Colin Marshall

The Painted Veil (John Curran, 2006)

This film makes a good show of it, based as it is on a respectable Somerset Maugham novel and shot as it is on genuine Chinese locations, but it commits an unforgivable crime. The offense is one perpetrated by many pictures — perhaps most of them — and very often viewers don't even notice it. I've certainly not had an easy time pinning it down, this malaise of the common cinema, but I do believe I've hit on a reasonable label: not being notable.

I'm not wedded to the word "notable"; "exceptional" might get at the meaning just as well, or better. But, alas, from whichever angle you take, The Painted Veil is not notable. It's a 1920s period piece that drops an all-but-split genteel English couple down into a remote, cholera-stricken region of rural China. (The husband, a bacteriologist, plans to take down two birds with this stone: seeing real live examples of a rare disease, and punishing his adulterous wife.) Betrayal, surreptitious passion, terminal illness, the looming concerns of polite society, wide rivers, green mountains, sedan chairs; they're all in their places, all in a tidy 125 minutes.

But, cripes — to what end? Everything's propped up, nicely polished and tightly locked together, but there's not one element of note in the entire production. The world needs many things, but another semi-lavish tale of a societally-repressed Englishwoman thrown into distressing foreign circumstances is not one of them. The movie is also enslaved, as so many non-notable movies are, to a constricted average shot length and artificially hastened pace. (I kept thinking of the recent Notes on a Scandal, which was an uncommonly clear showcase of such afflictions.) What's your hurry, unexceptional films? Must you keep rhythmically firing plot points as if your audience stood defenseless in a batting cage?

That said, the material itself isn't exactly unsalvageable, but I'd hand it to a filmmaker with a more distinctive vision. Would that we could've gotten Kubrick's version of all this. And I think the movie has made me a fan of the eccentric-looking Toby Jones, who plays Waddington (snaf), the dying village's final remaining representative of the Empire. Unfortunately, that's not quite enough.

La Dolce Vita (Frederico Fellini, 1960)

I've long kicked around the notion of powering through the filmographies of Bergman, Truffaut, Godard, Fellini — you know, the Big Four^TM — but I keep getting put off by the daunting nature of establishing a cinematic supply chain that could deliver, in timely fashion and chronological order, four substantial bodies of work. (Netflix is option one, but alas, last I checked, unfortunate gaps still mar their inventory.) Perhaps this is an idea whose time won't come until the every-movie-ever-in-HD-on-demand-over-the-net future. Until then, I proceed haphazardly, as likely to re-watch as to watch.

La Dolce Vita was a re-watch, but it'd been so long that I think it more or less counts as a watch. So much is made of this picture that it's become something of a daunting viewing prospect, daring viewers to grasp its scope, its majesty, its genius. And I wouldn't argue against its formidable cinematic craftsmanship for a second, though I'm not quite up to the perspective Ebert holds:

I've seen it, oh, at least 25 times, maybe more. It doesn't get old for me. Age has not withered, not custom staled, its infinite variety. I've grown so worked up just writing this paragraph that I want to slide in the DVD and start watching immediately. People asked me a few years ago why I included the movie in my annual Ebertfest, since it was, they said, hardly "overlooked," and the festival showcases films that deserve more attention. I said it was unlikely that more than a few dozen in the 1,600-seat theater would ever have seen it in a pristine 35mm print on a truly big screen. In gloomier moments, I wondered how many in the audience would never have seen it at all. What better definition of an overlooked film is there, than one want to drag everybody else to?

(That he notes, in the same post, that he once viewed Anita Ekberg's performance with "lust in [his] heart", that she "electrified" him, came as a surprise to me; I have a hard time seeing her as anything other than an abstraction, a grotesque, a female female impersonator.)

Speaking of that particular critic, a diligent websurfer can, on his web site, turn up what may well be Ebert's first-ever film review. And hey, guess which film it's a review of? As an Ebert fanboy, a film geek and a writing-mechanics obsessive — a heady cocktail, I assure you — I find it invaluable.

There is in "La Dolce Vita" a great deal to be puzzled about, and a great deal to be impressed by, and perhaps a great deal which we as Americans will never completely understand. Yet it is a fine motion picture. And we have the feeling that even those students who sat through its three hours with a measure of boredom came away convinced that something was there. It is this something, this undefined feeling being hammered at beneath the surface of the film, which gives it power and illumination. And it is this hidden message which contains the deep and moral indictment of the depravity which "La Dolce Vita" documents.

Already, we can tell that the 19-year-old Ebert was a much better writer than most writers his age before or since — better than I was at 19, I'll tell you that right now — that the 19-year-old Ebert's journalistic voice is broadly similar to the 66-year-old Ebert's, and yet that they're most definitely not in anything like the same leagues. The fascinating question, then, is this: what, exactly, is the difference?

Perhaps this is more practically asked as: what sentences, clauses and constructions does Ebert₁₉ use that Ebert₆₆ wouldn't? "A great deal to be puzzled about, and a great deal to be impressed by, and perhaps a great deal which we as Americans will never completely understand " is certainly unacceptably clunky by his current standards. I'd phrase it as something along the lines of "a great deal that puzzles, a great deal that impresses and a great deal that Americans may never fully understand". Much of the value of Ebert₆₆'s style lies in its directness; I doubt he'd ever write "we as Americans" when he could just write "Americans", nor would he call something puzzling through the awful styrofoam packing of a phrase like "to be puzzled about".

A lack of stiffness and vagueness also animate Ebert₆₆'s prose, so he's clearly kicked the likes of "a fine motion picture" to the curb. As for the semi-disastrous remainder of the paragraph, I'm sure the modern Ebert wouldn't go in for quite so much equivocation; why describe our "feeling" about something, after all, when you can just make a statement about it? My revision: "Even the students who sat bored for three hours left knowing something was there, a persistent undercurrent which empowers and illuminates the film, a deeply hidden moral indictment of the depravity it documents."

In technical excellence, the film surpasses every production this reviewer has seen, except a few of the Ingmar Bergman classics. Photography and the musical score are together almost as important as the dialogue in conveying the unmistakable attack on "the sweet life."

The first sentence of this paragraph reminds me of that Simpsons episode where the elementary school hands out a phony award for "Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence". And, happily, Ebert₆₆ has shed the irrational fear of personal pronouns that plagues so many young journalists. (It still plagues me at times.) I'd do a bit of substitution and reshuffling: "Except for a few of Bergman's classics, the film surpasses every production I've seen."

The second sentence's meaning could be clearer, but here's how I'd modify it: "The photography and score are nearly the script's equals in conveying an attack on 'the sweet life.'" That's not great either — the Ebert of today could crush it under his, as it were, thumb — but at least the contrast shows the importance of stripping out equivocation.

This attack is also made clear in frequent symbolism, although
sometimes the symbolism becomes too obvious to fit into the effortless flow of the total production. For example, in the final scene where merrymakers gather around the grotesque sea monster which represents their way of living, and then the protagonist is called by the "good" girl but cannot understand her, the symbolism is very near the surface. Yet this tangible use of symbols might account in part for "La Dolce Vita"'s fantastic success. Too often the "new wave" falls through symbolism that is simply too subtle for most movie-goers.

High school and college composition students rag on Strunk and White for so vigorously condemning the passive voice, but doesn't this paragraph stand as all the evidence you need that such condemnation is well earned? "This attack is also made clear in frequent symbolism" versus "symbolism frequently clarifies this attack". "The symbolism is very near the surface" versus "the symbolism sits near the surface". "Symbolism that is simply too subtle for most movie-goers" versus "symbolism that eludes most movie-goers by its subtlety." When you set them side by side, the choice is obvious.

You'll notice that I also performed a bit of clipping in those revisions. One of the starkest contrasts between the work of Ebert₁₉ and Ebert₆₆ is that the older Ebert simply uses fewer words and conveys more in so doing. I would use my comparatively meager powers to streamline the above paragraph thus:

Symbolism frequently clarifies this attack, though it's at times too obvious to fit the production's otherwise effortless flow. In the final scene, the merrymakers gather around a sea monster that represents their grotesque lifestyle. The "good" girl calls the protagonist, but he cannot understand her. Yet tangible symbolism might account, in part, for "La Dolce Vita"'s fantastic success; too often, the "new wave" falls through symbolism that eludes most movie-goers by its subtlety.

"Total production" becomes "production". "Fit into" becomes "fit". "For example" becomes nothing. "And then" has to go. "The symbolism is very near the surface" — didn't you already say that? A few commas, move "grotesque", convert a period to a semicolon and we're good.

The acting itself is startlingly realistic, and for a very good reason: too many of the players are portraying themselves. The greatest surprise — and one of the greatest successes — in the film is the Swedish sex goddess Anita Ekberg, cast as a "typical" American motion picture star. She plays the part with a wild, unthinking abandon which far surpasses her previous roles in "B" pictures designed primarily to exploit her impressive physical attributes.

This paragraph's not bad, though I'm noticing more vestigial adjectives — "very", "impressive", an inexplicable "too" — that Ebert₆₆ surely would've strangled in the cradle. And notice the word-excess-induced stiffness in other areas: "the acting itself", worthless articles, "motion picture star", "in the film" (habitually stating the obvious young-journalist malady), "are portraying" (the foul passive voice strikes again!) My rendition:

The acting is startlingly realistic, for good reason: many players portray themselves. The greatest surprise — and one of the greatest successes — is Swedish sex goddess Anita Ekberg, cast as a "typical" American movie star, a part she plays with wild, unthinking abandon which far surpasses her previous "B" picture roles designed primarily to exploit her physical assets.

I prefer "physical assets" to "physical attributes" — the latter puts a little too much distance between the writer and the object(s) discussed. "Attributes" could be anything. Cuticles, maybe?

But there can be no real award for best actor or actress in the film just as in a sense it does not seem to be a film so much as a simple record of "the sweet life." The characters, in their midnight parody of happiness, are all strangely anonymous. Only their life, their society, comes through — with a sad, burnt-out vividness that sputters briefly through a long night and then dies in the morning on the beach, dies with the sea monster who has blank, uncomprehending eyes.

Ah, here's a quality of Ebert₆₆'s work that's most definitely missing from Ebert₁₉'s: confidence. It's not hard to envision the teenage Ebert sweating over his sentences, getting swept up by the flow of ideas and not quite summoning the power necessary to verbally channel the onrush. The first sentence of this paragraph sums up the problem; throwing "real" around is one of the novice reviewer's major crutches. But this chunk of text doesn't actually need much work, in my opinion, to be brought up to the 21st-century Ebert standard. Here's what I've got:

But there can be no award for best actor or actress in what is less a film than a simple record of "the sweet life." The characters, in their midnight parody of happiness, remain strangely anonymous. Only their life and society come through, with a sad, burnt-out vividness that sputters through one long night and dies in the morning on the beach alongside with the sea monster with blank, uncomprehending eyes.

I confess to not being quite sure what Ebert₁₉ meant in the original paragraph's final sentence, and "sputters briefly through a long night" sounds like a contradiction, but I've made a stab at more clearly expressing what I think is the meaning. It's not a terrible paragraph, though it does harbor some true groaners — the grandiose repetition of "dies", "the sea monster who has blank, uncomprehending eyes" — that couldn't pass Ebert₆₆'s pre-pre-pre-filter.

In the film, the wild but bored house party comes just before the dawn. It is this party, in all its depravity, which has become one of the most widely known segments of the film. Yet it is probably the one area of "the sweet life" which misses the mark for many American audiences. The scene is meant to show a last, desperate attempt to find something beneath the whirlpool of animalism which finally engulfs them all. Yet as the girl lies still beneath the mink stole, bored and restless eyes look away — still looking.

This paragraph begins with trouble we've already diagnosed — indicating deliberately that you're talking about the article's stated subject — and continues with another identified issue: too many words, each doing too little work. I thin the herd from 96 to 75 as follows:

The wild, bored house party comes just before dawn. This segment, in its depravity, has become one of the film's best-known, yet it's probably the one that most misses the mark for American audiences. The scene tries to show the partiers' one last, desperate attempt to find something beneath the whirlpool of animalism which finally engulfs them all, yet as a girl lies still beneath her mink stole, her bored, restless eyes still look away.

Another rookie mistake rears its head: misjudging the reader's probable knowledge. The original version of this paragraph's description of the party seemed to presume familiarity with the party. If you've seen La Dolce Vita, you'll immediately understand what Ebert₁₉ refers to when he writes that "the girl lies still beneath the mink stole". If you haven't, you'll immediately get lost. And as far as divining the intent behind that last sentence, I simply throw up my hands. Perhaps coherence was sacrificed on the altar of poetry; it wouldn't be the only example of that in the annals of teen-penned criticism, nor in this very piece.

We are afraid that too many Americans might consider this scene as a sharp, immediate event. Its message, of complete and final meaninglessness, might not come through to an audience which may not find such things particularly everyday. And so, despite the almost extreme good taste with which the scene was filmed, we are afraid that many of the thousands who queued up before the theatre had rather elementary motives.

In Ebert₆₆'s reviews, the sense of every "we" is pretty clear; here, Ebert₁₉'s "we" could refer to any number of groups. Critics? Members of the audience? U of Illinois students? Here and elsewhere, there's a huge amount of ambiguity in this review — both deliberate and apparently unintentional varieties — compared to the ones Ebert would go on to write, even just a decade later. It seems that one of the qualities that separates the best critics from the rest is possession of a mental routine that identifies and quashes the ambiguity that, unchecked, threatens to seep into the cracks of all writing. Fortunately, it appears to be a quality you can cultivate. My ambiguated-down version:

I'm afraid Americans consider this an unusual event; its message of complete and final meaninglessness might not get through to an audience for whom such scenes aren't commonplace. Despite the sequence's borderline extreme good taste, I suspect many thousands queued up at the theater with more elementary motives.

I notice that leaning hard on "too" is an Ebert₁₉ tic; I wonder when he gave it up. And yeah, I changed "theatre" to "theater" — wanna make somethin' of it?

This is excusable. We wonder how many years it has been since a film as intellectual and meaningful — and as basically moral — as "La Dolce Vita" has attracted such crowds here. We suspect it has been a very long time. The greeting it is getting is a tribute to one of the finest motion pictures of our time.

Again with the "we". Seriously, writing teachers, can you stop warning your students against the word "I" so harshly? You were scaring them in the early 60s, and you're scaring them now. In any case, this paragraph is not all that meaningful. Boil it down, and I'd say it comes to this:

This is excusable. How long has it been since a film as intellectual, meaningful and basically moral as "La Dolce Vita" has attracted such crowds? The greeting is a tribute to one of the finest motion pictures of our time.

In the final analysis, then, what separates this Ebert₁₉ review from an Ebert₆₆ review? Let's get reductive. The younger Ebert's work is comparatively

• wordy (that is, each word bears less of a load) and adjective-heavy
  
• formal, usually stiffly so (and thus much less conversational)
  
• unconfident
  
• untrusting of the reader (as in when he explicitly indicates that he's discussing the movie at hand)
  
• a shifting, unclear attitude toward the reader (and a somewhat inconsistent authorial position at that)
  
• grand-sounding (and not always successfully, to the extend that grandness can succeed)
  
• shot through with vagueness and ambiguity

But the lesson here isn't just an accretion of hot writing tips. It's that this is just one example of a star in his field having had to start somewhere. Remember what Ray Bradbury said about having to crank out two million bad words before typing a single good one? It applies always and everywhere, even if words aren't your form.

Or, as Paul Graham once wrote:

People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.

Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius.

All of our luminaries were once amateurs — some just work harder at hiding it.

Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)

As an avowed Kiarostami fanboy, I do my damndest to spread the gospel. Unfortunately, nothing in the man's body of work jumps out as an especially effective "gateway drug". The impulse says to go to Taste of Cherry, his best-known film in the United States, and it while it certainly should snag curious viewers, I have to believe theire are titles that better reflect what Kiarostami is. While quite possibly his most acclaimed — Jonathan Rosenbaum certainly went into rhapsodies over it — The Wind Will Carry Us appears to have only a so-so conversion rate.

I put this question to essayist and Kiarostami buff Phillip Lopate when I interviewed him, and he thought 1990's Close-Up would be the one with which to lure others into the fold. I'm still not sure. I mean, the issue of the film's excellence is more or less indisputable, but it's such a novelty. Kiarostami is a pretty meta filmmaker anyway — rarely does he leave untouched an opportunity to remind the viewer that they're watching a movie, as in the infamous crew shot at Taste of Cherry's end — but Close-Up is a whole other game of meta altogether.

Once — and this is in real life, mind you — a lonely man named Sabzian found himself on a bus, reading a copy of The Cyclist. When a woman asked him what he had there, Sabzian obeyed a whim and told her he was Moshen Makhmalbaf, director of the acclaimed film The Cyclist. He eventually wormed his way into visiting her family under the pretense that he would use them in his next feature. One of her sons grows suspicious, however — he comes to suspect that Sabzian is just a burglar casing the joint, and pretty soon the jig was up and Sabzian was plonked down in front of one of those frowning, fearsome-looking Iranian judges.

This case caught Kiarostami's attention, and so he decided to make a film out of it. But he wouldn't deign to make a mere dramatization with actors — he made a re-enactment with the actual people: Sabzian plays Sabzian, Makhmalbaf plays Makhmalbaf, the duped family plays the duped family. A brilliant idea, sure, but there must have been a few awkward moments on set. Then again, bizarreness is a decent antidote to awkwardness.

So in Close-Up, we see a man who impersonated another man re-enacting his impersonation of that man as well as his plea in court that he just wanted to live a little by impersonating that other, the authenticity of the emotion of which is called into question (in re-enactment). The question, then, is this: is this man who is re-enacting his possibly acted testimony regarting his impersonation genuine? Hoo boy. And that's setting aside the fact that Kiarostami is in full this-is-a-movie mode pretty much throughout, showing his research interviews with the involved parties as well as allowing — and acknowledging — various technical problems that crop up during filming. (The production is agressively lo-fi, but even so it must be said that the Facets DVD transfer blows chunks.)

Despite these onionskin layers of truth, falsity and re-creation, it's hard to avoid a simple feeling of sorriness for poor Sabzian, a divorced, underemployed, Ahmadinejad-lookin' assistant printer who just wanted to feel good about himself for once. But is it sorriness for the "real" Sabzian? Or for his possibly constructed self on trial? Or for his re-creation of his possibly constructed self? Or for — aw, sheez. Damn this hall of mirrors!

Tampopo (Juzo Itami, 1985)

I've now thrice visited the well of Tampopo, and it shows no signs of drying. There's just too much stuff in it. The story's primary thread concerns a widow whose failing ramen shop is turned around by the efforts of an itinerant truck driver, the truck driver's sidekick, a drunk who doubles as contractor, a chef/chauffeur, a band of hobo gourmands and the Japanese equivalent of the Fab Five. But there's a whole bunch of secondary threads in there as well, which function both as standalone skits and as elaborations on the movie's broad theme of Japanese food culture. In one, an octogenarian woman darts through a convenience store, jabbing every bit of produce she can grab with her thumbs. In another, a man darts home so that he can order his wife, who's teetering on the brink of death, to cook one last meal. (This results in a moment of the most hilarious thing there is, crying while eating.) In another — and these segments are straight money — a white-suited man seduces his ladyfriend with the aid of various comestibles. (Wait until you see what they can do with an egg yolk.)

It's not all that surprising that Japanese cuisine makes a fine basis for a film; it's some of the best food in the world, after all. Note that I'm not trying to be at all objective here. For my palate, you simply can't do a whole lot better than Japanese (though Korean, which is approximately like Japanese but with infinity more spiciness, can often give it a run for its yen). I realize that others may love Mexican (toward which I'm approvingly neutral) or Italian (which ranks toward my list's bottom) more, but for some reason I loves me some east Asian. Go figure.

In any case, the food focus prevents the picture from being just another triumph-of-the-underdog yarn. It's not just about food; it's a satire about Japanese attitudes — and, more specifically, Japanese seriousness — toward food. The film opens with a scene where a young hopeful studies by the side of a ramen master — not a ramen-making master, a ramen-eating master. The old man gravely instructs his pupil to first observe the bowl, then take in the aroma, then poke the pork with one's chopsticks, then dip the pork three times in another, more specific area of the bowl, then apologize to the pork, then tap the pork thrice against the bowl's side, and so on, and so forth.

Tampopo puts the jugular of ceremony in its sights and goes for it. Two short sequences at French restaurant serve this puropse especially well. The first has a group of suits sit down at a banquet table for lunch, but — surprise! — the menu's in French. The big boss orders sole and a beer, and every employee after him does the same, each one putting on a show to mask the conformity. Finally, the waiter comes to the youngest guy — who was, of course, saddled with briefcase-carrying duty on the way in — who, despite receiving multiple kicks to the shin, goes against the grain and puts in an elaborate, question-laden order revealing not only his knowledge of the French language but of French food and of the restaurants in France itself. Pan to the rest of the table, all red-faced in horror and indignation. The second sequence shows a group of girls apparently out on a finishing school field trip. Their matron tells them that, in the west, it is absolutely forbidden to slurp one's spaghetti. (It's also an Italian restaurant, evidently; maybe generic "continental" eateries are more common in Japan.) But an obese white man sitting on the tier below ruins it, as he slurps his spahgetti with abandon. The girls all proceed to dutifully imitate this genuine westerner, much to the matron's chagrin.

The main thread is also all about this, of course, as the title character tries and tries to perfect her shop's ramen — which the subtitles translate, annoyingly, as "noodles", though that's the only major aspect with which this 23-year-old movie dates itself — but struggles to get it quite right, lending validity to the notion that the last 10% to perfection requires 90% of the effort. Rising to the challenge ends up necessitating all manner of trial, error, technique and subterfuge; at one point, Tampopo and Shohei the chauffeur make the circuit of local ramen joints, lying to their cooks and eating out of their garbage cans in order to acquire vital trade secrets.

It will come as a surprise to no reader when I say that Tampopo emerges victorious from the battle, but the point isn't the predictable destination, it's the bottomlessly entertaining journey through the phenomenon that is Japanese food, not to mention all its quirky detours. But on this vewing, I found it shed light on what may well be an unbridgeable cultural rift. I don't care how satisfying it is; there is no way in hell I could ever devote my life to mastering the nuances a single dish. I seem to recall Dave Barry making a similar o mores! in Dave Barry Does Japan, when, visiting the country, he observed a Japanese public employee happily scrubbing a trash can. If memory serves, the gist of Barry's comment on the image was that you can't get an American to scrub a trash can even if you hold out the promise of eternal life, let alone get one to scrub it happily. Another David, the Sedaris one, made what may or may not be a thematically similar comment in an essay about his recent Japan experience. Observing with great surprise Tokyo's many street-corner vending machines, Sedaris tells his translator (I think) that you'd never see anything like that in America. When the translator asks why, Sedaris is unable to quite come up with the words. His insistence that an American street-corner vending machine would just get smashed up and urine-soaked is met with utter confusion.

Therein lies the reason why, unlike the biggest Japan fetishists of my generation — and considering my generation, being among its biggest Japan fetishists would be an accomplishment indeed — I don't wish to go back and be born into this mysterious, alluring culture of the Orient. I'm pretty damn American, you see: I refuse to devote my life to ramen, I'd take a bullet before scrubbing a trash can, and if when see a vending machine outdoors, then by god, I smash it.

301/302 (Cheol-Su Park, 1995)

Why do I like Korean cinema so much? It's a good question, but not one, I fear, with a correspindingly good answer. Oh, there are a number of facile responses to give, but they're either insufficiently explanatory ("the UCSB video library has a lot of Korean stuff") or way too stupid ("Korean women be fine, dawg"). The most satisfying one, I suspect, has a lot to do with aesthetics — I have never watched a mediocre-looking Korean film, and a solid ten percent of what I've seen has been visually stunning — but also with a certain directness in their approach to subject matter.

Korean films don't beat around the bush. The script contains necrophilia? Then show necrophilia. The material dictates repeated swerves from one mood to another? Then swerve, damn you, swerve. Your main character unknowingly does his sister and then cuts his own tounge out with garden shears as penance? Gotta show him in the act(s). The only way your film can end is in cannibalism? Then, by god, cannibalism it is, as is the case in 301/302. It's not that mere indulgence in unconventional cinematic impulses is enough to satisfy me — if so, Troma's catalog would represent the end-all-be-all — but, my, it's refreshing to get a relief from the kneejerk coyness — accompanied, too often, by the mere attitude of transgression — that has become endemic in the U.S. and European mainstream. Korean cinema tends to accept that there's a little of the grotesque in everything — or, as the case may be, a lot.

But perhaps a rewind from the people-eating is necessary. This picture is the tale of an apartment building's two neighbors: Yoon-Hee, a celibate bulimic who spends her days penning exceptionally unappealing screeds about sex, and Song-Hee, a divorced gourmand. Intent upon putting a little meat on the bones of her skinny acquaintance, Song-Hee cooks a series of elaborate meals and delivers them across the hall, only to find that Yoon-Hee has been dumping them straight into the trash. This angers her. (In a film with a fair number of repulsive images, Song-Hee's reconstruction of these meals from the garbage and subsequent force-feeding of them to Yoon-Hee is easily the least acceptable.)

The situation is essentially a hellishly passive-agressive battle between two women with serious Food Issues, which, for a psychodrama, makes for very entertaining subject matter. But by laying out the "psychology" behind Yoon-Hee and Song-Hee's respective issues — in flashback, no less, although they're technically flashbacks-within-flashbacks since the most of the movie is itself a flashback — Park makes a truly weak choice. Turns out Song-Hee got fat during marriage (the actress actually looks pretty damn good with the big-butt prosthesis, but the full fat makeup has a hideous zombie-ish pallor) and was kicked to the curb for it, while a young Yoon-Hee played the unwilling mistress to her combover-having stepfather (and also indirectly locked a girl in the meat freezer of his butcher shop).

Redemption comes in the form of Park's foot hitting the accelerator, hard, for most of 301/302's final act. Or at least partial redemption; it's tough to forgive the supreme uncreativity that attends playing the "randy stepdad" card. What, they couldn't have had Song-Hee's man run off with his secretary, her blonde tresses billowing in the wind behind the red Corvette convertible?

Sputnik Sweetheart (Haruki Murakami, 1999)

Though it's widely regarded as one of Murakami's most flawed novels — even enthusiastic Murakami translator (though not of this particular work) Jay Rubin more or less called it straight-up lackluster in Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words — I couldn't rein myself in from enjoying it. Then again, I also enjoyed Dance Dance Dance, the oeuvre's other whipping boy, so something's clearly wrong with me.

Like South of the Border, West of the Sun, Sputnik Sweetheart is a simple-ish story of unevolvable infatuation interrupted by a sudden disappearing act. Unlike the earlier book, this one's got two frustrating crushes instead of one; instead of a thirtysomething married man growing ever more fixated on his childhood gal pal, we've here see a mid-twentysomething schoolteacher occasionally pining for his college gal pal, even as said gal pal herself pines for a late-thirtysomething Korean wine dealer.

Sumire, the narrator's object of desire, is a Murakami type: the young, polyglot, "free-spirited" (to use an abominable descriptor) girl who dresses her own way and follows her own incoherent set of rules. So is Miu, the older woman: she's one of those inaccessible Murakami ladies who can't explain why she's not quite there with the rest of humanity. And of course the narrator is pure Murakami man: lives alone, drifted into his line of work, enjoys listening to music, drops unusual references, has a swimming routine, leaves the country at the drop of a hat.

So after meeting Sumire at a wedding, the mysteriously alluring Miu offers her a position as her personal assistant. The previously impoverished, Jack Kerouac-worshipping, novelistically-aspiring Sumire consequently spruces herself up for (and is spruced up by) her new routine of office work and frequent European travel. At some point, Sumire and Miu's professional lives become, essentially, one big shared vacation, leaving the narrator (referred to, once or twice, as "K") to sit around Japan and read books by himself.

But then the call comes: a panicked Miu telephones K to let him know that Sumire has disappeared in Greece, and that he should fly over immediately. If you think that this situation will be tidily resolved, you clearly haven't been reading enough Murakami (or enough of my Murakami writeups). Even asking for the situation to be well-defined is asking a tad too much. (Not that explanations can't be built — you just have to resort to some serious freakiness to build them.)

And yet, what a pleasing book to read. Perhaps it's time for me to face the fact that Murakami's sedate, conversational prose would compel me to read just about anything, no matter how half-baked. That's not to say that I find Sputnik Sweetheart half-baked, exactly, though it's not nearly as elegantly constructed as South of the Border, its closest Murakami-canon relative. But they're in the same league of narrow scope and less-than-grand ambition, which is where the author shines brightest. (The more I think about the epic-weight The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the less I find it works. Murakami has promised to next deliver a real "brick" of a tome, so my expectations are cautious.)

The book might also be profitably compared to Norwegian Wood, though neither its characters nor its imagery are nearly as memorable as the mega-bestseller's. We might simply declare, alas, that Sputnik Sweetheart's stick-with-you quotient is, by the Murakami standard, unusually low. But I'd be lying if I said that, a year from now, there will simply be a 210-page gap in my memory; I think I'll remember K and Sumire's conversations, or at least remember them fondly:

"It's not like I want to give up writing," Sumire said. She thought for a moment. "It's just that when I try to write, I can't. I sit down at my desk and nothing comes — no ideas, no words, no scenes. Zip. Not too long ago I had a million things to write about. What in the world's happening to me?"

"You're asking me?"

Sumire nodded.

I took a sip of my cold beer and gathered my thoughts. "I think right now it's like you're positioning yourself in a new fictional framework. You're preoccupied with that, so there's no need to put your feelings into writing. Besides, you're too busy to."

"Do you do that? Put yourself inside a fictional framework?"

"I think most people live in a fiction. I'm no exception. Think of it in terms of a car's transmission. It's like a transmission that stands between you and the harsh realities of life. You take the raw power from outside and use gears to adjust it so everything's all nicely in sync. That's how you keep your fragile body intact. Does that make any sense?"

Sumire gave a small nod. "And I'm still not completely adjusted to that new framework. That's what you're saying?"

"The biggest problem right now is that you don't know what sort of fiction you're dealing with. You don't know the plot; the style's still not set. The only thing you do know is the main character's name. Nevertheless, this new fiction is reinventing who you are. Give it time, it'll take you under its wing, and you may very well catch a glimpse of a brand-new workd. But you're not there yet. Which leaves you in a precarious position."

"You mean I've taken out the old transmission but haven't quite finished bolting down the new one. And the engine's still running. Right?"

"You could put it that way."

"Funes el Memorioso" (Jorge Luis Borges, 1942)

My high school senior year English teacher was kind of an odd fellow, though I now believe he relished (and even cultivated) the "wacky English teacher" status. He was, I think, both more and less weird than he appeared to be. In some ways, he went well beyond wacky, as when he would routinely lead us to surprisingly dark corners of his personal life. (Some of his stories were so creepy that I'm not even going to allude to their facts obliquely.) On the last day of school, he presented me with his "70s award", earned by my recognition of his classroom references to lawn darts and Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers. (The award itself was a Rush album.)

At the time, I don't think anyone knew what to make of this lonely but apparently driven instructor, so little did he align with our established mental archetypes. I'm sure some of my friends who disliked him then dislike him now, but I involuntarily developed a certain undeniable, single-nod respect for the man's candor and cultural awareness. (He's one of those guys who hits the shops every Tuesday after work to get first crack at the new books, CDs and DVDs.) He also commuted daily from the heart of Seattle to our school's almost laughably dumpy suburb; I didn't quite see the significance of his life-work location gap then, but I see it now.

One of my major takeaways from that year was an appreciation of Alex Cox's Death and the Compass, a shabbily elaborate Mexican TV movie based on Jorge Luis Borges' short story of the same name. We watched it during our extended unit on Borges — this teacher loved him some Borges — the culmination of which saw each of us give a 40-minute solo talk on one of his tales. My assignment was the so-so "The Circular Ruins", though I would've preferred "Funes the Memorious".

Thus, "Funes" was the first text I turned to when I declared it time to return to another high school memory: the Spanish language. Despite taking nine straight years of Español in elementary, middle and high school, I never reached what you'd call proficiency. (This lends huge credence to the idea that one can't learn unless one wants to learn, which idea itself explains what people tend to think is astonishingly poor performance of educational institutions.) I certainly never reached the skill level needed to comprehend a writer as cerebral as Borges in his native language, but hey. I want to read Borges stories with all the original linguistic nuances, and I don't want to read the Spanish equivalent of Sweet Valley High, so as far as what I'm using to brush up my language abilities, I'm over a barrel.

It's also worth noting that my motivation to learn foreign languages transitioned from weak (or nearly nonexistent) to strong when I realized that, hey, learning foreign languages doesn't just mean learning to speak foreign languages. It can also mean learning to read foreign languages! To expand one's own literary horizons! To achieve closer engagement with one's favorite works! To improve one's writing skills in any language by observing examples of others! This realization changed up my linguistic worldview in a big way. Spoken French, for instance, is confusing, sounds like hell and sits just this side of useless. (As Cecil Adams memorably put it, "French is the primary language of maybe 114 million, including such outposts of world commerce as Haiti, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso, and is essential chiefly to reading menus at Le Cirque.") But written French? There's all kind of neato books in that, and I'm not just talking about the man dipping the cookie.

Film played no small part in my conversion, either; at least half my favorite movies — Taste of Cherry, Hana-Bi, Solaris, Ran — aren't in English, and I started learning Korean solely because of Korean cinema. So I guess my interest is less in speaking than in understanding. It long seemed a shame to me, then, that, after all those hours spent conjugating its verbs, the Spanish language was used by no cultures for which I had even the slightest affinity. (Living in the United States, it's easy to get the impression that worldwide Spanish-speaking culture consists entirely of sugar skulls, lucha libre and arduously long variety shows.) Having thought about it, though, that's not true. What of Chile, the Inglaterra of the Sud? What of Argentina, with its heaven-sent chorizo? What about Mexico City, with its hardest-of-hardcore internationalism? What of Borges? What of Borges?

Not having paid a visit to the Spanish language or Borges' concept-heavy stories in over five years, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. "Funes" was a favorite in English, though, so I figured I was on steady ground. The concept in this one is simple: a man who remembers everything. As in the author's other work, the instantiation of this idea carries with it a host of unexpected ramifications. If one can remember and never forget, for instance, one will also forever retain the memories of remembering every memory they have. And with this memory comes a hugely heightened awareness: every vein on a one leaf of the tree outside the window is like its own major world event. Such abilities also lead inexorably into engagement into a variety of crackpot projects, like assigning every number a proper name.

The case of Ireneo Funes, an acquanitance of the story's narrator, is no different. Maybe it's because I had to read extremely slowly and thus noticed more closely and envisioned more vividly — with my eroded Spanish abilities, grinding through the brief text took me hours — but his introduction is awfully evocative:

My first recollection of Funes is quite clear: I see him at dusk, sometime in March or February of the year '84. That year, my father had taken me to spend the summer at Fray Bentos. I was on my way back from the farm at San Francisco with my cousin Bernardo Haedo. We came back singing, on horseback; and this last fact was not the only reason for my joy. After a sultry day, an enormous slate-grey-storm had obscured the sky. It was driven on by a wind from the south; the trees were already tossing like madmen; and I had the apprehension (the secret hope) that the elemental downpour would catch us out in the open. We were running a kind of race with the tempest. We rode into a narrow lane which wound down between two enormously high brick footpaths. It had grown black of a sudden; I now heard rapid almost secret steps above; I raised my eyes and saw a boy running along the narrow, cracked path as if he were running along a narrow, broken wall. I remember the loose trousers, tight at the bottom, the hemp sandals; I remember the cigarette in the hard visage, standing out against the by now limitless darkness. Bernardo unexpectedly yelled to him: "What's the time, Ireneo?" Without looking up, without stopping, Ireneo replied: "In ten minutes it will be eight o'clock, child Bernardo Juan Francisco." The voice was sharp, mocking.

Years later, Funes falls from a horse and winds up paralyzed. Hearing that the narrator has brought Latin books on a return visit to Fray Bentos, Funes contacts him. The visit to Funes' home is just about as hauntingly described:

Without the least change in his voice, Ireneo bade me come in. He was lying on the cot, smoking. It seems to me that I did not see his face until dawn; I seem to recall the momentary glow of the cigarette. The room smelled vaguely of dampness. I sat down, and repeated the story of the telegram and my father's illness.

[ ... ]

Ireneo began by enumerating, in Latin and Spanish, the cases of prodigious memory cited in the Historia Naturalis: Cyrus, king of the Persians, who could call every soldier in his armies by name; Mithridates Eupator, who administered justice in the twenty-two languages of his empire; Simonides, inventory of mnemotechny; Metrodorus, who practised the art of repeating faithfully what he heard once. With evident good faith Funes marvelled that such things should be considered marvellous. He told me that previous to the rainy afternoon when the blue-tinted horse threw him, he had been - like any Christian - blind, deaf-mute, somnambulistic, memoryless. (I tried to remind him of his precise perception of time, his memory for proper names; he paid no attention to me.) For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything - almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible.

I won't launch into any great précis, but the gist is this: Funes talks to the narrator all night, describing what it's like to live with this "affliction", scare quotes because Funes himself considers it an invaluable superpower to be so, er, memorious. How he chooses to employ his memory says different:

He told me that toward 1886 he had devised a new system of enumeration and that in a very few days he had gone before twenty-four thousand. He had not written it down, for what he once meditated would not be erased. The first stimulus to his work, I believe, had been his discontent with the fact that "thirty-three Uruguayans" required two symbols and three words, rather than a single word and a single symbol. Later he applied his extravagant principle to the other numbers. In place of seven thousand thirteen, he would say (for example) Máximo Perez; in place of seven thousand fourteen, The Train; other numbers were Luis Melián Lafinur, Olimar, Brimstone, Clubs, The Whale, Gas, The Cauldron, Napoleon, Agustín de Vedia. In lieu of five hundred, he would say nine. Each word had a particular sign, a species of mark; the last were very complicated. . . . I attempted to explain that this rhapsody of unconnected terms was precisely the contrary of a system of enumeration. I said that to say three hundred and sixty-five was to say three hundreds, six tens, five units: an analysis which does not exist in such numbers as The Negro Timoteo or The Flesh Blanket. Funes did not understand me, or did not wish to understand me.

[ ... ]

Locke, in the seventeenth century, postulated (and rejected) an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch had an individual name; Funes had once projected an analogous idiom, but he had renounced it as being too general, too ambiguous. In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections, which he would later define numerically.

Today, Funes would probably be recognized as some stripe of autistic savant, possessed of neither the inclination nor the skill to interact with people but able to perform the wildest raw mental feats without a droplet of sweat. It's hard to say whether Borges is getting across the idea of an intellectual miracle going unappreciated because he's crippled and relegated to a cot in Fray Bentos — which is a hamlet even today, let alone as it was in the 1880s — or whether the story is more about how too much acuity in one dimension comes at the almost total compromise of the whole. As the narrator says, "Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details", so the second interpretation seems more plausible. (Quoth Nietzsche, "He is a thinker; that means he makes things simpler than they are.") But with Borges, it's never so clear-cut.

Gonzo (Alex Gibney, 2008)

This is a brief, respectable-enough overview of the life and work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson for viewers who aren't intimately familiar with the man's books. Unfortunately, I happen to be intimately familiar with the man's books, having first read the two Fear and Loathings in junior high. That's not to stake a claim of any particular political or literary precocity (though my exposure to Thompsonesque political wackiness no doubt inured me early to that sort of nonsense). It's just that my dad really likes Thompson's stuff, so, growing up, I came to like it too. Like complete knowledge of the works of the Firesign Theater, a respect for Apocalypse Now and a starting-to-falter hairline, that enthusiasm is my patrocliny.

So, slightly more detailed coverage of Thompson's utterly failed attempt to cover the Rumble in the Jungle aside — he spent the fight drugged out of his mind, even by his standards, floating in the hotel's pool — there's precious little new information for the Thompson aficionado here. We already know how he got his start on Air Force newspaper, how he wrote for a short-lived Puerto Rico sports magazine, how he hung out with the Hell's Angels, how he nearly landed the job of Aspen's sheriff, how he thought the Kentucky Derby article wouldn't work, how he demanded a Cadillac in which to seek out the American dream, how he really liked George McGovern, how he shot his typewriter.

This retelling will probably draw some new converts to the fold; few could hear of such a storied, semi-insane life without wanting to learn more. And the film does spend much more of its bandwitdh on Hunter Thompson as personality rather than Hunter Thompson as journalist. People will disagree forever about whether that's a good thing. There's not a whole lot of material included about Thompson's style, about what qualities of his writing itself made so many readers into fanatics. I have my guesses, but the documentary hazards only the vaguest.

But let's be perfectly clear — and bear in mind that this comes from a Thompson fan — the man was more personality than writer, especially in the final, oh, thirty years of his life. While I remain a fervent defender of such latter-day efforts as The Curse of Lono — it may be one of illustrator/sidekick Ralph Steadman's finest hours, in any case — and some of his better "media critic" columns for the Examiner, he was without a doubt running in fumes by his arrival in Zaire. In its favor, Gonzo seems to understand this, or at least to recognize this, which is more than you can say for the sort of Thompson hagiographies that insist he was going strong right up to the end. (As opposed to the Kerouac hagiographies, which don't even pretend.) As P.J. O'Rourke once observed — and this was on C-SPAN, not in Gonzo, as, alongside Bill Murray, he's one of the notably absent interviewees — where, exactly, do you go with the whole wild man thing after age fifty?

(As a side note, most people gawp at Pat Buchanan's presence in the movie, but for me the bigger surprise was Gary Hart. It was like that time he wrote into The Economist, except for the part about actually seeing his face, which can't help but conjure the monkey business shot in my mind's eye every time it appears.)

* * *
2008

1. James Marsh's Man on Wire 
2. Tarsem's The Fall
3. Alex Gibney's Gonzo
4. Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind
5. Randall Miller's Bottle Shock
    

Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)

Though unable, I assume, to correctly pronounce his name, I've harbored a growing fascination with the work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul — my guess is "a peach at pong, we're a see the cool", which I guess is why he goes by "Joe" — for some years now. Many of my favorite critics love the hell out of him; the much-esteemed-by-me Jonathan Rosenbaum calls Weerasethakul Joe "one of the most creative and unpredictable film artists now working anywhere." For Syndromes and a Century, reviewers offered countless tantalizing descriptors:

• "As delicate, complex and strange as any rare orchid"
   
• "Purely intoxicating"
   
• "[Joe] now has a claim to be approaching the league of Kiarostami and Haneke"
   
• "A quiet masterpiece, delicate and full of wonder"
   
• "A challenging, invigorating whiff of the magical properties of sensual cinema"

Wow! But praise is not enough. As I learned from Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, my second-favorite picture of 2006 (first was The Queen), a movie needs not only acclaim from the choicest critics but just the right kind of detraction as well. With that, we turn to the Netflix user reviews:

• "This film is not a movie; it doesn't move"
   
• "I could not figure out what the heck was going on and switched it off"
   
• "Boring!!! This is like a home movie of the boring parts of someones life"
   
• "Our entire family was lost the entire time"
   
• "The most boring, poorly made, stupid--utterly--movie I've ever seen"
   
• "yawn very boring"

Clearly, I've struck gold.

It occurs to me that this procedure might smack, to some, of a self-regarding elite filmgoer making fun of the reg'lar Joes and Janes who just wanna watch a normal, English-language movie with a real goddamn story. Two issues with that: first, I don't consider myself a particularly above-average filmgoer, let alone an elite one. I'm just a guy always on the lookout for something fascinating. Second, isn't that perspective on Joe and Jane at least somewhat infantilizing? Surely it's a rare film that's genuinely beyond the grasp of someone not organically damaged; Syndromes and a Century can't possibly lie outside of their intellectual capacity.

That's because the movie is more an aesthetic experience than an intellectual one, and boy, what an aesthetic experience. I hesitate to bust out the phrase "one of the most beautiful films I've ever seen" with debasing regularity, but this easily rates in the top ten, visually speaking. "Hypnotic", "mesmerizing" and "dreamlike" are others' descriptors, and, unfortunately, clichés as well. Going on eighteen or nineteen hours awake as I watched, I was on the edge of consciousness myself — a state in which one's extra-receptive to Syndrome-like experiences, undoubtedly — but the onscreen proceedings in no way resembled a dream. Joe's choices hew pretty damn closely to reality — to mundanity, even — but their cumulative effect is one of surreality.

I won't chalk up this feel to any one factor, because it appears to spring from many different sources. The pacing and editing, my most commonly complained-about aspects of modern cinema, border on perfection, allowing just enough time to observe and appreciate the details, of which there are many. It has patience, in other words. Funny how actual human moments tend not to find their way in when only given a window open to the typical average shot length. This is to say nothing of the music and the lush and/or gleaming Thailand backdrops, both of which happen to integrate perfectly with Joe's style here — or perhaps Joe's style integrates with them, having evolved in the very same setting. Hard to say.

Syndromes and a Century is such an overwhelmingly aesthetic experience that to synopsize its plot feels beside the point, but not entirely so. It's not a music video, after all; there is a story — or, rather, there are stories, plural — and they're not vestigial. Joe based the events of his characters' lives on those of the of his medically-employed parents, and so we have these threads: (a) a young doctor recalling her near-courtship by an orchid enthusiast and (b) a young folksinging dentist treating a monk who privately longs to be a DJ. Then, the story resets, keeping the cast more or less the same but advancing the time period and switching locations from rural clinic to shiny new hospital.

Afterward, the Livejournalist formerly known as cobalt999, with whom I watched the movie, asked me what I "took from it". I was distracted and thus forgot to reply, though now that I consider the issue, it's become clear that I don't have much of answer. The best I can come up with is mu, a word of Buddhist origin that, roughly, indicates a flawed assumption in the original question. (Classic example: "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" "Mu.") I don't know that I take anything from films but the very experience of viewing them. That's not to say that "What did you take from it?" is always and everywhere an invalid question — one shouldn't mistake the asking for intellectually confused allegory-seeking or the puerile hunger for a moral, both of which are invalid — but it's not how I approach art in any medium. What did I take from Syndromes and a Century? Syndromes and a Century. And now I'm optimistic, though maybe cautiously so, about the rest of Joe's filmography.