Movies

Every Friday for the past month I have been going down to Hakodate at the southern tip of Hokkaido to teach at a university (it's a part-time gig; don't worry, I am still the shining star at Muroran). The journey usually takes two hours by train but with the weather we've been having this winter, delays and stoppages have been all too frequent. On my way back to Muroran I have whiled away the hours stuck in a snowdrift somewhere near Yakumo-cho by catching up on my movie viewing. And as I know you are all desperate to get my insights on same prior to the Oscars, I thought I'd share some of my rather random thoughts on things Hollywood.
And they were all Hollywood. Dodge-driving, hamburger-eating, goddamned-made-in-the-United-States-of-f***ing-America! © Hollywood. I have a slew of Johnny Foreigner films on my hard disk but I still haven't discovered which viewer I need to download to get the subtitles to work. Hence the reason 'A Separation', 'Certified Copy', 'Kid with a bike' and 'Of Gods and Men' remain unseen.
So, in no particular order we have...Contagion - virus runs amok, wreaks havoc with Steven Soderbergh's color schemes and it's all the Chinese's fault.
This was a competent, well-made movie that, to my jaundiced agnostic eye, came across as a thinly disguised creed to Christian fundamentalism. How else to explain the fate that befell Gwyneth Paltrow's character and all she came in unclean contact with. She's a divorcee, worse, an adulteress who clearly enjoys the Hong Kong high-life and she's dead within 15 minutes. And she is responsible for launching a contemporary version of the Black Plague. And as (a) sin is obviously hereditary, and (b) he's not biologically related to his sainted stepdad, her son is dead within a further three minutes.
Meanwhile, her sad sack, everyman husband - a rather rotund Matt Damon - has a seemingly God-given 100% immunity from pretty much everything: viruses, fashion sense, having anything that hints at a 'good time'. Moreover, such is his white-bread, mid-western goodness, that he keeps his own (biological) daughter both virus-free and virginal despite airborne germs and the moody attentions of a lusty young fella from down the road.
So, kids remember: sexual repression saves! Sin, particularly of the sexy kind, will surely kill you!! And never, ever, party on down like its 1999 in Hong Kong, or you will surely unleash the next apocalypse. Amen.
Next up was Moneyball, or rather "An Ode to Late American Capitalism starring Brad Pitt in side-profile and a goddamned-made-in-the-United-States-of-f***ing-America! © Dodge pick-up truck". This movie left me wanting to re-watch 'Battleship Potemkin (which you can see here) and join the Communist Part of Japan (and which you can join here).
I mean, are we supposed to admire Mr. Pitt's character in this? Applaud his integrity in turning down an offer of $12.5m to manage the Boston Red Sox in order to stay with his beloved San Francisco Statistics or whatever the team was called? It’s not like he faced a Sophoclean dilemma: the Red Sox or poorhouse penury. A character who, we are lead to believe, foregoes the big bucks for fear of what a cross-country move may do to his relationship with his daughter, yet at the same time shamelessly dispatches unwanted players (and presumably their families) all over the country like so many postage prepaid, bat-swinging serfs.
Utterly inane. But so utterly American too.
Next, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (TGWTDT), David ‘Freud’ Fincher’s latest. It would seem that Mr. Fincher is methodologically working through his many and varied neuroses on the washed-out, color-faded big screen.
We’ve had schizophrenic homoeroticism (Fight Club); S&M (Seven); obsession (Zodiac); envy (Social Network); repression (The Game); and maternal love (Alien 3 - seriously). I haven’t seen Benjamin Button so I can’t comment but from the trailer it seems Brad Pitt is a dwarf in it. Hello?
Now we have TGWTDT and it seems that Mr. Fincher has decided to lavish upon us a veritable Swedish smorgasbord of emotional extremes. I should be honest here and say I didn’t like Stieg Larsson’s book which may explain why I am not particularly impressed with the movie either. Both are polished enough, just enough, to make the reader/viewer overlook how complicit we are in the vicarious gratification we derive from reading/watching all the pain on display. And ‘display’ is a key word here, I think. Mr. Fincher, in his mastery of the technical aspects of film-making - lighting, blocking, point-of-view, editing, audio, etc., - in effect ‘displays’, in the anesthetized aesthetic meaning of the word, rather than shows. We watch, we may even enjoy, but we are never let empathize.
Finally, The Kids are Alright. I didn’t watch this on the train, but rather at home with Sanae. Actually, I didn’t really watch this at all, only the first 45 minutes of it or so. The three-quarter hour mark seems to be the acceptable cut-off time when I can quietly leave the sofa without provoking my wife’s considerable ire.
So a movie about a lesbian couple, their two teenage children and their sperm dad. Call me a Jesuit but I just couldn’t get into that. Sure, I had a sort of anthropological curiosity about this sort of family life in contemporary California, but, you know, I’m not a lesbian (I’ve taken the blood tests); I didn’t particularly care what happened to these people, as they are not my people. They don’t play GAA, listen to the Sawdoctors, or go sleighing in a snowstorm on a Sunday morning.
So 45 minutes in I got out. Sanae enjoyed it though, but she also enjoyed The Proposal, so you may take that endorsement as you please.