Epitaph I
23 September 2005
This is the first installment in what I hope will be an ongoing collection: passages that have been or could be used as an epitaph.
What follows is not meant to be morose or iconic, nor is it a parody. This series, infrequent as it may be, is from the heart. It is meant to inspire thought... to create auspicious gales.
Let me suggest, then, that the word “epitaph” here is not defined as an inscription specifically for the dead but merely as a passage we, the observers, are meant to remember. Epitaphs are, after all, a gesture... or a jest. One phrase pulled out of an endless sky of sentences. A phrase by which we are meant to sail. The storyline and its final word.
What you won’t find here, then, is Shakespeare’s epitaph. Too commercial.
What you will find will be derived from anything that strikes me as fitting: a riddle, a rhyme, a warning, advice. From anywhere. Ancient and new. Used and waiting to be.
The idea is that the following words and the words following them have taught me something about how the world should be taken. In small doses.
It also serves as a small change of pace, for me and for you, from the grind of this blog. If nothing else, it allows me to dispense with a few of the innumerable quotes I have floating around in my head. And, more importantly, it allows us a moment to reflect.
To this end, we start, fittingly, with a prayer...
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May God bless and keep you always. May your wishes all come true.
May you always do for others and let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung.
And may you stay forever young. May you stay forever young.
May you grow up to be righteous. May you grow up to be true.
May you always know the truth and see the light surrounding you.
May you always be courageous, stand upright, and be strong.
And may you stay forever young. May you stay forever young.
May your hands always be busy. May your feet always be swift.
May you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung.
And may you stay forever young. May you stay forever young.
"forever young"
by bob dylan
Arthur Ryel-Lindsey » Comments:
The Long Thumbs Up: Questioning the Critique in Response to "The Constant Gardener"
18 September 2005
Fernando Meirelles’ new film "The Constant Gardener" is a towering achievement. The screenplay is transposed from John Le Carre’s best-selling novel into an extraordinarily precise thriller with extraordinary parts all around. The cinematography is brilliant – both in its visuals and its affect on the film’s narrative, namely its use of the handheld camera to heighten the sense of immediacy; in fact, "The Constant Gardener" has the most effective and committed use of handheld camera work in recent memory. The film’s editing is magnificent, its use of colors superb, and its ability to hold suspense remarkable. Oh, and Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz are good too.
Here endeth the review.
"The Constant Gardener" is one of a handful of – for lack of any term by which to suitably categorize them – Issues films. "Hotel Rwanda" and "Schindler’s List" are two others. Films interrogatory and shattering. Films beautiful and alarming. Films which leave the theater with the audience, to slip out in conversations for days and weeks and even months afterward... once attendees dispense with the long, silent car rides home, the kind of rides these films tend to evoke.
These three particular films are well-crafted, well-acted, well-made. But what do questions of technique matter when the story is so powerful it eclipses the means by which it was told?
Meirelles’ film concerns a British diplomat (Fiennes) struggling to find the truth behind his wife’s controversial work against pharmaceutical companies. It depicts the disadvantaged, dead, and dying of Africa beside corruptions among the West’s major power brokers which seem almost too appropriate to be untrue, and it is staggeringly effective, for all the reasons of technique above. In one scene, for instance, after Fiennes’ prodding Justin Quayle has been beaten as a warning to stop prodding, the perspective of his attackers’ exit is from the floor, sideways – i.e. Quayle’s point of view as he lies on the ground bleeding. From this low angle, the attackers are revealed to have a soccer ball, a signifier that relates to a moment earlier in the film. The image – dark, with a red carpet taking up half of the screen while the men appear as silhouettes – is a simple touch to put the audience literally in the eyes of the protagonist, but it is spot on for creating sympathy.
But even in this light, do I say "The Constant Gardener" is good? Of course it is good – it is very well made – but one is hardly human if he/she walks out the theater after "The Constant Gardener" having "enjoyed" it on the narrative level: the film is a heartbreaking tale of deception and death. On the artistic level it is exceptional. Between the two, the narrative dominates, so it becomes one of those films that is great to see but impossible to watch... like "Hotel Rwanda"... like "Schindler’s List." Does that make it good?
To put it another way, how does one even begin to review a film like "The Constant Gardener?" My glowing review in paragraph one stands, but were I to be writing a critique to be published in a daily newspaper, I would not dream of writing it that way. My working assumption concerning the job of the newspaper film critic is that he/she is not supposed to answer the reader’s question, "Is the film good," but rather, the question, "Should I go see this movie?" So, "a towering achievement" is helpful, but the rest of paragraph was not.
After all, my instincts coming out of the theater were not to describe how beautiful "Gardener" was shot, or how well it was edited and written; those were later concerns that, now that I think of them, I hope the movie gets recognized for. Instead, I was thinking, "How horrible, how could these things happen." In short, I thought about the story itself, not the storytelling.
That second question of "should I go" cannot, thereby, be answered with praises of "The Constant Gardener"s cinematography or acting. At least by me. Lisa Schwarzbaum, critic for Entertainment Magazine, wrote in her review, "the chemistry between Fiennes and Weisz... feels playfully sexy" (who sees a movie about mistreatment of an epidemic and thinks, at any moment, of the word ‘sexy’?). Those praises should come down the road.
I could start with the problems I found in the film, but the only real problem with "Gardener" that is not justified in its telling is how it is being advertised. It has a very good trailer, but its poster's tag line is "Love. At Any Cost." One begins to wonder if Justin Quayle’s story is for love, or rather for some emotion closer to vindication, reconciliation, or a need for penance. "The Constant Gardener" is not, I feel safe in saying, a love story.
"Gardener" is, however, a tough, intense film that investigates hard questions, perhaps to the point of over-reaching, but certainly in a way artful, beautiful, inspired, and worthwhile. It met one of my seldom-met criterions, which send a film soaring up my quality meter – I asked, "How’d they do that?" – and it succeeded in the first rule of good cinema: story. And though its theme is at times hard to take, it is equally hard to forget. In short, I hope everyone will see it.
That would be my newspaper review. In fewer words, "Yes, go see it." Such is the problem of print: not enough space to include all one's thoughts: "Yes, go see it. Oh, and the film making is REALLY good too."
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Photo Caption: The Eyes of Voldemort. Ralph Fiennes as the beleaguered Justin Quayle in Fernando Meirelles' "The Constant Gardener." From the Focus Features Trailer.
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The Caine Mutiny: In Celebration of the Final Scene of "The Italian Job"
06 September 2005
Hurrah, for "The Italian Job." Hip, Hip... well, you know the rest.
I am not, of course, referring to that sniveling, seething, whimpering little attempt at a remake two years ago. I am referring, as loyal readers will have no doubt by now surmised, to the genuine article: "The Italian Job," Michael Caine, 1969.
While I could applaud it for the pure energy it creates, for its many memorable lines, or as a staple of sixties British cinema, I am cheering it today for its ending: an ending that would never fly now.
At the risk of spoiling the original "Italian Job" for many, as (a) all too few people have seen the original and (b) the remake diverged dramatically from it (a fact I will commend the new one for, though there is not much else to commend), I will describe the last moment of the film... and a fine moment it is.
Successful in the heist of the century, gentleman con man Charlie Crocker (Caine) and his band of miscreant thieves and specialists celebrate aboard a private bus that careens around the narrow mountain roads of the Alps as the crew travels from Turin into Switzerland to deposit their shining stack of gold into a Swiss bank. The driver of said bus is part of the heist and is, of course, celebrating, too, which causes him to nearly miss a sharp turn, and the bus is thrown over a cliff’s edge, teetering perilously close to certain doom for our heros.
In this literal state of suspense – this literal cliffhanger – the crew of thieves shuffle cautiously backward toward the side of the bus lodged on the cliff face. Is this enough? Of course not: the gold, at the suspended end of the bus, is itself causing the bus to teeter. Somehow, our heroes must get it back or risk losing their fortune, and drastically less important, it seems, their lives.
Crocker cautiously gets on his belly and crawls slowly, excruciatingly forward, toward the gold. We watch from the safe side, like a member of the miscreant band, as he gets within arms reach. Then we cut to the reverse, to the back doors, where the gold slides further away, thanks to a more radical tip of the bus with Crocker’s added weight.
The drama continues in this vein – Crocker within an arm’s reach, the gold sliding almost out the bus’ back doors – until, from the point of view of one of the band of thieves, he turns his head towards us and says, "Hang on lads. I’ve got a great idea." Dissolve to a long shot of the bus teetering on the cliff’s edge. Cue the film’s iconic musical theme – "Self Preservation Society" – as we crane away. Credits. Fin.
What a moment of pure animated suspense. What a scene of perilous defiance. Like a choose-your-own-adventure book, the audience is left with only its opinion of the characters to decide what is their inevitable fate. Do they crash and lose their gold and their lives? Do they, somehow, get out to safely? Do they live and lose the gold, a case in which they are sure to die anyway, since criminal mastermind Mr. Bridger (Noel Coward), whom made the heist possible, would surely use his connections to rid the lot of them.
It is a pretty well established fact that this moment was not the film’s intended ending. Some sources say no end was scripted by the time shooting began, and eventually, the second unit was given the task of completing the film. On the other hand, Michael Caine, in a 2003 BBC interview to celebrate his 70th birthday, did actually describe what his character’s great idea was, which suggests there was one. In any case, the scene the filmmakers came up with – the above scene – was favored by Paramount for one very desirable reason: it left space for a sequel. (Unrealized at the time, the sequel may well be the 2003 "Italian Job" with Mark Wahlberg as Crocker. That film goes beyond the original film’s script to make all the characters save one suddenly American, and, more to the point, to create a double cross after the Italian heist. Coincidentally, the 2003 movie will have a sequel: the uninspiringly titled "The Brazilian Job," to be released in 2006).
If screenwriter Troy Kennedy-Martin did write an ending he surely would not have been surprised it was changed by the time his film was in production: among the many changes made were an entirely ad libed scene in a garage as Crocker steals an Aston Martin, and, more consciously on the part of the director, alterations in character types thanks to the hiring of comedic actors like Coward and the impregnable Benny Hill.
But what the film achieves in that final moment is a great element of unrefined absence – bordering on true artistic disappointment, the Russian Formalists’ notion of estrangement – at the moment we cut away from the scene inside the bus. It is unexpected, and it makes the ending absolutely perfect.
This is an action movie, after all, and be it now or in 1969, what we have come to expect from action movies is what a mentor of mine dubbed, "the male melodrama": clear heroes, even more clearly defined antagonists, and a clear triumph over villainy. "The Italian Job" has that: the heist is a success. But in that moment on the hillside it adds the unexpected: the even more emotionally demanding possibility of the bird-in-hand disaster. With hard stuff out of the way, the movie surprises us with the loss of the money, the very thing we have strived with our heroes to attain. How could they be so careless? How could they be so dumb? Bridger will surely have their bits off now. A perfect disaster in every sense.
So where else to end, but... Hurrah.
Arthur Ryel-Lindsey » Comments:
"Grimm" Finish: A Review of A Review
01 September 2005
[These] are my principles, and if you don’t like them... well, I have others.
Groucho Marx
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The wild and fantastical "The Brothers Grimm" is easily within the canon of director Terry Gilliam’s usual flights of fancy. It features brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm (Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, respectively) as con artists who masquerade as exterminators of evil spirits. They are sent as a punishment into a truly enchanted forest, where trees crawl, men are enchanted by an ancient queen, and the worlds of Terry Gilliam are finely restored.
Since the film's release last Friday, however, "The Brothers Grimm" has been reviewed on a scale from oddly entertaining – The Boston Globe’s Ty Burr called the movie, "An absurd mess that's more entertaining than it has any right to be," while Peter Canavese found it "easy to recommend but hard to love" – to downright bad. Manohla Dargis echoed many professional critics’ sentiments in her review for the New York Times: "‘The Brothers Grimm’ sputters and coughs along like an unoiled machine, grinding gears and nerves in equal measure."
The AP’s Christy Lemire is among the harsher critics. "It’s as if he doesn’t know what he wants his film to be," she wrote. "A loopy farce? A lavish costume-piece? A high-energy action film?"
Ignoring the obvious question – why can’t a film be all these things at once? – and assuming that Lemire has reviewed by the all-too common heading that any tip-toeing over genre boundaries automatically labels a film "bad," one has to wonder if "The Brother’s Grimm" is trying to be any of these. "A loopy farce," certainly, as Terry Gilliam is nothing without the sense of humor that placed him among Monty Python’s cast. "A lavish costume-piece" is less convincing, as that can hardly considered a genre: people make films that require lavish costumes, not lavish costumes that require a film (even then, the costumes in "The Brother’s Grimm" were quite good, meaning Gilliam succeeded where Lemire claims he failed). Finally, "a high-energy action film" is crap since, under its vague auspices, the term can imply everything from Schwarzenegger – probably where Lemire was going – to Bruce Lee to... well, anything: there was suspense and intrigue, a police chase, and gunfire in "Casablanca," surely that means it was trying to be "a high-energy action film."
Lemire continues, of course. "At times," she said, "it even feels as if this is Gilliam’s anti-war film, framed within the context of a comedic fairy tale." To which, the reader who has seen the movie, or even heard about the movie, says, "quoi?"
Lemire does not explain this fairly surprising revelation – surprising certainly to me, since I saw no overtones of Iraq or any other war in the spritely way about which Damon and Ledger confront the mythical horrors of an enchanted, 19th Century forest. Rather, Lemire summarizes the film, claims the effects are "schlocky," and comes to a head, saying, "Classic characters like Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel come and go, but they aren’t used to their full potential; they appear so randomly, they seem like afterthoughts. Although the Gingerbread Man, who forms from a glob of black goo at the bottom of a well, is awfully cute. Then he eats a small child." Sentence fragment "although... cute" aside, I begin to wonder if Lemire was watching the right "Brothers Grimm." In one sense because the Gingerbread Man forms AFTER eating a child, but more to the point, Gilliam’s allusions to Grimm fairy tales ARE afterthoughts... and that is the whole point.
Gilliam set out not to film Grimm fairy tales, but to construct a fictionalized account of the brothers as adventurers that has only the trappings of the stories the real brothers wrote. While Lemire only mentions the fairy tale characters who appeared in the film, Gilliam added others less obviously: the dead queen sits on a pile of mattresses – a la "The Princess and the Pea" – and Jacob’s drunken boast of going into hell to discover the name of an imp pangs of "Rumpelstiltskin." Certainly there are even more references in the film to fairy tales – not everything can be gleaned in one viewing – but these examples, as well as Rapunzel or the film’s Hans and Greta, are so clearly not meant to dominate the action that it is ludicruous to base a review on their status as elaboration.
This is a genuine problem in film criticism, for anyone: the desire to nitpick to the point of pugnacity, to the point of missing the point. Lemire is, after all, getting paid to write down what she thinks of a given film, and her desire to give the most informed, most precise, and most fair review leads her – let us hope – to watching a film more scrupulously than the average viewer. "Fair" is the key word: how does the critic avoid walking into a film without assuming that something is wrong with it? Then, how does the critic avoid picking out the things that are stereotypically wrong – genre blending – or seemingly opaque – "afterthought" references to fairy tales – that are, in fact, exactly what the artist had in mind?
The results of this critical habit in Lemire’s case are her loss of authority. Her criticism of the film that is justifiable and true – that the brothers’ relationship was not well-enough developed to buy the turning point when Jacob says, "You’re my brother – I want you to believe in me" – has no weight whatsoever thanks to the messages that she had already blown out of proportion. She becomes harsh about trivialities, scathing without any body to scold.
For my part, I would like to consider criticism something loftier than this review, not an automatic "this is good," "this is bad," but vastly more important, "this works because...," "this did not work since...," "this was effective for just that scene, but in the contexts of the whole film it was rather...," and so on.
Perhaps this is an idealistic dream. Perhaps Lemire was working on a deadline, with space restrictions, with only one viewing and one gut reaction of the film. Not perhaps, certainly: these are the realities of newspaper journalism. But what we can also be certain of in Lemire’s writing is a failure to address Gilliam’s film within the film’s language.
The critic needs to have eyes and ears for the story, as much as the filmmaker. It does no one good to be unoriginal.
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