les yeux les oreilles

realizing the added value of having an arab who speaks corsican, cesar luciani (the prison godfather) asks malik el djebna (rahim) to be his eyes and ears when it comes to his gang's surroundings in their french prison. amidst a current power shift in the cultural makeup of the prison, the relationship between cesar and malik grows in significance after most of cesar's gang is disbanded. he is the last of cesar's old gang and still the only half arab/half corsican who is able to straddle the defined boundary that separates inmate interaction and ideology between races. malik, who works for no one but himself, uses the destablization of prison equlibrium to his own advantage.

allowed to be released for a couple parolled days, thanks to cesar's influence and power, malik runs errands for his boss in the outside world. during his first trip, malik finds the time to recoup a bag of drugs left behind by one of his arab inmate friends who sets up another one of his released friends (ryad) with a drug running job. upon arrival back in the prison, cesar suspects that malik has alterior interests and threatens him by taking a spoon to his eye and digging it into the socket. his second trip is no less frightening. after several failed attempts at "wacking" one of luciani's rival mob leaders, malik takes it upon himself to assasinate him and his entourage during the middle of the day. while shooting inside an armoured car, malik leaves physically unharmed but looses his sense of hearing momentarily.

the most valuable assets to malik's survival in prison are endangered. malik's eyes and ears are his own and they represent his unique way of seeing, hearing, and existing. when corrupted through the veil of gang order and supremacy he almost loses them completely; he becomes a pawn in the chess game of others. however, when malik uses his senses independently he stumbles upon spiritual freedoms that he has never felt before. its during his parolled trips that malik experiences an empowerment of being. riding above the clouds in an airplane and walking through the ocean along a beach are sensations that release malik from an imprisoned world of his own senses. at his actual prison release, malik is greeted as a new kingpin (in the shadow of cesar's fallen empire) by a convoy of trucks. instead of acknowledging them, malik turns to ryad's widowed wife and walks with her with open ears and eyes.

family portait

going home for the holidays is an understatement when it comes to the zhang family, one of hundreds of millions of chinese migrant worker families, who go to desperate lengths to travel extraordinary distances during their sole vacation week, the chinese new year. the arithmetic alone of the largest human migration in the world is cause for awe. however, lixin fan paints a much more impressionistic picture of the emotional/psychological despair caused in the absence of parenthood (as it belongs to children and parents alike). while separated by thousands of miles, the greater distance between the zhang family is an opinion of the significance of sacrifice.

as the parents see it, their absence from the home is to better the potential futures of their son and daughter who unlike most rural children attend school full time. more than anything they would prefer to see their children not follow in their factory-job footsteps. as the children see it, they grow up in an environment where their only parental figure is their grandmother in addition to the income of their parents which doesn't even relieve them of their labourious existence. a life without the support of their parents feels like a life confined and imprisoned. an obvious reaction to this structure would be, as qin (daughter) does, to rebel and explore the freedom of independency.

her choice: to drop out of highschool a year early and pursue a factory job sewing jeans. at first qin appreciates her new found freedom and even finds a certain pride in her work. in one scene, qin and her roommate go shopping at a local mall and search for the brand of jeans they have put all their hard work into only to find that the department store doesn't carry them. as the exterior shots of qin's factory suggest, the mounds of denim they toil in are shipped and sold to a foreign market. nevertheless, this hardly phases qin who in her own search for affirmation gets a barbie-styled haircut that all the tourists share. in a less than positive appraisal, the haircut proves to be not quite what qin had anticipated. her search for expression/individuality comes up short. while she may be too stuborn to admit it to herself, a lonliness (the ghost of her parents support) pervades her new life.   

in an attempt to convince qin to change her mind and go back to school, her parents pick qin up for their annual migration back home. she laughs and scoffs in a childlike-wonder while her parents cautiously wait among the masses for a single train ticket. waiting days on end is commonplace and qin's mother tries to instill the value of this painstaking wait. upon arrival back home, the zhang family is even more dysfunctional. in an extreme insult to the dignity and honour of her father, qin uses the word "fuck" and is physically punished for it. for further emphasis fan keeps in a shot of qin breaking the fourth wall - addressing the audience that this is the "real" her. the surface of the film, like the tear in the family unit, has finally ripped. while last train home certainly points to the disconnection of family and loss of generation, it imparts a sense of immediacy and need for action. the longer the common peasant worker in china continues to sew mindlessly, the greater chance that the unity of country/family will go past the point of being able to be mended.

cold shower

alpha male, staff sergeant william james (renner) is anything but tame. nicknamed the "wild one" he acts on destructive impulses and has a reckless abandon for protocol. dropping head sets, smoking cigarettes, and entering baghdad solo are the norm for this expert bomb-diffuser. dramatized or not, james' ego encapsulates a personality that gets off from being immersed in the chaos and horror of war. the tension of facing death every day (the episodic structure exposing the hauntingly routineness of it) gives james a natural adrenaline rush that makes him feel his most alive. under his bed he keeps deactivated detonators for trophies: he mentions how fascinating they are as instruments of death that could have killed him. underneath this though, they serve as a faint reminder of james' last fix. he is a man addicted to this rush. as bigelow's opening quote suggests, war is a drug.

unlike his partner who he accidentally sent to the hurt locker, james finds no comfort and zero ambition returning back home. the mundane experience of grocery shopping just doesn't compare to the kinetic urgency of bomb-diffusing. serving his country, and more precisely serving his own dependent need, james chooses to go back and fight in iraq. however "personal" this choice is, it represents a larger idea; that there are pleasurable impulses in warring. one reason america repeatedly engages in war is because it releases a natural high. its soaked into the genetics of history. in the scene after james shoots his partner, he enters a washroom alone and starts a shower to relieve his stress. as the water pours down his still military-suited body it rinses into a pool of blood. james is surrounded by a cold truth: death and injury of innocents are the cost of a body that, at its most nakedness, is always at war.

simultaneity

being many things at once is not a novel concept for detroit duo the white stripes, even if these things end up contradicting each other. as frontman jack white informs the viewer in malloy's the white stripes under great white northern lights, the most accurate review of the band he had ever heard is that they are simultaneously the most fake band and the most real band. an interesting thought, and one that malloy teases at throughout the documentary in cinematic fashion.

interviews with the bandmates reveal an idiosyncratic depth to the methodology of the white stripes. fully aware of their contrivance of style (red, white, black iconography) and limitation (being a two piece band) the band works within these parameters to produce (sometimes forcefully) something unique and creative. in the process of revealing how the white stripes function as artists, malloy mirrors the dimensionality of the band in the structure of the documentary.

equal parts performance, interview, and narrative the film also has many moments of purely visual purpose. at first, shots of jack and meg in front of airplanes painted red and white or the black and white shots of them walking on the frozen surface on nunavit may seem as nothing but an exercise in vanity. however, given the film's subject matter its more apt to consider that the inclusion of shots like these show an acceptance of  the band's superficiality and how it works in framing their identity. not including pure red, black, and white imagery would do an injustice to who the band actually is. those red and white smoke stacks capture the canadian landscape but illustrate a surface.

behind one surface lays another. the film also captures the band's ability above all to play music. combining theatre shows with secret shows, the stripes run the gamut of musical exhibition. in the process, malloy allows many songs to be filmed start-to-finish, giving the viewer an experience of the spaces the white stripes create. the band plays without set-lists and sometimes without set-locations; the result of such endeavours creates a purely unique musical experience. no show/performance is rehearsed or duplicated (often making the band second guess their individual execution). a vein of originality pulses through the "body" of the white stripes. to illustrate the raw, unfiltered texture of the band, the film almost exclusively uses grainy camerawork while they are on stage.

cynically, this could be interpreted as yet another device perpetuating the mystique of the stripes. this misses the point; the white stripes are a band who box themselves in multiple constrictions to force creativity. great white northern lights forces a spotlight on the concept of the artist. it is more than a document of a canadian tour its a document of identity. not just how the white stripes should be percieved or want to, but what goes into that perception. what makes-up who the artist is. the conclusion being that the white stripes are, after ten years, still the same band they started out as: gimmick and grit.

when the child was a child

he's just a boy pretending to be a wolf pretending to be a king. this is douglas' regretful observation of the wild things' newly founded king, max. while douglas would like play make-believe, keeping the status quo for carol's sake, he tries to quell his tempermental friend with a bit of truth. not having it, carol bursts into a fit of rage and is more than ready to eat the "terrible" king who, according to carol, failed to keep them safe and take care of them. echoing max's tantrum with his mother (with the caveat that max has never eaten anyone, just bitten), carol's emotions reach uncontrollable monstrously-sized proportions. 

and so, max runs; away from danger and straight into the maternal body of k.w. (the main source of carol's emotional turmoil). its while hiding from carol inside k.w. that max comes to the conclusion he has to go home and be with his mom. max instinctually feels the need for domesticity: the comfort of family and warmth of loving parents. in a sense, max comes back down to size. he recedes from a world where even his wildest imaginations can't conquer the fear of growing up and finds solace in the tranquil housing of a mother's womb.

this fear of aging permeates max's physical and psychological space throughout the film. before he even gets to the island, max is confronted with examples of aging and, as is with most children, internalizes these modes of change into feeling. be they abstract thoughts (like the demise of the sun, among other human catastrophes) or visceral feelings (like the abandonment of a sister who's already grown up), max naturally wants to stabilize the disorder around him. hence his quest to establish order with the wild things. at one point he asks bob and terry (k.w.'s feathery friends) for some wisdom: "how do i make everyone o.k.?" all max is concerned about is the safety and happiness of his friends. to do it he imagines everything from a "sadness shield" to the "ultimate fort."

at home max uses his mom as his own sadness shield. she becomes his protective force when the raw energy of primary emotions like fear, anger, and sadness become to much to tackle alone. after max faces the learned truth that everything is fun and games til someone gets hurt (max under his igloo fort) his mom let's him know that she wouldv'e done something about it. likewise, when max is worried about his mom while she is fixing reports on her computer, she notices max's desire to be with her. from max's point of view (at her feet), she appears as a larger than life figure; surrounding him physically and emotionally. asking him to tell her a story, max authors a tale about a vampire who bit a building, lost his teeth, and was ostricized from his vampire friends because the teeth he lost weren't going to grow back. max's fear of aging is, as he confesses, a fear of leaving behind a time of baby teeth, childhood, and wild things.

vanishing american

neil diamond's nfb documentary, reel injun, appropriately examines the evolutionary portrayal of indian culture in hollywood cinema. framed chronologically, the film provides an iconoclastic deconstruction of each decade's stereotypic representations of the "injun" and, in turn, the difficulties in constructing an identity lost to genocide. an insightful interview with filmmaker jim jarmusch brings attention to how the birth of cinema coincided with the colonization of native peoples allowing america to replace an exterminated culture with a mythology of the indian. technology taking over for centuries of tradition.

this thought really puts into perspective the fragility of native identity, which independent of its own free will is inextricably linked to the power of cinema. as a result, any form of cliche, from the "noble" indian (silent, peaceful, mystical) to the "savage" indian (loud, warring, barbaric), de-humanizes and warps native/popular conceptions of what it means to be an actual indian. it takes from the original and imparts creations of convenience (non-existent headbands); alters truths of appearance (plains indians did not wear headdresses); and instills fallacies of fiction (that signature woo-ing warrior call, an invention of hollywood) into the replacement.

with such a media-based identity, technology has also helped in the reconstruction and empowerment of native culture. sacheen littlefeather's stand-in for marlon brando's best actor (the godfather) boycotted acceptance speech gave visibility to real adversities (wounded knee) in the native community. and a current for-us by-us mentality in native filmmaking has given a voice and gaze to native peoples that is utterly native. prize winning atanarjuat (fast runner) ends with a presumedly dead man running out of a tent completely naked across the arctic ice in a scene that volumizes the rebirth of the on-screen injun; stripped down and the future ahead of him.

              

comic relief

to quote woody allen from annie hall: "they're always giving out awards. best fascist dictator: adolf hitler. if an award like that really did exist, though, they’d probably end up giving it to mussolini."

up for eight oscars at this year's academy awards, a satirized hitler co-stars in inglourious basterds. no stranger to the academy, adolf has been represented before and won for pictures like black fox (best documentary) and downfall (best foreign). tarantino's basterds, however, depicts the notorious subject in a much more cartoonish manner akin to chaplin's the great dictator (nominated itself for 1940's best picture). consider how the first few scenes of the fuhrer illustrate a "type" as much as they do a politcal icon. cloaked in an illustrious cape, hitler is shown mid-tantrum pounding on his desk looking more like a foiled super-villain than an actual leader of germany. his ineptitude becomes a source of comedy and he is positioned in a very basic dichotomy of good and evil - the source of his rage being the titular g.i. joe task force of the basterds (the good guys).

showing a proclivity for comics (tarantino's kill bill has a scene that's fully animated as well as a scene in which bill waxes on the mythology of superman), tarantino fashions this tale of sadistic jewish revenge in an aesthetic of glamourized violence. within the realm of the comic (emphasis on the visual/surface), endings such as the over-the-top hitler assasination/german third reich blaze work because they are purposely theatrical. the fact that this revenge is exacted within a movie theatre, by a theatre owner, who insists on filming herself is quite revealing. on the other side of things, in addition to the super-heroic identities of "aldo the apache" and  "the bear jew," the basterds are joined in their parallel plot to destroy the nazis (project kino) by a german movie star, an english soldier who happens to be a film scholar/critique, and a renegade german soldier (hugo stiglitz) who is equipped with his very own "origin story" and marquee title. while it is impossible to undo the past, inglourious basterds uses these caricatures of film to revise the course of history. through its theatricality, the film becomes a parody of itself.

it is precisely this type of bastardization of history along with language that animates the "ratatat" world of inglourious basterds. just like a comic, the film uses the english language graphically; most of the film existing in subtitles and characters oscillating spoken languages without hesitation, complete with numerous misnomers. take the film's title as cue that there is nothing "proper" about the idealization of a history where hitler's face is machine-gunned to death.

shuttering depths

a man completely unto himself, edward daniels (dicaprio) unconciously re-plays his life as a us marshall hellbent on uncovering the sinister conspiracies (transorbital lobotomies, psychotropic drug use, etc.) practised on shutter island in a medically planned attempt to have edward recover from his own severe repressed psychological traumas. this act of role play successfully works, after two previous years of treatment, when the emotional shock of self-realization eventually kicks in. daniels learns that he is in fact the man (andrew laeddis) he was attempting to hunt down for the death of his wife.

in order to come to this ultimate truth daniels traverses the treacherous landscape of the island and penetrates the deep psychological labyrinth of his own mind. these two obstacles going hand-in-hand. the island itself is as isolated (geographically/socially) as edwards' own fantasy narrative. encircled by a perimeter of inescapable bluffs, the island's outer regions are almost impossible navigate. they become a border that works to prevent daniels from getting to the truth and likewise securing him in his dreamworld.

even in the opening scene, daniels is introduced aboard a ferry in front of a "stormy" green-screened background. a technique echoing the film noir staple of rear projection (casting a pre-filmed background before live actors) that today has the cinematic effect of blurring lines of verisimilitude and invoking a degree of artifice. on the boat, daniels tells his partner of their vague assignment and of his secluded personal history; equally unclear as the surface and texture of their setting. while shutter island certainly plays homage to the detective-thriller genre, its first scene also sets the stage for the jig-sawing of reality to come.

it is no wonder, then, that in this maze of a landscape scorsese should use a lighthouse (the place where daniels dellusionally believes houses the most unimaginable/horrific surgeries) at the base of the bluffs as the location for daniels' coming to; daniels reaches the logical conclusion of his fictitious"conspiracy" when he reaches the top of a structure designed for vision and clarity. like the rear-projected background of the ferry scene, the symbolism of such a structure seems strangely familiar. take for example, hitchcock's masterpiece vertigo which follows a similar thematic course to shutter. in place of a lighthose, a church bell-tower (a building of literal religious awakening) is used as the final location of scottie's (stewart) healing of his own individual trauma.

in addition to the symbolic reference of these buildings as psychiatric posts of consciousness, they have a common visual characteristic that works to encompass their character's respective journey. inside each building there is a staircase that winds upward to the top. although more prevalent in vertigo, this spiral motif represents a confusing/dizzying path. in shutter island, daniels traces this path into the truth of his own past. not limited to the staircase alone, the spiral can be recognized throughout the film: from the use of german records (which recollect some memory for edward); to the recorded tape of daniels' therapy sessions which dr. cawley (kingsley) reminds the viewer have been on a continuous loop for two years; to the circuitous route that daniels and partner take on the island, twisting and turning at seemless ends including daniels' own solitary venture into the nether-regions of ward c that coincidentally bring him closer to his real-life past; to the swirling of letters necessary to anagram the alter-ego's he creates; and even to the puzzling rotation of daniels and his partner's appearance on the island and the disappearnce of their counterparts. and holding all these elements together is the biggest natural cyclone of them all: the hurricane.

abraxas

for a film that so meticulously recreates the time of the summer of love (may 1967 appears as the date on the calendar of the first rabbi's office wall) it may strike a viewer as odd that a serious man time-jumps ahead 3 years when larry gopnik is summoned by the columbia record club. during this conversation larry is informed that he owes them for his monthly main selections. this month's record being santana's abraxas and next month's selection vowed to be ccr's cosmo's factory; both albums were recorded and released in 1970. 

etymologically the two records share reference to god and the heavens. the origins of "abraxas" come from a greek word generally describing gnostic cosmology. while it remains vague, carl jung offers the following from his gnostic text seven sermons to the dead: "that which is spoken by god-the-sun is life; that which is spoken by the devil is death; abraxas speaketh that hallowed and accursed word, which is life and death at the same time. abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness in the same word and in the same act. wherefore is abraxas terrible." 

according to jung abraxas is a force that combines all opposites into a single being; a god higher than that of god and the devil and at the same time encompassing each. theoretically this is not unlike the paradox of schrödinger's cat referenced by gopnik earlier in the film. gopnik uses a boxed cat that is at once dead and alive to illustrate the uncertainty principle. the conclusion being that we can't really know anything until the cat is out-of-the-bag or the answer reveals itself. abraxas, then, may come to stand for gopnik's inability to comprehend the unattainable, the unknown, and the unlistened to record.

on the otherhand, cosmo's factory is a little more straightforward. although the album itself refers to the rehearsal space in which the band recorded, the root "cosmos" refers to the sky, the heavens and the universe. in this sense abraxas and cosmos are used with artistic liscence to represent a call from the supernatural.

this thought is especially salient considering how gopnik's frustration with the "columbian" record club parallels his problems at large: larry didn't ask for or want santana abraxas and to recieve it he didn't do anything. much like all the present trials that have befallen larry, he automatically recieves abraxas without knowledge or reason for the cosmological order behind it. it just happens. there is no understandable explanation of god's will (or in this case the coens). and like the goy's teeth it is best to stop trying to decipher what these (anachronistic) puzzles mean and simply accept the mystery.

korean avatar adds fourth dimension

a gimmick is a gimmick is a..... avatar. while most of the world marvelled at cameron's digital wonderland avatar, korean moviehouse mogul CJ-CGV equipped the film with a fourth dimension. half film/half amusement ride, specialized 4D theatres in seoul engage the audience with real-life sensations (lazers, mist, explosions, etc.) making the special-effects that much more "special."

avatar, however, is not the first film in korea to recieve this deluxe treatment. apparently, journey to the centre of the earth was fully enhanced last year and the popularity/profitablilty of the experience (along with promises of sequels to the avatar franchise) may soon bring these multi-dimensional movieplexes to north america, which apart from 10-15 minute rides has sofar failed to bank on feature films.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118014803.html?categoryid=19&cs=1

guardian angel

tom ford's debut a single man introduces supporting actor nicholas hoult as a mysterious crush-laden university student named kenny. unlike a normative clear cut love interest, his role as pursuer involves a seemingly selfless desire for his professor. fully aware of falconer's (firth) visible depression and in tune with his suicidal loneliness, kenny goes beyond the role of lover - to which he will eventually take- and becomes his spiritual rescuer.

in his attempts at breaking the ice with falconer, kenny not only goes out of his stalkerish way to court his prof (outside falconer's car door) but has air of omnipresence for showing up at the right time and place (a bar around the corner from falconer's home, where presumably he's having his last drink). however, this transcendent characteristic is not limited to spatiality alone.

while ford's lens visually objectifies every pore and follicle of hoult's fountain-of-youth face, kenny's sexual interest in falconer is blurred by observations of a girl-friend and an unclear boundary of appropriate student/teacher behaviour. thereby making kenny, on the surface, solely interested in a deeper beauty; one beyond the skin; one of conversation and partnership; and one that george falconer has been without since the tragic loss of his long-term boyfriend, jim, several years prior. this absence of partnership (and cause of george's closeted/single lifestyle) is crystallized in the "ceremonious" swimming scene right after kenny and falconer have left the bar. kenny has focused his carefree, carpe diem philosophies in a way that falconer has no trouble seeing and ultimately receiving: the once always suited, ever-guarded man of intellect throws caution to the wind (along with his trousers) and has become a bare, emotion-lead man of the moment.

transformed and now headed in a direction of happiness, falconer owes a debt or two of gratitude to his newest lover. not to be mistaken as a simple replacement for his lost love - falconer makes especially clear to one time female lover, charlie (moore), that there is no replacing jim with anybody - kenny is better recognized as a protector and conduit of self-realization, imparting his openness as a guide for falconer to follow. a white light at the end of a dark miserable tunnel.