting apart, living on two different continents. Riopelle’s mosaic-like painting style, achieved by taking gobs of paint and then smearing them with a spatula or knife in mass geometric patterns, was a revelation for me.

Zama – This is Lucretia Martel’s 2017 adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel. I’m unfamiliar with Martel’s work, but this is a fantastic start, even though I much prefer the book (see next week’s Partial Review). The film follows the titular Don Diego de Zama, an administrator in the Spanish Empire stationed in Asunción, as he vies for a promotion to another region, ideally to his family still in Buenos Aires, or best of all to Spain. Zama is repeatedly promised these opportunities, but as the years pass unmarked, the realization of his desolation sinks in. We are never allowed to see inside Zama’s head but Martel externalizes his longing and metaphysical pain through vague illnesses, dilapidated means of living and a mesmerizing non-diegetic sound design. The tactility of the period is possibly this film’s highest achievement. Lastly, I got to see this at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, which is quite nice!

Gardiner Museum – The ceramics-only museum in Toronto was hard to pass up. The temporary exhibit was a participatory Yoko Ono “room” that involved meditating with a rock, creating string connections across walls, and mending your own broken ceramics in the spirit of community. It had the strange two-pronged effect of inducing multiple eye rolls yet endearing me to Ono. The main collection, a short history of East-Asian ceramic production followed by a much more in-depth collection detailing how porcelain production technologies and styles permeated through Europe, was most notable for its British collections. The Brits brought an entrepreneurial spirit to porcelain, standardizing popular prints and styles for mass production. This in turn enabled them to serve both a larger middle class market, while stimulating highly inventive ceramics for the elite which necessarily needed to be more impressive. Though I felt like I was looking at the beginnings of Pottery Barn, the British seemed to understand how economics and art could be synthesized in a way that the other European powers did not. The standardized pieces, labeled by the pattern number (of which there were over 500), were the most elegant as well as the most egalitarian.

Avengers: Infinity War – I liked it. . . It was fun in the way that a comic book crossover event can be, but also as meaningless. Though, even if the events of this film are likely to be undone soon, it feels like Marvel is hinting that the events of the next film will result in some permanent consequences. I’m all on board the MCU train at this point. I recommend this review for a more substantive take: Avengers: Infinity War

Week in Review: April 16th – 22th, 2018

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Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin’s 1928 epic modernist novel about a working class man named Franz Biberkopf in Weimar Germany. At the start of the book, Franz emerges from prison, serving time for accidentally beating his ex-wife to death during a dispute. Franz is a brute and may not be all there in the head. Our narrator explains early on that he will be tested three times on his spiritual journey to make a life for himself in Berlin, each test a blow, harder and more severe than the last, after which he will not be the same man. Döblin’s novel, like several modernist epics, is long and tedious, at times more about evoking a stream of consciousness or abstractly detailing a space, in the mode of a newspaper per se, than it is a linear story one can follow. One sequence systematically details the lives of all of the inhabitants of each floor of a new apartment building, starting from the bottom up. Though it takes hundreds of pages to adapt to this book’s rhythms, I eventually found it nourishing. Franz is one of the more beguiling characters I’ve read, and Döblin’s approach, both sadistic and humanistic, will surprise you throughout. It’s also a remarkable portrait of a city that would be destroyed in less than twenty years. Döblin couldn’t have known exactly what he was capturing, but nonetheless, the dark tides of history are clearly shifting in this text.

In the Shadow of Women – The middle installment in Philippe Garrel’s love trilogy, and the first to have Jean-Claude Carrière on board as co-writer. The film follows a disaffected middle-age couple, who work together as documentarians, as they simultaneously cheat on each other and subsequently both discover this about one another. This film is simply funnier, sexier and more interesting than Jealousy, and I’m tempted to give nearly all the credit to Carrière. Which is all to say that this is a pretty good film, and still not a great film. Throughout this trilogy, Garrel explores how human insecurities dictate the curious architecture of relationships; unfortunately, these varied insights never seem to congeal into anything substantive or unique in the vast face of French film history. Though, the black & white photography and economic storytelling may be enough for some to enjoy.

After the Rehearsal & Persona – Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove brought his Toneelgroep Amsterdam troupe to the Kennedy Center for two performances of Ingmar Bergman plays. I was unfamiliar with After the Rehearsal, but Persona happens to be one of my favorite films. Bergman directed it with a cerebral multi-dimensionality, notable in most of his more severe projects, and I was eager to see how it would translate to a stage. I was not disappointed. The first play takes place in a theater director’s office after a rehearsal of a play he’s about to launch. As he digests the afternoon’s events, he’s visited by two of the actors, both women, a mother and a daughter, a family that has a long history with the director. Slowly, it dawns on the viewer that one may actually be watching the interior of the director’s mind, wrangling with the meta-actors, and their respective characters past and present, attempting to get a grip on his play. After intermission, the diorama set has been skinned of its theater detritus. Now resembling a barren, cold hospital cell, Persona begins similarly to the film. During the transition to the island though, the walls of the cell collapse outward into a simulated ocean (a couple of inches of water surrounding the inner stage) which contains the rest of the action. A storm then drenches the two women, utilizing a giant fan and hose to literally spray rain across the stage. The two women, mother and daughter in the previous production, are now mostly disrobed as their identities begin to merge over a shimmering, dreamy floor of water. It’s hard to understate just how dazzling the production design was here, and how effective it was at nesting, echoing and amplifying these two works. If you happen to see an Ivo van Hove production in your town, this should be a must see.

Lover for a Day – The final installment in Garrel’s love trilogy. Carrière is on board again, bringing a needed vigorousness, and it mostly pays off again. The plot revolves around a heartbroken daughter moving in with her father, who happens to be dating and living with a young woman the same age as her. Garrel demonstrates cleverly how relationships can generate and propagate problems into other relationships. Philippes’s real-life daughter Esther Garrel stars as the daughter, making the already unsettling age dynamic a meta-issue. As stated above, these films were all competently made and entertaining but ultimately disappointing in their slightness.

Fortune Teller – Xu Tong’s unsanctioned documentary about a poor fortune-teller, Li Baicheng, in a suburb of modern Beijing. Li is in his mid-50’s with several health conditions and needs two make-shift crutches to move. Deaf, blind and suffering from several undiagnosed mental and physical disabilities, Li’s wife is even worse off. To make a living, Li illegally practices fortune-telling through various arcane methods that he appears to truly believe in. Above all else, this film is a harrowing display of poverty, and like the documentary Three Sisters, an implicit criticism of the Chinese state. The prosperity from China’s record growth is concentrated, leaving hundreds of millions behind without any social healthcare or unemployment benefits.

NOTE: After a month of personal travel, family requirements and multiple weddings, Partial Review will now be returning to its normal schedule. Expect a frantic cataloguing of the last month and a half’s events until things return to normal. Thank you.

-Management