Tag: Politics

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. . .

What I’ve Been Watching

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Capernaum – For this western viewer, this is an eye-opening and harrowing snapshot of what is going on in Beirut seen through the lens of a 12 year old boy named Zain (played by a Syrian refugee with a demonic zeal in his eyes) living and hustling on the streets. You see an environment that is festering with poverty and overcrowding, buffeted by desperate regional migration from Africa and Syria. The city, the state and the family unit as completely dysfunctional. The grimmest, funniest and best sequence is when Zain is basically raising an Ethiopian baby alone! and features Zain dragging his child, Jonas, around on a skateboard in a pot. . . My main critique is of the courtroom frame for the story, which gets a little too sappy for my taste. Director Nadine Labaki uses impressionistic cinematography and a frantic editing style to capture it all. She is someone to keep an eye on.

Happy Hour – This nearly 5 and a half hour film is an absolute delight. You follow four female friends in their 30’s, basically just exploring their friendships and personal relationships. Much of the film focuses on the mundane – family unit routines, jobs, commutes – until one of the friends reveals she cheated on her husband and is now filing for divorce. Things set off from there though nothing is ever that dramatic or boils over, it’s almost anti-Hollywood; nonetheless, it builds and builds into something dynamic, complex and alive. Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has a penchant for holding on the smallest details for as long as possible, surprising you later as the meaning sinks in. Scenes are rarely less than 10 minutes and frequently much longer. His digital cinematography was inspiring too, it has that HD soap opera look, but over time i found it got me much closer to the characters. Again, it felt more real. For example, he plays a lot with contrast, opting to shoot characters in front of bright windows, knowing you won’t be able to see the actor. He’s also quite restless with his editing and framing. A picnic scene with the 4 women will feature 6-8+ different angles and he’s constantly switching between them. I cannot wait to see Hamaguchi’s latest, Asako I & II.

Destroyer – Seedy, opioid fueled LA neo-noir. Nicole Kidman is disturbing and hideous, a make-up feat I thought impossible. Similar to Aaron Katz’s Gemini, this one can’t compete with the best LA noirs this century (Mulholland, Dr., Drive, Brick, Inherent Vice, BR2049) but still manages to carve out its own little space. Director Karyn Kusama favors marginal genre tweaking here, reminded me a lot of Soderbergh’s genre exercises.

Week in Review: April 2nd – April 8th, 2018

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Three Sisters – Wang Bing’s beautiful and heartbreaking documentary from 2012 traces a year in the lives of three sisters in an unconnected and undeveloped village in rural Yunnan Province. The three sisters, ages 4 through 10, are left to fend for themselves while their father works in the distant city of Kunming; the mother has abandoned the family. Yang Yang, the eldest, becomes the work horse and pseudo-mother to the younglings, performing all of the rigorous farm and house work in addition to attending grade school. The key sequence is late in the film, when the father takes the younger two children to the city, relieving Yang Yang of her responsibility, but leaving her completely alone as a consequence. It’s an overwhelming portrait of poverty, isolation and resilience. Often relying on a crew of himself, Wang captures it all with a hand-held, low-grade video recorder for a cinéma-vérité style. As a viewer, you almost never forget that Wang is in the scene filming and yet he rarely loses the fly on the wall invisibility that allows life to unravel in its natural rhythms.

British Sounds – Another Godard directed Dziga Vertov Group political film, this one set in Great Britain in the late ‘60’s. It’s divided into roughly 5-10 minute segments each with entirely different visual stratagems. The first and best sequence features one long continuous pan through a Renault automobile assembly line, Marxist commentary included. Another one features a newscaster reading over-the-top, politically incorrect right-wing political commentary. This segment is remarkable in how it resembles actually politically incorrect talking points featured any given day on Fox News. Godard’s satire is now just real life. A less positive sequence features a long take of a naked woman from the waist down, the voice over describing the need for female agency and empowerment in society. This didn’t offend me per se, in fact, it is quite powerful, but I would have been more comfortable with this scene coming from a female director.

Freer Gallery of Art – This took three attempts, but I finally made it through the entirety of the newly renovated permanent collection of the Freer Gallery of Art. Though the building isn’t particularly large, like any good museum, it rewards patience and careful consideration. It features ceramics, sculpture and painting from across the Asian continent paired with some American work for contrast. The Chinese and Japanese Art collections were my favorites, especially the Chinese jade Bi from the Liangzhu culture and the various Japanese wabi-sabi vessels. The former are particularly mysterious because historians are unsure what function they played in society. Sometimes individuals would be buried with them, and others would be passed down within families for generations.

Meshes of the Afternoon – Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s short avant-garde debut. This was a re-watch and I was blown away by the cinematography. The turbulent identity loop Deren’s character literally climbs through sits in a continuum, building on the promise of Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, anticipating the later work of Jean Cocteau and even Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Thematically, the woman in psychological peril subject matter feels as accomplished as David Lynch’s oeuvre. A reminder that we should all be paying more attention to the avant-garde. Speaking of which, where is the avant garde in film today? Surely Lynch and Malick are too mainstream now. Who else?

Queer Eye – The first episode of this reboot is just ridiculous fun. I find that intimate moments in reality TV are harder for me to buy into than in fictional or documentary film; The staging and editing room manipulations tend to be too obvious. BUT, this Fab Five are so likeable and their feel good message of self-love and empowerment is so important that it was easy to forgive the show’s flaws. I particularly enjoyed the little montages each host gets before their segments. For example, Jonathan Van Ness, the hair stylist, will be twirling his admittedly amazing hair while dancing with a huge smile for multiple quick shots. Totally infectious.

Port of Shadows – Marcel Carné’s moody, noir-ish portrait of a world at the brink of oblivion. It’s 1938, Jean (a sterling Jean Gabin) has deserted the army and hitchhiked to the port city of Le Havre, intending to escape the dark shadow looming over Europe. In the city, Jean gets entangled with the locals and falls for the charming Nelly (Michèle Morgan), giving fate enough time to wrap its tentacles around him. Nearly everything and everyone is great here, most notably Carné’s expression of masculinity through Gabin. Gabin’s Jean is running away from his duty and his country, yet Carné directs only sympathy with this choice. Moreover, throughout the film Jean stands as a moralizing force for the other male characters, literally beating them when they get out of line. This code, a personal hierarchy of masculine values, strikes me as particularly French, a precursor to the type of cool masculinity that defines the later crime noirs of Jean-Pierre Melville.

A Quiet Place – Jim from The Office directing a pretty good horror film! I would give this movie an A for concept and a B / B- for execution. John Krasinski is a competent director and, if A Quiet Place is any indication, an ambitious one. The best scene is at the halfway point when the wife, played by Emily Blunt (Krasinski’s real-life wife), must give birth in silence after stepping on a nail. Also promising is Krasinski’s aptitude for spatial management on a massive farm set. Too much of this film is directed safely, the visual puzzle pieces are a little too big to make it challenging. Worse, I found myself grasping at straws to build a coherent thematic response from its swirl of Biblical and Americana imagery. Perhaps a larger interpretation will congeal over time. In the meantime, I am eager to see what this box office success will afford Krasinski next.

Isle of Dogs

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This is basically a defense of Wes Anderson, which is a position I’d never dreamed I would be in 10 years ago.

Wes Anderson, above all else, is an aesthete and his films are extensions of his personal style. I’ve come to terms with his output being more about presentation than what is presented. And in fact, only when we stop protesting what he isn’t and address what he is, can we actually criticize him.

Though there is nothing overly new or rich about the characters, story, or themes in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, from an animation perspective alone this film is worth seeing. Anderson creatively synthesizes cutting edge stop-motion animation with Japanese woodblock print imagery, kabuki and bunraku theater influences to create images and sequences that are easily some of the best in his œuvre, and some of the best in animation.

Buried in Anderson’s style fixations is his ethos of individualism, personal duty, social civics, and common morals. Again, he’s not treading new thematic or psychological ground, but he is finding new, unique and interesting ways to express himself. That is more than most artists ever achieve. In his commitment to this ethos, and as an auteur with substance, I see much more in common between Anderson and Robert Bresson or Quentin Tarantino, than I do Michael Bay.

Now for the cultural appropriation question, for which this film has drawn much ire. Overall, I found this film’s approach to be well-meaning and indeed respectful of Japanese culture. The lengths to which Anderson goes to carefully emulate Japanese theater, woodblock printing and cinema speaks volumes. I liken this film more to his masterwork The Grand Budapest Hotel than The Darjeeling Limited. The latter film renders the Indian subcontinent as a colorful, exotic backdrop for white man-child angst, while the former is an example of a film that intelligently and creatively engages with a foreign culture. In fact, I would like to see more filmmakers attempt what Anderson is doing here. And finally, as a challenge for any criticisms, I think most of the claims of foul play could (and would) still be argued even if Anderson had made the opposite choices. This begs the question, is what is being criticized actually the problem, or is the problem that people shouldn’t create artistic projects that engage with cultures foreign to the artist. Obviously there is a line for cultural appropriation, but I do not think this film approaches it.

All of this is to say that I found Isle of Dogs to be a charmingly slight, or slightly charming, film and a must-see for animation fans. Oddly, my biggest complaint with it is that there are not nearly enough dogs in it!

The New Yorker

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In the Fall of 2012, my late Grandma Lydia and my father came to visit me in college at SMU. My Grandma brought with her several copies of a magazine called The New Yorker. I was vaguely familiar with this magazine, but had never actually held a copy before that point. On one of those afternoons, resting in their hotel room before heading out for the next activity, I eyed one she had left on the couch. Enticed by its colorful cover design, I picked it up, slumped in a chair and began to flip through it; within minutes I knew this was something I needed.

It was the September 10, 2012 Fashion issue. I really only turned the pages, reading little bits here and there, but I knew. In that issue, as in all of them, there were endless descriptions of New York City’s surplus of cultural events, trendy political commentary, personal essays by famous writers, long form journalism, long form culture articles, short fiction, poetry, cartoons and reviews of what at that time seemed like everything. My grandmother, noticing the glint in my eye, urged me to keep that issue. In the days that followed, I read that magazine from cover to cover, a rarity for anyone familiar with it. My thirst unquenched,  I then signed up for the trial subscription. And when that was finished, I became a yearly paying subscriber which has been the case for the last 5 years. In that time, I’ve received the magazine weekly, devouring and struggling to keep up with that relentless pile, often bringing my own stacks of back issues on vacations and holidays.

As of April 9th, 2018, I am no longer a subscriber. Without going into detail as to why, I instead want to use this space to reflect. The magazine was, without a doubt, one of the integral catalysts for my broader intellectual curiosity late in college. I can honestly say I wouldn’t be who I am today without it. Despite any criticisms that have led me to this decision, it is more true to say that my leaving the The New Yorker is a signifier of just how influential it has been. Perhaps I will be a subscriber again one day, and I will still be loosely following it online (within the 10 free articles a month constraint). But for now, a heartfelt goodbye and thank you to The New Yorker.