officially not helping the situation since 1985

I think it’s rather nefarious to wish death upon anyone, much less rejoice after the fact. Between work and Facebook, I (and you also, no doubt) have been witness to some very audible gasps, silent moments of shock, and the occasional sarcastic and emotionless ‘Thank God!’ over today’s (and the rest of the month’s) news: Michael Jackson, “King of Pop”, died. By the time you read this it won’t be new news to you and you’ll already have your own opinion figured and calculated about the whole thing. You’ll have either spent hours in front of the television, or hours avoiding the television. You may even make a valiant (but futile) attempt to disassociate yourself intellectually and emotionally from the charade altogether because “there are more important things” or “he was a very, very bad man… I want nothing to do with him.” But you won’t be able to.

Michael Jackson was an integral part in the lives of many people, and it is people we congregate with mind you, not vapid uninfluencable human pods that find it easy to erase the joys of their past because the present finds itself so lacking. The positive influence that his music had on the millions and millions has undoubtedly influenced you positively in one way or another, whether you have the option of knowing it or not.

Presently, the ostensible truth of Michael Jackson’s “very, very bad man” actions make listening to his music a less gleeful fare than they may otherwise have been had no transgressions taken place. Which is fair. This is how we have been made. Our minds, souls, and bodies have been temporarily fused together into a single unit of existence, a unit of existence made to be and to create, and that is how we are (and should be) perceived. So it is no mistake that when people listen to his music they struggle to get over what became of the human unit that was Michael Jackson: a child molester concerned more with his own gratification than the lifelong well being of another human… of their mind, of their body, and their soul. It is no mistake to be relieved that it won’t happen with him again.

But what is a mistake is the proposition that he doesn’t deserve any compassion whatsoever… that he’s ‘one of those people’ that aren’t worthy of being saved from themselves… aren’t worth the time, energy, or thought, and would be better off dead. It is a mistake to egregiously weigh the transgressions of a person on a scale we’ve wrenched into being heavily in our own favor… It is a mistake to be flippantly (or worse, emphatically) happy in their death. It is a mistake to take gratification in condemnation.

‘Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves—to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.’ — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

So it is with that that I hope the awful pleasure or joy any of you might take in the death of a person is diminished and replaced with the simple, loving recognition of their humanity. For every human is just that: human: mind, body, and soul. And even the murkiest of the lot deserve the clearest of compassion, a compassion so strong that the death of one among billions actually means something, something infinitely more holy than our little resentful, sarcastic ‘Thank God!’ quips could ever fathom to compare.

The YouTube Symphony Orchestra.

Fantastic student short film!

An Imaginary Friend

Trouble the Water
Man on Wire
Waltz With Bashir

Three documentaries, three completely different formats, all released in 2008…

I highly recommend all of these films. Each one has it’s own documentary format: Trouble the Water is pretty straight forward, Man on Wire is a reenactment, and Waltz with Bashir is animated. The more I think about it, the more I want to say that Waltz with Bashir is the best animated movie from last year, even when including the magnificent Wall-E. Waltz with Bashir is my personal favorite of these three documentaries.

I can’t see very many people being disappointed by any of them…

Trouble the Water :: A

Man on Wire :: B+

Waltz with Bashir :: A

Keanu Reeves is going to take the title role (or roles, if I must) in a new adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I’m not sure how this makes any sense what.so.ever. The very actor in Hollywood known for his inability to differentiate his character’s persona from one movie to another is somehow being asked to create two different personas in one character, in one movie? I just don’t get it. He really is the last person I would ever have considered for such a role, which is why I’m bringing it up. I’m befuddled. My brain has an itch, and the only scratcher available is writing about it.

P.S. To set the record straight, I’m not a Keanu-hater. I like him in The Matrix and Thumbsucker, and I also really like one of his least-liked movies, The Lake House. His stilted way of performing is not always a hindrance, but I see it hindering much in Jekyll and Hyde…

P.P.S. This project is not the same as the Jekyll and Hyde project slated for Guillermo del Toro in the next decade or so… del Toro knows better. And I think we all know which adaption has the advantage…

P.P.P.S. ‘P.S.’ stands for ‘post-script’, in case you’ve wondered all your life like I had until this morning, May 9, 2009. Behind I might be, but fervently learning more nevertheless!

‘The Confession’

Interesting article at Screen Savour on Hitchcock’s Psycho.  An article longer than your arm about ‘neuroenhancing’ drugs at The New Yorker.  Brett McCracken’s ‘The Rise of the Ironic Class‘.   Repentance, not perfection, is the constant state of the Christian life.  Sigur Ros actually is the expression of the right hemisphere of God’s brain.

:: symconlyd [sim - kuhn - lahyd]  abbr. ’stuff-you-must-check-out-now-lest-you-die’ ::

I never regularly watched Sex and the City when it was on television. I saw three episodes, none of which I was very enthusiastic about, so I didn’t think much about seeing the movie. Film critic Mark Kermode of the UK gave it a heavily-inked stamp of ’stupid’, and we’re usually on the same page, so I was then even more inclined not to take the time to watch it. It’s also two hours and twenty-five minutes long, which is longer than most action-packed blockbusters. But… my curiosity got the better of me, and since recording stuff on DVR isn’t that much of a hassle (nor is fast-forwarding), I ended up watching it last night. And I’m very glad I did.

It’s not all of what one might think it would be. Yes, there is sex, and the awfully romantic enveloping city of New York, and lots and lots of designer clothes… but there is more than that. There are relationships, believe it or not, relationships clearly worn in over the years, fractured and mended, fractured and mended, all the while canopied by what the film adopts as it’s theme: love, ‘a label that never goes out of fashion’. Which is almost corny beyond imagination, but in the context of the film and in the universal context of life… it’s true. Love never goes out of fashion, and anyone who attests that love is an unworthy adventure or a fickle bitch, has lost perspective. Love is worth it. ‘Even worth…’ you ask. Yes, even worth that.

*spoilers*

In the film, Miranda, one of the four ladies, is cheated on by her husband Steve. He confesses what he has done to her directly and she leaves him immediately, refusing to forgive him. Shortly thereafter Carrie, the main lady of the four, is stood up by her fiance on her long awaited, heavily anticipated, outlandishly planned wedding day. Six months later Miranda confesses to Carrie that on the night before her wedding, Miranda had spouted (in a bout of frustration over her own failed marriage) to Carrie’s already cold-footed fiance that they would be ‘crazy to get married’ cause ‘marriage ruins everything’.

This, obviously, angers Carrie. Her friend indirectly encouraged her fiance not to show up on the wedding day. After a few days Miranda tracks Carrie down and implores her to forgive her, at which point Carrie asks Miranda how she expects others to forgive her after three days when she (Miranda) can’t even forgive her begging and clearly remorseful husband six months after he admitted cheating on her.

‘But it’s not the same thing,’ Miranda says.

‘It’s forgiveness,’ replies Carrie.

Which, maybe only for personal reasons if nothing else, is one of the more interesting insights I’ve encountered in a while. It’s nothing new, but the suggestion is still profound. Forgiveness, however grave the crime, or however small and ‘inconsequential’ the betrayal, is forgiveness through and through. It’s measure is unmeasurable.

‘Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.’ - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

From a psychological point of view, forgiving someone for one thing may be more difficult than forgiving them for something else, but when it comes down to it… if you forgive for a stolen dollar or forgive for marital unfaithfulness, the forgiveness is neither more nor less potent in either circumstance. It’s forgiveness.

Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?’
Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.’ — Matthew 18:21-22

It’s not about the sin. And it’s not about how many times you forgive it. It’s about the spiritually sound heart needed to forgive. Forgiveness has nothing to do with whether or not what the other person did to you was kind of a bad thing, a really bad thing, or a vicious and vile thing, but everything to do with the realization that one’s self, just like everyone else’s self, is on its way to hell in a hand basket with nothing but forgiveness to jump up, out and onto.

C.S. Lewis:

I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself. God intends us to love all selves in the same way and for the same reason: but He has given us the sum already worked out in our case to show us how it works. We have then to go on and apply the rule to all the other selves. Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves. For really there is nothing else in use to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco… - Mere Christianity

This obviously doesn’t mean we forgive an ax-murderer for ax-murdering a child by giving him an ax and letting him spend a weekend with another child. Silliness. That’s not forgiveness, but foolishness. You can forgive and still retain standard circumstantial consequences. A murderer can be forgiven, but cannot, as we have been created, be easily trusted thereafter. Trust takes time. Forgiveness is not a stupid thing to do, but a smart one; it is the acknowledgment that the other person has fallen down and we really, really want them to get back up and follow a better path. Forgiveness, when given, is an instant reckoning, and the reckoning gives breath and life to a person finding it hard to breath… just like you, me… everyone. It’s a reckoning we should put at the top of our lists, before hate and before repulsion, and before we make the mistake of thinking any person a ‘mere mortal’.  I’m not saying it’s easy and I’m not saying I’m good at it, I’m just laying it out as it should be…

In the end, Miranda went back to her husband. Did she have to? No. But did she at least have to forgive? Yes. Especially if she expected it from others.

We all have people we need to forgive. I can think of a few people I need to forgive right now. Though chances are we have more people we need to ask forgiveness of than those who need it from us.

Sex and the City is a fundamentally sound movie. Its simple embrace of ‘never unfashionable’ love, and the suggestion that forgiveness is just that… it’s forgiveness (’no matter how small’, as Dr. Suess might say), had me won over by the end.

:: B

Soy-based-inked-toilet paper.

I can’t say that I would, can’t say that I wouldn’t.

I guess the real question is ‘what does this say about Michel Gondry?’

So, what *does* this say about Michel Gondry? Either he’s the most self-effacing artist alive (hard to come by) or he’s the most stuck-up artist alive and thinks that his ideas should permeate every fabric of our livelihood, including being an integral part in the foul act of cleaning up one’s butt-hole after defecation.

I guess we shall never know, but I lean toward self-effacing. I’m biased though.

Best line: ‘Talk. To. Her!’

YES.

It seems as though things will be slow(er) around here for a while. I had the great misfortune of needing to sell my computer on the fly a few weeks ago and have since been damned to use the computers in the library. It’s perturbing.

Facebook: a most necessary evil.

Daft and dull.

:: C-

There’s something strangely and thoroughly gratifying about watching people fight in a film. I’m not talking about bloody punches and karate kicks. Oh no. I’m referring to vein-throbbing verbal wars, where venomous language and spit-wads of wit and defiance mix to create a jarring poison for the soul.

Don’t worry, I can’t be bothered! You’re not worth the trouble it would take to hit you! You’re not worth the powder it would take to blow you up. You are an empty, empty, hollow shell of a woman. - Frank Wheeler, to his wife

Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes’ much more serious and better explication of the false serenity of suburbia than his American Beauty, is one huge wallop of a fight.  The story is of Frank and April Wheeler, who move into a wonderfully quaint home in a beautiful neighborhood only to find themselves yearning for something else, something more adventurous and less stable, something like, say, a move to Paris.  It seems unlikely (if you’ve seen the trailer) that I’m spoiling anything by telling you that they don’t ever move to Paris.  They don’t ever get their adventure.  They remain in suburbia with the rest of the ‘boring folk’ and can’t live with each other for it.  So they fight.  They kill themselves from the inside out, twisting the life out of each other like one might wring water out of a towel.

Hopeless emptiness. Now you’ve said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness. - John Givings, to the Wheelers

They are endlessly dissatisfied, perpetually trying to fill a ghostly void.  At first, Frank and April Wheeler want each other, which they get.  Then they want a house, which they also get, along with friendly (very friendly) neighbors, and children, and the blissfulness of security and routine.  But then mundanity arrives, and boredom, the great troublemaker for the immature, swoops in and unravels everything faster than they can say “I hate my life.”  Through the affairs and lies and mockery, their lives and each other become a bitch for both of them, and their tangled webs begin to choke them tighter and tighter until they explode into virtueless rampage…

Their virtueless rampage towards the end of the film makes Julia Roberts and Clive Owen’s ‘argument scene’ in Mike Nichol’s Closer look petty.   Of the two films, Closer is the better, but Kate Winslet and Leonardo Dicaprio’s big ‘argument scene’ in Revolutionary Road is a much more deeply felt, much further down the hole of loathsomeness, much meaner, permanent, and scarring.  It’s in this argument that their relationship finally unhinges, climaxing violently and then whispering woefully in a vacuum of silence and regret.  There’s a scene that follows, a denouement of sorts (at the end of which the movie should have ended, but didn’t), in which one of the characters gives in and decides to follow the other, supposedly.  It’s surprisingly heartbreaking and abruptly mournful, and serves as the cornerstone from which the film’s ‘false serenity’ theme reveals itself to have been built from and towards.  The culmination of the previous hour and a half of simmering disgruntlement (except for a lovely dance scene that tastes of a Paris unreachable), and it’s sudden clash with pristine formality, makes even the most peaceful of us peacemakers and the most moral of us moralists wish that the characters would return back to their gluttonous, selfish, and indignant ways instead of relinquishing into the hollowness of falsehood.

Where before their ‘transformation’ their beliefs and feelings were a bit more clear (as they let them flow loudly and freely in the name of ‘truth’), their new stance is unnervingly un-peggable.  We are forced to question their genuineness: is he/she sacrificing him/herself willingly, or are they simply unable to resist the strain any longer?  It might not be what they want, but how have they chosen it?  Was their change in attitude in the name of love, or, as C.S. Lewis refers it, an exercise in mercenary ‘Unselfishness’.  In the face of change, does this even matter?  Clearly it does, but unfortunately Mendes drags the film on to explain to us why it does, which turns the near masterpiece of propositions and advisements into a long-winded, guilt-inducing sermon.  It’s a minor complaint, but because its the end of the film it sends the audience out on a more closed, definite note than it otherwise would have, where ambiguity would have served the film’s thematic purposes better.

The film also would have been better without a music score, and especially a Thomas Newman score, a composer whose style (unique though it may be) is becoming increasingly way too familiar for its own good.  But like I said, these are all minor complaints.  The film is quite good; it’s fantastically grim and appalling, like a trainwreck that horrifies but fascinates all the same.

Kate Winslet delivers her best performance since her effusive role in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Leonardo Dicaprio is his usual (not to be confused with ‘boring’ or ‘underwhelming’) engaging self.  Michael Shannon gives an unsettling performance as John Givings, a character who follows lightly in the shadow of last year’s vigorous instigator from No Country For Old Men, Anton Chigurh, poking and prodding characters into facing the ultimate horror, the horror that one has wasted their life and will continue to do so if they refuse to risk the status quo.

Revolutionary Road knows what it is, knows what it is doing, and does it as you might expect that it should, but its familiar theme and its unsurprising format doesn’t hinder the film’s healthy helping of food for thought…

How much of your life should be led as others expect that you should lead it?  How much of your life should be led strictly by your own desires?  Where is the balance, if any, and what do you do when you realize that everything in your life is horribly, grimly out of whack and unremittingly unsatisfying?  Do you fight it?  Is it worth a virtueless rampage?  Should you, for the sake of serenity and social and mental stability, turn a blind eye and pretend that everything is perfectly and pristinely just fine, dandy, and darling?

Tell me the truth, Frank, remember that? We used to live by it. And you know what’s so good about the truth? Everyone knows what it is however long they’ve lived without it. No one forgets the truth, Frank, they just get better at lying. - April Wheeler, to her husband

:: B+