Tag: Culture

The Dark Knight

Max Mayo1 Comment

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is a challenging picture that still provokes one’s definitions of heroism and vigilantism more than a decade later. It depicts torture as a somewhat effective means of intelligence gathering. It depicts extraordinary rendition as helpful. It demonstrates secretive mass surveillance of citizen’s cell phones to be extremely effective and necessary under the right circumstances. It’s a film that presents the obstruction of justice for the murder of 5 cops as justifiable for social cohesion and a cleaner narrative. And it depicts a city government telling this lie to its citizens.

In case it wasn’t obvious then, or now, The Dark Knight is a parable for the United States’ vigilante role of sheriff of the liberal world order, with special emphasis on the Iraq War era. Nolan’s achievement is realizing the potential of a philosophical battle between Batman and Joker to server as an imperfect mirror to current events and a politically plural audience.

A few observations that stuck with me on this recent viewing:

  • The expansive mob network that effectively runs Gotham City is operating as a money laundering outfit for dark money emanating from mainland China via Mr. Lau’s company. The implication is that dirty money from China is directly empowering the rot in Gotham.
  • The reason Mr. Lau runs to Hong Kong is because China will not extradite one of its citizens to a foreign power under nearly any circumstances. That Nolan is including irregular international extradition law as a key plot challenge for Batman went way over my head when I first saw this.
    • A digression: This is the second Nolan Batman film where China and Chinese culture plays an elliptical role in the proceedings. In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne is seen speaking Chinese after committing a robbery abroad, eventually finding himself in a prison in Bhutan. And notably, the terrorist organization Bruce briefly joins called the League of Shadows, headed by Ra’s al Ghul, is depicted as a vaguely Indo-Chinese faction by their fighting style, garb, set design and from the casting of the other members.
  • The final action sequence takes place in an under-construction building from which Joker is conducting his ferry-prisoners-dilemma spectacle and holding hospital patients hostage in clown mask disguises. That building was then under-construction Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago. . .

Week in Review: May 21st – 27th, 2018

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Who We Are and How We Got Here – This will be one of my favorite books I’ll read this year. David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here details the still nascent field of ancient DNA analysis, how it is upending the existing scientific hierarchy, and how ancient DNA is retelling the story of human evolution on planet Earth. Before this period, we had to rely on anthropology, archeology, philology, and older science, like carbon dating, to triangulate knowledge about human prehistory. Now, thanks to cheaper DNA sequencing technology and new methods of comparative analysis, scientists can gather a bone segment from central Eurasia and quickly know, with near absolute precision, which historic population of humans that sample is from, where that population came from and which populations were near them. The major revelations are twofold; first, pre-historic human populations have been moving around the globe almost continuously since the hypothetical (now in question!) “Out of Africa” theory; and second, these human populations have been mixing with each other for just as long. The implications here are massive. For example, you will learn repeatedly that Earth’s current racial demography is a relatively recent state of affairs and there have been numerous races before. The book details only 30 known human population mixture events, of which there are more still yet to be discovered; these events represent mixtures of populations more genetically disparate than modern Europeans are to modern Asians. There is a steep learning curve to this book, but Reich makes the cutting edge technology understandable for a layperson (read: me) while layering in a moral optimism to the findings. One cannot come away from this information without a profound sense of connection to our species’ shared history.

The Nasher Sculpture Center – A few unsurprising thematic clusters of permanent collection classics comprised the main exhibit on this visit, but the experience was still rich due to Renzo Piano’s wonderful design for the building. His penchant for overhead natural light in gallery spaces is still underrated, and the building’s comb-like structure up’s that ante with glass walls on north and south ends. The joys of that building were then tempered by the sculpture garden which I found a bit generic now that we live in an age where every modern art museum does more or less the same thing here.

The Crow Collection – Only the ground floor was available, but even with one floor and only two micro-exhibits, The Crow Collection is a gem for the city of Dallas. The first exhibit detailed a full set of Japanese samurai armor piece by piece. The armor was arranged on a mannequin in the center of the room allowing for a 360 degree analysis of the many pieces and ornaments. The second exhibit was a brief survey on the history of Korean ceramics. . . which was pretty fantastic luck because Korean ceramics happen to be my favorite ceramics in nearly every way: their colors, their glazes, and most of all, their shapes. The works were arranged by time period and paired with contemporary Korean ceramics for some interesting contrasts. I am always astounded by how distinct, elegant and sophisticated these works are from this tiny peninsula. My suspicion is that the extreme pressures of being sandwiched between the massive, ubiquitous cultures from China and Japan made such creativity possible and necessary.

Week in Review: May 14th – 20th, 2018

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Claire’s Camera – Even Hong Sang-soo’s experiemental, slapdash editing ruse is more interesting and more fun than most film efforts, a testament to his talent. Here he’s gathered regular Kim Min-hee and French titan Isabelle Huppert to make a low stakes, 70 minute love triangle drama, shot on the streets of Cannes while the three of them were attending the eponymous film festival a few years ago. The film is a sort of artist’s statement (though its difficult to know when Hong is sincere. . .) about Hong’s approach to editing and the act of capturing someone on camera. Claire (Huppert) takes Polaroid pictures of characters throughout claiming that when you take a photo of someone, the person is changed. To look at that photo is to look at the distance between what you have changed into and what you were. Thus, filmmaking is the act of capturing change. Making all of this more complicated is the non-linear editing. Frequently the film jumps backwards and forwards in time, testing the viewer to not only compile the timeline but to focus on how the characters are imperceptibly changing.

Racer and the Jailbird – Belgium director Michaël R. Roskam newest, starring the beautiful Adèle Exarchopoulos and the beautiful Matthias Schoenaerts. I haven’t seen Roskam’s much lauded Bullhead and this film doesn’t whet the appetite. To start, Racer features a bizarre narrative with no less than three jarring plot shifts that actually change what the film is about. Most viewers having seen the first 30 minutes will not be expecting this film to have more to say about terminal illness and reform-based justice systems than bank robbing or racecar driving. Even more confusing, the movie was marketed as a sexy, Euro-crime thriller. At the very least its a surprising ride featuring two genuine francophone stars in their prime, I’m just skeptical that there is much of anything going on under the hood; a strange injection of Americana, sentimentality and Christianity in the final moments left me scratching my head.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant – I saw this Cuban production at the Kennedy Center in Spanish with a very poor translation. Thus, any nuance this performance contained was lost on me. It did make me want to see the Rainer Werner Fassbender film on which it is based. The story is about a lesbian love triangle in West Germany and focuses on the changing power dynamics in a liberalizing Europe. This rendition maintains the location and time period of the film, but utilizes 4 male actors in drag for the lead roles. For an informed review from someone who did not need the subtitles I recommend this: PLACEHOLDER.

My Next Guest Needs No Introduction – Tina Fey is an important and hilarious comic, and this interview is an excellent introductory biography of her. She seems to be truly struggling with how to navigate our ever more politically correct world and the toxic culture of social media. I will talk about this a bit below, but I would like to see her stay away from SNL.

John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City – As a fan of John Mulaney, I was happy to see him provide a mostly entertaining special that, if venue size is any indication, epitomizes his well-earned popularity. I was also surprised by the size of his ambition, as this special is a claim to the comedy throne left vacant by #MeToo. But in lieu of this, I was left a bit sad. When comics go bigger, its inevitable that they will also have to be broader. This is a pop culture law of physics. In this special, Mulaney is louder, nastier, more machismo than normal, and though these are necessary land grabs for a broader comedy identity, I found I was laughing much less. Mulaney in conversations, interviews, working behind the scenes, and in smaller productions is weirder, brainier and riskier, traits that have gotten him this far. I hope he finds ways to maintain those characteristics as his star continues to rise.

Saturday Night Live – I was so high off of the Sterling K. Brown episode that I ended up watching the rest of this season. I would liken it to watching a clown car drive up off a ramp placed at the edge of a cliff and then continuing to watch as the clowns plunge into gorge, exploding on impact. That is to say, it started funny, and then quickly became very not funny and sort of painful. Witnessing Tina Fey host this finale was the final gut punch. She’s so talented and the years where she was head writer on SNL are some of the very best in the show’s history. Unfortunately, the skits they wrote for her were either overly reliant on that legacy, presenting old favorites devoid of their necessary cultural context, or dead on arrival political commentaries that have typified this season. My advice for Tina, follow the wise Kylo Ren’s advice and, “let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you were meant to be.”

Tully – Jason Reitman, Diablo Cody, and Charlize Theron have teamed up again for possibly their weirdest film yet. I was excited for this one, as Young Adult, their previous collaboration is probably Reitman’s best film. Tully is an om to the maternal experience and a fairly interesting indictment of new age lifestyles. I don’t think this movie works in the end, nor have I thought much about it since, but I enjoyed myself thoroughly despite its flaws. Cody is just a fun writer (I recommend seeing Jennifer’s Body for her finest work) and Theron can make any material compelling.

Michael Che Matters – Surprisingly funny. More people should be talking about this. Che is actually offensive in this special and seems sincere about it, repeatedly building a tension with his audience that his jokes then release. The fun is seeing how long he can sustain the awkwardness before he lets the audience off the hook. It goes without saying, but this guy is going places.

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 16th – 22th, 2018

Max Mayo2 Comments

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