For spacejack we have Rocket Pirates.

The little red triangle in the upper left corner always sports white text, and the preferred color scheme for the rest of the package tends to be blue when possible (not really possible with coffee or banana juice, mind you). Gut & Günstig, my generic brand of choice for another week or so. Their Soja Reis-Drink (ooh, Denglisch again) is described as “rein pflanzlich” and “ohne Zuckerzusatz.” Zusatz is a great word, but I prefer Ersatz—years ago as part of a skit we had a dance group called Fleischersatz. We were likely thinking of SPAM at the time, but a name like meat substitute is more appropriate for soy products.

Now from cellulose to celluloid ...

I brought The Incredibles with me, and have (re)watched it a few times this past year whenever I get bored and need its wit. I hadn't watched Toy Story (1 or 2) before, but did so the other day, and enjoyed both. I do have a soft spot for Pixar; the Burton-esque grotesques over at Sid's place in the first were unexpected but enjoyable, and the over-the-top antics of the second are what made the sequel potentially better than the original. I have, however, been watching and rewatching live action films for the most part recently.

Before Sunrise and Before Sunset

When I saw it quite a while back EuroTrip was entertaining in spite of its genre, conventions, plot, and actors—there was rank stupidity, but it occasionally went over to the absurd, and I was hooked as soon as I saw the mime-fight outside the Louvre.

For many our reasons for liking L'Auberge espagnole have to do with a certain similarity of experience, not the exact characters or plot devices. We don't see ourselves as annoyingly weak as Xavier, etc., but we lived abroad as college students in multi-national dorms or houses, and so the relationships and structures ... there we find the similarity.

The film not only serves as an inexact nostalgia-device, but also as a way to share with others.

Before Sunrise works in a different way; it plays off memory as well as works in its own right as a tale. By focusing on only two characters (and their occasional interactions with extras) there is a greater specificity than a movie like L'Auberge espagnole, there are fewer relationship structures that emerge from the movie itself, so the film does not suggest or inspire identification the same way as L'Auberge espagnole, which uses its group dynamic in an explicit allegory about the EU, contrasting the legalistic, bureaucratic superstructure Xavier experiences “on the job” with the “reality” of a pot luck (another international English title of the movie was Euro Pudding). Before Sunrise never stands in for some other meaning. This specificity is a bit alienating; few if any of us have actually met a potential significant other on the train from Budapest through Vienna to Paris, gotten off in Vienna, and spent and afternoon, evening, and night visiting cemeteries, clubs, cafes, music stores, bars, famous ferris wheels, etc. before having sex in a park.

Yet for me it does recall a type of tourist one-night-stand, of meeting people upon arrival in or on the way to a city, spending a day or two with them exploring things, talking about maintaining contact later, and splitting up never to see one another again before moving on to another city or going home. Aachen, Budapest, Cluj, Paris, Salzburg, Timișoara. In contrast Constanța, Florence, Granada, and Rome—on my own, fascinating cities, but alone and unshared despite the masses mingling around me.

I have not viewed the sequel to L'Auberge espagnole (Russian Dolls), but the other night I did watch Before Sunset, a structurally similar movie to its predecessor, but one which evoked different connotations. Like Before Sunrise it is a specific sort of film, the characters are not mere types, and it does not provide generalized situations or lessons. Whereas the first film's dialogue came across as sometimes too stilted and at other times too inconsequential, the second film's words fit better, flowed better, and silence was used to better effect and affect. Upon reflection the dialogue in the first that I didn't care for was actually authentic enough for early-20s strangers, for the constant romantic, Celine, and the pseudo-cynic, Jesse. The awkward romantic tension (see: the record store, the ferris wheel) does remind one—or me—of those first encounters before you grasp the personal boundaries and how to navigate them, and perhaps part of it was that I disliked Jesse, feeling him to be an immature slimy ass just trying to get into Celine's pants. When viewing the ten-years-later sequel it was amazing to see how the two leads had aged, and to hear how Julie Delphi's accent had changed. The second is more constantly on the move (until the end), is shorter, and has no actual secondary characters of note.

Instead of those brief travel encounters it connected me to those old exes with whom I have maintained contact and with whom I am still friends—when we get together the boundaries are different than before, we're seeing other people, we're a little bit older, and the attraction that is still there and drawing us together is balanced by obligations and wisdom keeping us apart. Walks, park benches, and boats—we can linger here, but a backseat ride in a van is not supposed to work as a movie set, as a locus of truthful discussions, but here, that moment when he is looking away and does not see her as she stretches a hand toward his head, pauses, and pulls back—it disproves my assumption about the van and provides all the potency of the film needs.

I once knew a Celine, and although the accents were similar this was a Belgian Celine, and we did not meet on a train but rather in a dorm. When I traveled to Antwerp, she was not there.

Contact

I still love watching this movie ... so competently done, so filled with good performances. It is arguably Matthew McConaughey's best role in ages, if not in his entire career, and makes him not seem like a dumb dude; Jodie Foster provides her usual strong performance, walking a fine line between control freak and spirited intellect that only becomes too mannered for a moment there in the machine. I saw this long before Dancer in the Dark, so Contact colored my image of David Morse when he showed up in that other movie. I had forgotten that this was one of Jena Malone's first film roles.

At times Robert “Forrest Gump” Zemeckis provides too much sentimentality, but as an adaptation the film is faithful enough to its source and goes for drama rather than melodrama most of the time. There is something wicked about John Hurt that adds an edge to everything. Skerrit and Woods are more banal politicians than plain evil, which is all the more depressing, for they are not “bad guys” who can be fought. One might argue that the movie is a bit more fair to faith/religion than Sagan's novel.

This argument rests upon analogical/parallel structures: Ellie's experience in the machine, that her critics do not believe, and Palmer's revelation early in the movie about how he gained his faith, then paralleled further when Kitz (Woods) asks her about Occam's razor, which takes her back to her other encounter with Palmer during the party and her attempted use of Occam's razor against him. Furthermore, while we are expected to recognize Drumlin's (Skeritt) false or at least insincere faith, as well as the lunatic fringe played by Joseph (Busey) the martyr, Palmer is largely sympathetic, and furthermore puts Ellie on the defensive: “And I just couldn't in good conscience vote for a person who doesn't believe in God. Someone who honestly thinks the other ninety five percent of us suffer from some form of mass delusion.”

Of course, it's not that simple. The movie tosses out that number without evidence, it lumps all forms of faith or belief in a high power together (one god? which one? many? non-divine spirituality? etc.), and the committee hearing and invocation of William of Ockham is also not quite parallel to the earlier version with Palmer. The trip and setup was changed compared to the novel, which had a team, not just one person, so the movie transitions from group experience(s) to individual “revelation.” In addition to the behind-the-scenes tipping off to the audience about the reality of Ellie's experience—those 18 hours of static (another irony being that her only proof, which she doesn't know about, comes in the way of a [non]recording on a device she did not want to take along in the first place!)—we have the poorly argued Occam's razor situation, because the alternative provided, dealing with John Hurt's Hadden, is merely proposed without evidence, and we cannot be sure, in the context of the committee, that that it's even a viable (rather than purely politically motivated) alternative. It is quite possible that it is—logically—the more complex alternative, requiring so many conspiracies and manipulations so as to be unwieldy or merely circular. It does, however, provide greater emotional drama and feelings of injustice than Sagan's intellectually stimulating text version.

And while on the topic of books and their adaptations ...

Lolita

So many things mask the foreignness of the world, be they ideologies or theories, or international systems of politics, commerce, culture, and meaning. It is a small world only relative to specific questions and perspectives. We often forget how foreign our recent past was. Example: Lolita, barely fifty old, yet once difficult to publish and even banned ... oh, wait, we're still doing such things today.

The novel and movies are well-known, so I only wish to touch upon a couple points from Lyne's 1997 adaptation: the choice of Dominique Swain as Lolita and a few matters of symbols and allegories.

When reading about the soon to be released movie, The Illusionist, I read a number of comments by people who decided against it simply because it stars Jessica Biel: “Unfortunately Biel is a turn-off as far as the Illusionist goes. I have heard from a few sources that she was surprisingly good, but I am disinclined to like her.” [1] A similar but more rabid argument ensued regarding Dominique Swain in Lyne's movie [2], one that dealt not only with her merits as an actress, her appropriateness as Lolita, but also with such matters as the difference between auburn and chestnut brown. It's really too silly to take seriously.

But this absurd fascination with the looks of a fictional character and with those of (often very thin [skin and bones]) teen actresses does provide access to an interesting aspect of imagination and representation. In short, Swain's imperfection made her perfect for the role. We have a hard time sharing Humbert's judgment of her looks, which, to simplify again, shows a gap between “objective beauty” and what Humbert is seeking—a nymphet. In fact, we can take this as a matter of objective versus objectified beauty, perhaps, but what is important is that Swain's imperfection distances us from some naive expectation of what (a) Lolita should look like as well as from our own image of such a figure—instead, we have Humbert's image of such an ideal, one based on arrested development and his experience with Annabel Lee (Emma Griffiths Malin) at age fourteen, as well as filtered through the prism of nymphets: “A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy [...]” [3]

Silly aside: D. Swain was born, so we are told, in her father's Datsun—at about that time (1980) we owned a blue Datsun pickup, the only non-GM vehicle we owned until the purchase of my Bug in '89.

According to the 1956 afterword to the novel that Nabokov penned, he “detest[s] symbols and allegories,” and while author intention is not the end-all-be-all of interpretation, one should at least tread lightly with regard to figurative interpretations, though of course, neither film adaptation is strictly or only Nabokov's work. I would be wary of any interpretation that states so-and-so stands for xyz, but there is a delicious, one might say American vulgarity to Swain's Lolita, one that goes from innocent to practicing to exploited to practiced to exploiting. It contrasts nicely with Humbert's decadent refinement and Charlotte's pseudo-refinement—an old-school America looking toward a European model versus her daughter's post-War disinterest in being like her step-father/traveling-companion/rapist.

Anatomy of Hell

The Woman is played by Amira Casar, who is completely nude most of the time, although the opening titles inform us that a body double will be playing her closeups in the more action-packed scenes. “It's not her body,” the titles explain, “it's an extension of a fictional character.” Tell that to the double.

Ah, the worst kind of literary adaptation, one that at best moves half-way from one medium to another. In this case the source is the director's own novel (Pornocracy), and perhaps the movie's failure is due in part to Breillat's closeness to the material. Roger Ebert [4] provides insightful commentary about experiencing the movie itself.

They talk. They speak as only the French can speak, as if it is not enough for a concept to be difficult, it must be impenetrable. No two real people in the history of mankind have ever spoken like this, save perhaps for some of Breillat's friends that even she gets bored by.

The haters outnumber of the lovers in some regard. Phipps writes, “[...] Breillat's best moments make a literal war of the sexes look like a fact of everyday life. It's when she retreats into theory, as she does pretty much from the start of Anatomy Of Hell, that she becomes hard to take seriously.” [5] Manohla Dargis [6] is more scathing than Ebert: “awkwardly choreographed,” “painfully foolish,” “stilted and ridiculous,” “gone off the deep end,” “especially gutless,” and “more than a lapse; it is a brutal self-parody of a filmmaker who [...] may finally have nothing left to show.” All these critics respect or like a lot of Breillat's earlier work. The positive reviews often have to retreat to the language of theory or of feminism—see J. Hoberman at the Village Voice [7] and Stephanie Zacharek [8]—rather than discuss the film as a film. Zacharek, whose recent reviews have annoyed me greatly, used to have things to say, as she demonstrates in her analysis of Breillat's film, but it's more about the ideas than the execution. There is little to no talk of the language of cinema, only about gender relations and the Freud plus Sartre philosophy that informs Anatomy of Hell.

After a while, it feels less like an examination of the relationships between men and women than like an exploration of what can be inserted into a woman's vagina. (Pauline Hunt, Casar's stand-in for the close-ups, deserves special commendation for her work here.)

This is sad because the movie—which does not work as a story, study of character, manipulation or exploration of setting, presentation of dialogue, etc.—does house some wonderful images and moments, often inspired by or even embodying a philosophical discourse. Wrist slitting, throat slitting, fellatio, and tossing from a cliff, these are just shock moments often accompanied by words masquerading as meaning, not the inspired images of which I am thinking The transformation night by night from disgusted observer to tool-using explorer to co-participant could be distilled to its core images (call it hoe-in-the-ho' if you will, the tea-bag-tampon, lipstick-labia, etc.) and put together with the best of the dialogue (see the frog discussion) to make a real film.

If that's not Casar's hoo-hah housing that rounded stone invader, then why bother showing it at all? [9]

9 Songs

Before Sunrise condenses so many aspects of a relationship into one day—there are a half-dozen or more date activities packed into one encounter, all that was missing was a movie—and Before Sunset is a constantly-on-the-go afternoon meandering through Paris, one that makes physical the wondering discussion(s) of the two leads. Anatomy of Hell got stuck in the abstract world of philosophy between book and film, but all three of these movies are in a way deeper than 9 Songs, and that's perfectly okay in my book.

Like the others it is a condensed two person relationship blown up big on screen. I watched it last summer or before when I was still in Madison; I came to it by way of Michael “stylistically promiscuous” Winterbottom's intriguing and also low-key Code 46 (“like Blade Runner on meds”), which I liked for the same reasons as Ebert, but which I would have given a higher rating. I would also like to watch A Cock and Bull Story—Tristram Shandy has a certain cult status among scholars of the 18th century—and thinking of it brought me back to 9 Songs not too long ago.

Goethe's Elective Affinities as well as plenty of 20th-century fiction use other discourses as models for their narratives. Elective Affinities, now popular with postmodernists and deconstructionists, goes for chemistry, at that time only recently separated from the world of alchemy. Arthur Schnitzler's short piece Reigen (aka La Ronde) uses a specific dance form as the key to its narrative structure. A series of (9) songs, experienced as live performances but accessible to the audience like an album or mix-tape, provide the framework for Winterbottom's film—translating this to another discourse is difficult, and reducing it to traditional plot and narrative conventions is impossible, for the closest thing to a standard narrative device is the (distant) framing from Antarctica. What is clear is that the moods of the songs/performances along with how they are experienced (alone, together, etc.) map cleanly onto the the accompanying romantic encounters and provides the rhythm and meter, if one will. While the characters and experiences are specific, the lack of analysis, of metaphors and symbols, of exterior motive, allows us the freedom to see parts of our own past relationships in the encounters between Matt and Lisa.

Upcoming

I am looking forward to The Fountain if only because it has taken a while to get here, and it stars Rachel Weisz and is by Darren Aronofsky. In contrast, I am really not looking forward to Jay Chandrasekhar's Beerfest—he seems to suck the actual humor out of potentially funny (yet stupid) movies. There is a trailer for Michael Bay's Transformers out there, but it's really just a teaser—the robots are from Mars and are attacking. But to end on a high note, Babel, by Inarritu—whose stunning and well-acted 21 Grams ([10], [11], [12], [13]) I watched Sunday evening—and starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, looks really good: in theaters October 27th, 2006.