Tag: Religion

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

Week in Review: March 26th – April 1st, 2018

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The Constitution of the United States – I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it’s surprisingly short and simple, elegant even. The Founder’s laser focus on preventing future authoritarianism remains striking, though I’m most impressed with its inherent capacity for self-correction and evolution.

A Film Like Any Other – My first step in an effort to watch Jean-Luc Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group political films he made, along with Jean-Pierre Gorin, in the wake of the failed French student revolution of 1968. This conceptual film consists of nearly two hours of political discussions between a group of French communists sitting in a field, occasionally intercut with montages of the ‘68 uprising. There are two simultaneous audio tracks of independent debate one gets to read through, and the frame limits your vision to the backs of the comrades in the surrounding tall grass. . .only Godard. This is an excruciating sitting, recommended for Godard completionists only.

Kaili Blues – Bi Gan’s very beautiful Chinese drama from 2015. Set in a rural Chinese town, a doctor feuds with his step-brother over the raising of his nephew. The second half of the film, following the doctor on the road looking for his nephew, is punctuated by a roughly 40 minute continuous shot, the camera traveling several miles via two motorcycles, a car, a boat and then circumambulating an entire town on foot, all while following multiple characters repeatedly interacting. Its impressive stuff, though I was even more taken with the still photography throughout the film. Bi extracts a somber moodiness from the sort of detritus typified by a rural town undergoing uneven development. Wet concrete, cloudy skies, industrial materials, unfinished construction and slow motorcycle rides are expressionistic cues that build out the emotional thrust of the work. The Chinese title translates to “Roadside Picnic”, the same name as the Russian science fiction novel that would inspire Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Though the influence of Tarkovsky is notable on Bi, that potent comparison doesn’t keep this first film from feeling a bit under-baked. Perhaps a re-watch would help but I felt there was too little going on plot-wise. Still, Bi’s visual instincts appear fully formed. This is an auteur to keep an eye on.

Barry – SNL alum Bill Hader’s new HBO show. Hader stars, directs, writes, and produces here, and surprise!, he’s good. Like, really good. Hader plays a lonely assassin, former marine, who rediscovers the joys of human connection in a hack L.A. acting troupe while honing in on his next mark. Like many of the dark, anti-hero led prestige television shows from the last decade, there’s a certain perversity baked into the concept. The show requires the viewer to root both for Barry’s emotional fulfillment and his professional success (i.e. killing people). If the pilot is any indication, these two things will rarely be aligned.

Colossal – The premise is unique: a woman’s self-destructive alcoholism in upstate New York personified as a rampaging kaiju in Seoul. In execution, this movie falls apart. The ‘fight scenes’ were often unintentionally laughable and tonally awkward. Worse, the film clumsily alternates between which characters are deserving of your sympathy during any given scene. I would normally leave it here, but in the wake of Barry, I have to mention Jason Sudeikis. The contrast with the talent and ambition of Hader is stark. I don’t know if it’s the script, the direction or him, but Sudeikis is unusable in this film. Every dramatic moment involving his character feels false, a cartoonish depiction of alcoholism and personal resentment. I like him, I find him hilarious at times, but at this juncture I’m skeptical that he has the dramatic chops to do anything but broad comedies.

Translations – Brian Friel’s 1980 play about the Irish-English cultural divide set the 1830’s. During this time, the British Empire was actively employing the Royal Engineers to standardize Ireland through language and cartography. Their job was in effect to rename the entire country. The majority of the characters are Irish people speaking Gaelic but this is all performed on stage in English. Likewise, the Royal Engineers obviously speak English. Thus, very cleverly the language and cultural barriers of that time are conveyed using a common language for the audience. Fitting too, as this play was a pointed commentary on the then ongoing Troubles with its central theme around translation. The question of how to translate a random street crossing with a nearby well becomes an existential dilemma of whether one should fight to maintain a cultural heritage or assimilate into what will be the future paradigm.

Week in Review: March 19th – 25th, 2018

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Conversations with Tyler: Martina Navratilova – This is my favorite podcast and I am lucky to live near where it is recorded. The guest was tennis superstar and LGBT activist Martina Navratilova. David Foster Wallace noted in his review of Tracy Austin’s autobiography that the greatest athletes usually lack the ability to express their genius through language, that their expertise lies in physical exertion and instinct. Navratilova certainly bucks that trend, yet there remained a lacking psychological depth in this conversation.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold – The 1981 novella by Gabriel García Márquez. This is either García Márquez at his most drawn-out or his most concise depending on where you fall on his style. I opt for the latter. García Márquez was a journalist before a novelist, and here he experiments with a journalist’s prose in a recognizably Garcimarquesian narrative structure. A few hours over a single night and early morning chronicling the murder of Santiago Nasar are meticulously detailed over a mere 120 pages. Our narrator constructs the event 20 years after the fact, jumping from perspective to perspective, and back and forth along the short timeline of events, only revealing at the very end what was foretold from the beginning. García Márquez is analyzing a society complicit en masse; No one body with enough personal responsibility yet dozens with moments where intervention was possible. This novella is a remarkable tracing of the contours of fate, and leads to some unpleasant questions about the trajectory of civilization. The political history of Colombia circa 1981, and the current events in the region more generally, cannot be ignored here.

The Death of Stalin – In the wake of Stalin’s death, the remaining members of Stalin’s committee – a pack of spineless, incompetent, morally bankrupt buffoons – squabble for control of the Soviet experiment. Armando Iannunci (Veep, In the Loop) directs this black satire, maybe the first comedy to encapsulate the Trump presidency. The slap-stick here is particularly good.

Yi Yi (A One and a Two…) – My favorite Edward Yang film and sadly his last. As mentioned in my partial reviews of Taipei Story and A Brighter Summer Day, this three-hour family melodrama is unique in Yang’s filmography for its embrace of a broad humanism. The fatalism and ennui that typifies his characters still remains, but no longer does Yang emote these feelings with them. The film follows the layered personal crisis’ of the Jian family after their matriarch goes into a coma. As with the earlier films, Yi Yi is an extraordinary document of a specific time in Taipei’s history that will only grow more nourishing as our world evolves. Yang’s use of glass here is a masterclass.

Doctor Strange – Mediocre movies are often the most frustrating movie experiences, as was the case for Marvel’s Doctor Strange, a lazy rip-off of The Matrix and a colossal waste of Tilda Swinton, Mads Mikkelsen and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

National Symphony Orchestra: Noseda conducts Verdi’s Requiem – My first time hearing and seeing Guiseppe Verdi’s Requiem, and doubtfully the last. At 90 minutes, with no intermission, this part opera, part choir, part symphony about mourning for salvation at the horizon of the apocalypse is both over the top and totally engrossing. Predictably, the Dies irae segments are most memorable, the few moments where nearly every player is turned up to 11. Verdi wrote the piece as a memorial to Italian writer Allensandro Manzoni and I’m also told that Verdi was likely a non-believer. That Christianity has so often been a conduit for great art begs the question: How often is that religion actually the subject matter for a work, and how often is it merely a veil for more personal expression?

Bluets – Maggie Nelson’s short book of over 200 short essays? poems? tweet-sized thoughts? All of the above? Whatever you label Nelson’s collection, Bluets functions as a meditation on the color Blue. For Nelson, the color symbolizes both her innate depressive nature and the intensity of a recent love. Her success here hinges on a montage effect, oscillating between a potent personal thread and an intellectual discourse on the color blue throughout art history.

Foxtrot