Vacancies.
The tiled stairways seemed to survey their cooped delirium again, as he shuffled up its tunneling damp. This apartment. A strange impossibility made real by the uneven paved cement under his feet, and the smell of urine. It was surreal, to think that all this, these alleys, these shuddering lifts, existed, alongside that sheltered contruct through which he had strung great hopes, or seizured illusions, carried as it were, by the luck of circumstance in a great enabling machine that had now ceased to run, to pour its great lubricant syrup over the cog of days. Of course, he could trace the boundaries of the protective circles of his mind, like so many impenetrably arbitrary things. But a moth flew from the ceiling, and latched to the doorway. Who lives there? Perhaps some waitress, remembering salvation through strange forgettable bedfellows, like modern day priests? Perhaps some avuncular man, that hangs, and in age, reminds one of jolly life juxtaposed with a death-truth that sweeps one over deserting present, a kind of embalmed archetype, condemned to sincerity? The mothman stared, for it shouldered his wrists. Its eyes looked; wingtips brushing the tips of his armhairs. He kissed it, and it latched to his face, fluttering, trembling, shuddering across his face.
Thursday, July 07, 2011
Tuesday, July 05, 2011
Movie Impressions 2
Having spent many hours travelling on Emirates, I enjoyed the Oscar contenders for 2011 from the enlarged, newly minted flightscreens of an A380, lofted above Dubai deserts, and floating in and out of sleep.
The Social Network
A docu-fictionalization of Zuckerburg's overgrown startup from the lens of a screenplay that essentializes and amplifies the overwhelming, yet emotionally hollow, intersection of parties, of entitlement, of authority, of impossible girls that characterizes the brew of college culture and beyond - this movie, like its subject matter, flips and darts across space, across individuals and times, as each progressively alienates and becomes alienating, each, accounted for, registered and then discarded, as quickly and surely as modern life itself, moored between the emptiness of an evening office space and the dreamlife of a keyboard that fails to play and to express adolescent truth any longer. It drives forward, still repressed, and finally hangs nowhere. No; craft is salvation. I slept till the motion sickness pills wore off.
The King's Speech
This movie is well made. Its crucial opposition, among many others, to the Social Network, lay in its created representation of the moment as an infinite carrier of emotional significance, thereby universalizing the particular in a manner reversed to the Social Network, which found its universal subject in an easily referenced contemporaneity and therefore particularized accordingly; which effect is to primarily engage us in different ways, and to arouse different sets of responses, namely, envy as against pity.
Here, one is enfurled into the arms of a more comforting tradition, and of real relationships, unconditional and genuine - clearly, it is institutions that corrupt human natures. Emotional turmoil is nested in the security of moral certainties: an affair is a great violation where responsibilities are largely ceremonial. This fantastically comforting portrayal is justified by the customary right of historical event-based movies to appeal to antiquarian romanticisms. We are never made uncomfortable throughout this slightly patronizing, and thoroughly bourgeosie entertainment: quiet satisfaction, supported by a beautiful consistency, reigns.
Never Let Me Go
The main complaint against The Social Network is its antipoetical substitution of images with scripted wit. The main complaint against Never Let Me Go is its sentimental insistence on the pain and suffering of life through distorted images and cardboard characters. The obvious intent of creating a mood piece that culminates in the twin ejaculations of simple anger and a wash of tears; that is, moods as intense yet trivial as the perpetual scowl of Ruth, unanchors the script from a believable potrayal of the interiority of its characters as the point of departure from which to create depth, or dilemma, or any serious invitation to the viewer to address himself to the themes which Ishiguro sought to uncover. This movie, like the sense of barren waste it often evokes, feels like a letdown. One was led to suspect that the original was written by Jodi Picoult.
Carey Mulligan played Kathy H wonderfully, given her unfortunate script. The brilliant yearning eyes projecting from a sensously melancholic face conveyed less of the agility of technique than of the naturalism of self-expression.
True Grit review here.
The Social Network
A docu-fictionalization of Zuckerburg's overgrown startup from the lens of a screenplay that essentializes and amplifies the overwhelming, yet emotionally hollow, intersection of parties, of entitlement, of authority, of impossible girls that characterizes the brew of college culture and beyond - this movie, like its subject matter, flips and darts across space, across individuals and times, as each progressively alienates and becomes alienating, each, accounted for, registered and then discarded, as quickly and surely as modern life itself, moored between the emptiness of an evening office space and the dreamlife of a keyboard that fails to play and to express adolescent truth any longer. It drives forward, still repressed, and finally hangs nowhere. No; craft is salvation. I slept till the motion sickness pills wore off.
The King's Speech
This movie is well made. Its crucial opposition, among many others, to the Social Network, lay in its created representation of the moment as an infinite carrier of emotional significance, thereby universalizing the particular in a manner reversed to the Social Network, which found its universal subject in an easily referenced contemporaneity and therefore particularized accordingly; which effect is to primarily engage us in different ways, and to arouse different sets of responses, namely, envy as against pity.
Here, one is enfurled into the arms of a more comforting tradition, and of real relationships, unconditional and genuine - clearly, it is institutions that corrupt human natures. Emotional turmoil is nested in the security of moral certainties: an affair is a great violation where responsibilities are largely ceremonial. This fantastically comforting portrayal is justified by the customary right of historical event-based movies to appeal to antiquarian romanticisms. We are never made uncomfortable throughout this slightly patronizing, and thoroughly bourgeosie entertainment: quiet satisfaction, supported by a beautiful consistency, reigns.
Never Let Me Go
The main complaint against The Social Network is its antipoetical substitution of images with scripted wit. The main complaint against Never Let Me Go is its sentimental insistence on the pain and suffering of life through distorted images and cardboard characters. The obvious intent of creating a mood piece that culminates in the twin ejaculations of simple anger and a wash of tears; that is, moods as intense yet trivial as the perpetual scowl of Ruth, unanchors the script from a believable potrayal of the interiority of its characters as the point of departure from which to create depth, or dilemma, or any serious invitation to the viewer to address himself to the themes which Ishiguro sought to uncover. This movie, like the sense of barren waste it often evokes, feels like a letdown. One was led to suspect that the original was written by Jodi Picoult.
Carey Mulligan played Kathy H wonderfully, given her unfortunate script. The brilliant yearning eyes projecting from a sensously melancholic face conveyed less of the agility of technique than of the naturalism of self-expression.
True Grit review here.
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