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RIP Tim Hetherington

2011-04-25T12:40:00.003-04:00

A slightly belated RIP to photojournalist Tim Hetherington, co-director (with Sebastian Junger) of the critically acclaimed documentary Restrepo. Hetherington, along with colleague Chris Hondros, was killed in Libya this past week while covering the ongoing conflict.

The National Geographic channel will be airing Restrepo and a tribute to Hetherington tonight at 9PM (Eastern and Pacific).

Limitless + Sucker Punch

2011-04-08T10:33:00.018-04:00

Limitless

The premise: main character takes drug which allows him to access all of his brain power at once, as opposed to the mere 20% that the rest of us mere mortals can manage. Main character realizes this is pretty spiff. Unfortunately, the Bad Guys™ realize the same thing. Cue some chase scenes and narrow escapes. Main character realizes that Drugs Are Bad, but not, of course, until he has conveniently reaped all the benefits of taking said drug.

Pretty much mindless and meaningless, with more than a few plot holes. There's a pretty cool trucking shot of a NYC street during the opening credits. That's about the only thing going for it.

Sucker Punch

The premise: Main character's evil stepfather arranges for her to be institutionalized and then lobotomized so that he will inherit her fortune. Main character retreats into highly stylized fantasy worlds to cope with the dreariness of reality.

This one is probably the definition of style-over-substance. The plot, which involves various virtual realities taking place in the main character's head, is actually fairly straightforward and certainly nothing new, at least structurally. But the visuals are gorgeous; the juxtaposition of medieval castle + dragon + B-25 bomber + automatic weapons is certainly striking. And Sucker Punch doesn't have the lazy moral inconsistency that plagues Limitless... though, admittedly, its supposed message of "female empowerment" is probably undermined just a little by having the girls wear preposterous midriff-baring plate-armor-and-fishnet ensembles while they wreak havoc.

the movie that accidentally defined a generation?

2011-02-05T14:22:00.008-05:00

And besides, on Social Network, I didn’t really agree with the critics’ praise. It interested me that Social Network was about friendships that dissolved through this thing that promised friendships, but I didn’t think we were ripping the lid off anything. The movie is true to a time and a kind of person, but I was never trying to turn a mirror on a generation.—David Fincher, interview in W Magazine

I found the above-quoted interview with David Fincher, director of The Social Network, pretty interesting. Currently The Social Network is a front-runner for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but the article goes on to quote Fincher as saying that he doesn't even really consider it a "film": "It's a little glib to be a film." He considers it simply a "movie".

But what Fincher originally set out to do with The Social Network—show "friendships that dissolved through this thing that promised friendships"—is perhaps the very thing that unwittingly made it the mirror of a generation, a reflection of the digital age, when relationships are not legit in the eyes of society until they're "Facebook official" but, at the same time, Facebook friendships are comfortably impersonal. The term "Facebook friends" automatically connotes a relationship that doesn't require our responsibility, time, or thought—connotes a friendship that we haven't really put effort into pursuing in "real life".

It's the reason I think The Social Network deserves Best Picture. The King's Speech was heartwarming and impeccably crafted, but it doesn't have the same immediacy to it; it doesn't give us pause, make us examine ourselves and the nature of our so-called "friendships". It doesn't have the same keen (however unwitting) insight into society in the Facebook age.

like whoa

2011-01-26T14:28:00.005-05:00

...It's the new year. That was a long break.

I'll admit it up front: I have not written a film review since I last posted here, which was exactly three months ago. In those three months I've written over 60,000 words of fiction, submitted a story for publication, and returned to school full time. What I have not done, unfortunately, is watch movies.

But it's a new year, and I'm determined to dust this place off and get some reviews written. Oscar season has gotten me excited. I probably won't be able to review a new release each weekend, since I'm not at the theater as often as I was over the summer and fall (only working two days a week now), but I'll try to get some interesting stuff out here. I'm in the midst of re-watching the complete series of Firefly, for example, and a review is definitely on my agenda.

hiatus

2010-10-26T13:58:00.003-04:00

I'm going to be taking a break from this blog for a while in order to participate in NaNoWriMo this coming month. If all goes according to plan, I'll return with a slew of new reviews (including, but not limited to, The Social Network, Easy A, RED, and hopefully a number of November releases). Until then, stay classy!

wall street: money never sleeps

2010-10-04T20:24:00.012-04:00

For the first hour and a half of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, I thought I had found my favorite movie of the year. Timely, intelligent, well-acted, stylish; best of all, it had heart. Regardless of your stance on fiscal policy—left or right, Keynesian or classical—this film had a message that could resonate.

That was for the first hour and half.

It all fell apart after that. Like so many other films this year, Wall Street 2 is ultimately undone by a poor, tacked-on ending. A strong pro-family message still filters through, and the film is still worth seeing for its relevance, but its moral compass goes completely haywire by the end, destroyed by a plot twist that occurs in the last ten minutes.

Director Oliver Stone spends the entire film telling us that money can't buy happiness—relationships matter more than fickle, faithless material wealth. Wall Street is ruthless; greed can destroy lives. Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan) knows this all too well; her father Gordon Gekko went to prison for years for insider trading (the primary plot of the original film, which I have not seen) and she has been dealing with the havoc that wreaked on her family ever since. Her boyfriend Jake (Shia LaBeouf) is an up-and-coming proprietary trader who becomes deeply embroiled in the dog-eat-dog world of Wall Street. It takes a drastic toll on their fragile relationship, especially when Winnie finds out that Jake has been seeking advice from his entirely untrustworthy future father-in-law.

Winnie believes that Gordon isn't the ultimately-goodhearted, remorseful father figure that he seems to be. (Spoilers) As it turns out, she's right. Gordon cheats Jake and Winnie out of a huge sum of money and skips off to England to start a new business venture, leaving Jake and Winnie's relationship in shambles.

Stone then would have us believe that Gordon has a complete change of heart when he looks at ultrasound images of his unborn grandson; he returns home to his daughter and even pays back the money he stole from her. A happy ending, right?

The problem is that Gordon's change of heart doesn't mean anything. It would have meant something, maybe, if he hadn't taken the money in the first place, if he had seen the error of his ways and been content to live with his daughter and his new son-in-law and their child in a (relatively) modest fashion. (By "relatively modest" I mean that Winnie had $100 million in a Swiss bank account—pocket change compared to the kind of money the characters in this film deal with on a day-to-day basis, but still). Instead, Gordon only comes back once he's amassed another fortune. He buys his way back into his daughter's life with a pittance of the money he's made on her account, and it is this action that brings them together as a real family.

Money can't buy happiness, this film says—unless you're Gordon Gekko, and then you can solve all your relationship woes by writing a check.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a major disappointment, mostly because all of its great potential is wasted by a completely unnecessary plot twist that occurs ten minutes before the credits roll. It's recommendable for its timeliness, its fine performances and its lack of any major objectionable material, but any meaningful message it could have conveyed is ruined by that idiotic ending.

the town

2010-09-17T14:19:00.012-04:00

Major spoilers follow.

As a heist movie, The Town is certainly one of the better ones, because it is actually the characters who keep our interest, not just the plot. We are constantly questioning the characters onscreen, wondering what their next move will be, where their loyalties will take them. We sympathize with all of them in turn—with Doug MacRay, the brilliant mind behind a series of Boston bank robberies who begins to yearn for something deeper and more meaningful than his life of crime; with his off-and-on girlfriend Krista, who is a horrible role-model and mother but who does seem to want something better for her young daughter's future; with the unswervingly persistent FBI agent on Doug's trail; even with James, Doug's loose-cannon friend and fellow robber. When Doug unexpectedly finds himself falling for Claire Keesey, the bank manager his gang took as a hostage on their last job, we want their relationship to succeed, to be the path to Doug's redemption. Because director/writer/lead actor Ben Affleck has successfully made Doug into a sympathetic anti-hero in our minds, we are rooting for him to escape and find peace. In the end, though, we feel robbed ourselves—the characters and the viewers both deserve a better ending than what we're given.

Until the end, The Town works as a dark morality tale. It shows us how utterly devastating life in Charlestown (the "bank robbery capital of America") can be, and just how difficult it is to escape that life. When Doug tells his imprisoned father that he is thinking of putting the town behind him, the only explanation his father can think of is that Doug must be "taking heat." "Either you got heat or you don't," he says. There is no other alternative in his mind, no other reason why Doug would want to leave; nothing else computes. This is the mentality of all Doug's acquaintances—life in the town is all there is. How can Doug escape that life when no one else around him acknowledges that anything else even exists, much less offers something better? But Doug genuinely wants to make a change, and we root for him against those impossible odds. Even though he is a criminal with a violent past, even though some of his actions onscreen are despicable, we want him to rise above that. We want to see him redeemed; we want a happy ending.

It makes it so much more disappointing, then, when he is not redeemed. We are supposed to feel happy that he escapes, I guess; happy that Claire does not betray him to the FBI, and even more happy that he does not keep the money for himself, but gives it to Claire so that she can put it to "good" use. But none of this equals redemption. Doug's closing voiceover tells us he believes that everyone must pay for what they've done—but he obviously isn't paying; he's lying low in Florida, suffering no real consequences whatsoever. This "happy" ending falls flat, because it is meaningless and shallow. Doug has not grown as a character, and instead of being the key to his redemption, Claire has fallen to his level.

Technically, The Town is one of the best movies of the year, and I won't be surprised if it gets some Oscar nods. The cast is top-notch; Jeremy Renner, in particular, deserves another acting nomination. Thematically, The Town is a major disappointment. It gives us characters that we really long to see redeemed, and then—instead of redemption—gives us a faux happy ending that probably was intended to make us feel good inside, but just ends up negating anything we learned from the rest of the movie.

conflict of opinions

2010-09-16T09:24:00.004-04:00

Sometimes I regret the inevitable digital creep that is taking over traditional film projection— rumor is that by Christmastime our own 10-screen cinema will have converted entirely from 35mm to digital projectors, and there will be no need for an actual projectionist anymore. I am thankful that I got the chance to learn the art before it becomes obsolete, but it makes me sad to think it is the end of an era.

Sometimes, like today, when there are four new films to be built and five to be broken down, I think that Christmastime can't come fast enough.

the american

2010-09-01T11:54:00.009-04:00

Its loud, generic trailers misrepresented the quiet movie that Anton Corbijn's The American is. If Hemingway had directed a film, this would be it. It's not a Bourne- or Bond-esque action thriller; it has a lot more in common with Italian neorealist films than it has with those. The film begins abruptly and ends the same way, seemingly right in the middle of the story it is telling. There is no backstory given—throughout the film we have no idea why Clooney's character is in Sweden, then Italy, or who he is working for, or why "the Swedes" are after him. Elaborate "whos" and "whys" do not really matter for what The American is, or at least tries to be—muted character study rather than plot-driven actioner. It's probably the most artistic film to be given a wide release this year, but, that being said, it ultimately does not satisfactorily accomplish its goal. It does not delve quite deep enough to be entirely character-driven, and its sparse plot cannot carry the difference.

We are given the skeleton of a storyline—Clooney's character, Jack, is an assassin, and an expert at handling weapons. After the mysterious "Swedes" disrupt his quiet life with a lover in Dalarna, he goes back out into the field again, to complete another job for his nameless employer. This job takes him to the Abruzzo in Italy, where his encounters with a kindly priest and a beautiful prostitute motivate him to forsake his past and find peace—once he completes this final mission.

Jack's relationships with the priest and the woman, Clara, are the real keys to the film. His relationship with Clara, particularly, is nicely developed—a relationship that begins only with lust and selfishness eventually becomes something more meaningful and committed. His relationship with the priest suffers a little more.

The American does a good enough job of establishing that all men are sinners. It fails to show, however, that there is a savior. I kept waiting for Corbijn to build Jack's relationship with Father Benedetto to the point that that truth could be brought out—The American would be the best film of the year if he had. But instead Jack seems to accept that God is not interested in him, and Corbijn is content to leave it at that. Spoilers. At the climax of the film, Jack kills an assassin who has been targeting him. Leaving the blood-spattered body in the street, he turns towards Father Benedetto, who has come running up, and simply says, "Sorry, Father." He then drives away, and the film ends not long after—he never sees the priest again. It was a wasted opportunity, and ultimately it destroyed the film for me.

Director Corbijn has a background in photography, and the mood and visuals of The American are striking and beautiful. It is undeniably a well-crafted film that I do think pays tribute to Italian neorealism. Unfortunately, it has another thing in common with Italian film—excessive and unnecessary nudity. It is not the leering, ogling nudity of the atrocious Piranha 3D, but it still could have been easily toned down. Neither the violence nor the language are nearly as gratuitous.

restrepo

2010-08-13T13:07:00.006-04:00

Soldiers are living and fighting and dying at remote outposts in Afghanistan in conditions that few Americans back home can imagine. Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one’s political beliefs. Beliefs can be a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality. — directors Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, Restrepo press notes

Restrepo is a harrowing account of the war in Afghanistan, particularly for an audience that has been raised to view war-time violence as entertainment. We get the sense that the soldiers themselves have taken that mentality with them. They play first-person shooters before going out on patrol; they talk about graphic video-games as a boy's rite of passage. At the beginning, it seems like they view the war that way. Restrepo shows that that mentality is useless.

The wearying effect that their deployment has had on the troops who were at O.P. Restrepo is obvious. After the fact, they are unable to put into words the experiences of their 15-month tour. Coping with it has been difficult. It hasn't been like this since WWII or Vietnam, one soldier says; the Army doesn't know how to treat us. At the end, they are just ready to go home. There is the sense that the whole thing has been an exercise in futility. The victory has not been won; end title cards tell us that the U.S. pulled out of the Korangal in April 2010.

Restrepo is not an anti-war film. It is not blatantly condemning the U.S. military-industrial complex the way Why We Fight did. It is not disrespectful to the armed forces; rather, in some ways it heightens our respect for them, because they are willing to undergo these conditions. It gives us an unblinking look into the lives of ordinary soldiers, at what they are facing day-to-day. These are real-life challenges; these are the real-life effects the war is having on our soldiers. According to the synopsis given in the press notes,

This is an entirely experiential film: the cameras never leave the valley; there are no interviews with generals or diplomats. The only goal is to make viewers feel as if they have just been through a 94-minute deployment. This is war, full stop. The conclusions are up to you.

Restrepo has been called an apolitical film by its directors. The viewer should draw his own conclusions, they say. But Restrepo does make a powerful statement, intended or not: we don't understand what type of war we're fighting. We understand that the enemy, the "bad guys," are fighting for religious ideals, but we don't know how to counter that. The film drives that home powerfully as it shows the U.S. forces offering the people of the Korangal money, jobs, roads -- "progress," in the material sense. But our idea of "progress" is foreign to these people. They are fighting a religious war. Those who are not fighting have deep ties to those who are. Westernized "progress" is meaningless to them. That doesn't mean they won't take money or handouts, but money and handouts do not change the beliefs and ideals that are ingrained into them.

The reality of the war in the Middle East is unavoidably complex, even if you try to leave politics out of it. Restrepo shows that remarkably well; in fact, it does the best job of just about any modern war film in showing that. The Hurt Locker was excellent, but Restrepo is exceptional. It's not fiction. It feels raw and visceral. It feels like you are there. Consequently, the statement it makes is much more powerful.

Restrepo is rated R for language throughout, and descriptions of violence. It is never tastelessly graphic, but it is still intense — as it should be.

gunga din

2010-08-10T10:38:00.005-04:00

George Stevens' 1939 action-adventure dramedy Gunga Din, imaginatively adapted from Rudyard Kipling's poem, was ahead of its time. It's technically stunning; the on-location filming adds great dimension (granted, it was filmed in California, not India, but such a good job is done with the sets that it works quite convincingly), and the battle scenes are more realistic and all-around better than anything that appeared in Hollywood movies for a long time afterward. The camera work is creative and adds to the slow building-up of suspense as the story progresses.

More significantly, though, the message of the film remains relevant today and is even more surprising considering this film came out when India was still under the Raj. The film goes much deeper than its action-oriented plot might suggest. Its depiction of British colonialism is fairly complex. On one hand, the British are the heroes, bringing law and order to a fragmented India. But on the other, the British system is ineffective without the efforts of the Indian people themselves, and familiarity with native Indian culture is shown as vital to its success.

Gunga Din is a timeless portrayal of late-19th-century Raj India. Its cast, including Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Victor McLaglen, have perfect chemistry and comedic timing, and its technical aspects are excellent. Beyond that, it handles the complexity of British India with remarkable clarity and foresight.

Adapted from a review I originally wrote on LivingSocial.

disappointments and surprises of summer 2010

2010-08-05T18:30:00.008-04:00

This summer has been a rather mediocre summer for movies, especially after such a good spring (How to Train Your Dragon, Shutter Island), and after last summer set a high standard with Inglourious Basterds, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and District 9. The latter wasn't quite to my taste, and 2009 had its own share of sub-parness (G.I. Joe, for instance), but even so, this summer has, in comparison, been something of a letdown.

What follows is sheer personal opinion, my own summing-up of what I felt were the most disappointing movies of the summer, along with the ones I thought were the most surprisingly good. I don't mean the "best" and "worst" movies, because while I may have been more disappointed with, say, Prince of Persia than I was with The Last Airbender, Prince of Persia was still the better movie. Nor am I counting Inception as "surprisingly good." The fact that it was good didn't really come as a surprise to me.

The Disappointments

Toy Story 3. It was essentially a rehashing of Toy Story 2. The villains were virtually identical: good toys who have gone wrong, succumbing to their own selfish senses of entitlement. 3 spent so much time making nods and clever references to its predecessors that it didn't break any new ground. It had its memorable moments, and it capitalized well on viewer nostalgia, but overall it was disappointing. As of right now, I'm standing behind How to Train Your Dragon for Best Animated Feature.

Iron Man 2. The original film was a pleasant surprise, but Iron Man 2 was disjointed and unexciting. Robert Downey, Jr., was excellent, as always, but the rest of the cast forgot to show up. Scarlett Johansson's character was as forgettable as the plot.

Robin Hood. For me, it was the most disappointing film of the summer. I had my expectations too high, probably, but it had none of the emotional gravitas of Gladiator, and it just came off as an oddly bitter film. While well-acted, none of the characters were remotely likable. Several of the plot developments bordered on ludicrous. I'm not attacking the historical accuracy (see my previous post on that topic), but the developments didn't make cohesive, narrative sense in the world the film itself creates. A director's cut that fleshes out some of the characters and smooths the pacing a little would be an improvement, but as a theatrical release, Robin Hood missed the mark.

The Surprises

The A-Team. From the trailers I expected a mediocre action movie, and I had already endured The Losers, and with The Expendables coming out this month it really does seem like Hollywood has run out of originality. Don't get me wrong; The A-Team is, at its core, a generic action movie, and its third act is a mess. But the beginning and middle are just plain fun, with sharp editing, snappy dialogue, and some outrageous ad-libbing from the excellent cast. Things only fall apart when the paper-thin plot starts trying to carry the film.

Predators. Again, the third act is the weakest part of the film, but Predators surprised me by tackling some issues that are surprisingly weighty for a dumb summer movie — what is the difference between "living" and "surviving"? Is the latter worth it without the former? The title itself is cleverly ambiguous: who are the real "predators" of the movie? The film was nicely paced, and did a good job of creating suspense for things that the trailers had essentially given away. It also accomplished the unthinkable feat of making Adrien Brody a convincing action star.

However disappointing the summer has been, the fall looks to make up for it: The Town could very well be excellent, as could Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Tron: Legacy and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows both look epic.

the raven

2010-08-04T23:06:00.004-04:00

I stumbled across this a couple months ago. It's an intriguing short film made on a budget of $5000. Some language and violence involved.

shutter island

2010-07-30T13:58:00.004-04:00

I didn't get the chance to see Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island in theaters, which is unfortunate, because now that I've seen Inception I have to fight the urge to judge everything else by the high standards it sets. And it's unfair to Shutter Island to do that, because Shutter Island deserves to be judged on its own terms. The two are strikingly similar, but I'll try to refrain from comparing them; besides, Leonardo DiCaprio does a fair enough job of that here. I will say this: like Inception, Shutter Island only gets better upon reflection.

Possible light spoilers follow.

The film is set in the Boston Harbor area in 1954, in the midst of Cold War paranoia. DiCaprio's character, Edward "Teddy" Daniels, is a U.S. Marshal investigating the disappearance of a dangerous inmate from an asylum for the criminally insane on remote Shutter Island. The longer he and his partner stay on the island, though, the more they begin to feel like there's something else going on besides the simple case of a missing person. The staff are reluctant to answer their questions; the guards border on hostile. An ambiguous note (Who is 67?) found in the cell of the vanished inmate prompts Teddy to start digging deeper, questioning what exactly the asylum doctors are doing to their patients. As he digs, he experiences flashbacks to his own traumatic past -- his role in the liberation of Dachau, the death of his own wife. The possibility that his wife's killer, Andrew Laeddis, is present on the island causes him to question the real purpose of his visit -- is he part of some diabolical game that everyone else is somehow in on?

Shutter Island has many strengths, the foremost of which is probably DiCaprio's performance. He has the hardened-U.S.-Marshal part down perfectly, but balances it with a complex emotional side. The flashback dealing with his reaction to his family's death is particularly powerful. The mood Scorsese creates is fittingly disturbing and dream-like, almost Hitchcockian at times. How you interpret the message of the film depends a great deal on how you interpret the ending, but there is a moral either way. Whether that moral involves Andrew coming to terms with Truth and accepting the consequences of what he's done, or Teddy seeking to accomplish his mission and keep his sanity and his identity as a "good man," is left up to you.

In my opinion, Shutter Island's weaknesses are nearly all technical ones. The music at times fits the mood perfectly, or effectively helps create it, but at other times it's very jarring, practically forcing the mood onto the viewer. The quick-cut editing in some scenes feels odd and disrupts the flow. Shutter Island is not Scorsese's masterpiece, but it's definitely a top-notch thriller that further cements Leonardo DiCaprio's place as possibly the best actor of his generation.

hollywood and history, part ii

2010-07-26T15:56:00.007-04:00

I've been thinking a little more about what I said in my last post -- that, through our own ignorance, we are allowing Hollywood to control what we know about history. In and of itself, that's a bad thing. But that doesn't mean we should shun Hollywood's take on history -- even if it's blatantly "revisionist" history. Admittedly, the history major in me still cringes a little at the inaccuracies of Braveheart; I'm not saying we should look to Hollywood for factual accuracy. But I do think that Hollywood's reinterpretations of historical events are important to study.

Movies are a reflection of the zeitgeist, and what they have to say about history needs to be taken into consideration. Take Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven as an example. It's a better movie than it gets credit for, both technically and thematically. On the surface, it's a movie about the Crusades. But it's the type of movie that wouldn't have existed prior to 9/11, when the Western world got a radical wake-up call and realized that it knew practically nothing about the nature of Islam. Kingdom of Heaven's commentary on the religious-political relations between the East and the West, and on the motivations of the Crusaders, is unmistakeably 21st-century at times. But that's my point -- a study of the Crusades would be essentially meaningless if it did not address the influence the Crusades have on us today, or our own understanding of the events, or why we understand the events that way. Kingdom of Heaven portrays the Knights Templar in a negative light -- greedy, power-hungry, only nominally religious. It's a portrayal that is probably fueled, at least in part, by our own cultural mistrust of religious organizations that exercise political power. That kind of attitude would have been virtually nonexistent at the time of the Crusades. So while the movie may not be "historically accurate," it certainly sheds light on the way the Crusades have been understood throughout history, and on the ingrained biases of our own culture. Fundamentally, the way our culture understands a historical event is the key to understanding our own times. In that sense, movies like Kingdom of Heaven are invaluable historical tools.

My point is that Hollywood revisionism can be an important element in historical study. Movies cannot provide us with cold, hard facts, and they shouldn't try. Movies, accurate or not, broaden our understanding of the facts. My point is not to negate my previous post. If our culture chooses to ignore its own history, no number of Ridley Scott epics can save it.

hollywood and history

2010-07-24T11:26:00.007-04:00

Is it getting to the point that it takes movies to remind us of our own historical narrative? Gauging the reaction to the new Secretariat poster at the movie theater has been interesting. It's not a movie about secretarial work, as some people seem to think. It hasn't quite been forty years since Secretariat won the Triple Crown, but the feat has already faded from memory.

Granted, not everyone is a horse-racing fan, and granted, I don't think it was an event that altered the course of history in and of itself. But the fact remains that we now apparently must rely on Hollywood to make us aware of our own past. It doesn't matter that we are blessed with instant access to a wealth of information; we prefer to ignore that and have it spoon-fed to us by a film studio. Taking Orwell into account (who controls the past controls the future...) that's a scary thought.

From Hollywood's perspective, of course, our historical ignorance is a good thing: people are probably more likely to see a movie if they don't know the ending already. It makes me wonder if Valkyrie's ending came as a surprise to anybody... or if, in twenty years, a whole generation of Americans will think that Hitler died in a Parisian cinema on the night of the Nation's Pride premiere.

inception

2010-07-17T12:56:00.025-04:00

You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling. — Eames, Inception

I've been a fan of director Christopher Nolan since I saw Batman Begins, which still comes to mind whenever people ask me what my all-time favorite film is. No other current director seems to be able to package it all together like he does: creative and engaging storylines, layers of themes, outstanding performances across the board from his actors. Nolan proves that a movie can be intelligent and a box-office draw at the same time; he makes movies that please critics and crowds alike. He also has the rare and admirable ability to deal with intense and mature subjects tastefully and with restraint, with little gratuitous content.

Inception is a continuation of the Nolan trend: brainy, thought-provoking, and wildly entertaining. It's a sci-fi thriller somewhat in the vein of Gattaca or Blade Runner, putting more emphasis on characters and theme than on being sci-fi. The protagonist is Dom Cobb, played very competently by Leonardo DiCaprio. Cobb is an "extractor," a specialist at breaking into minds to steal the secrets lodged there. He mostly uses his abilities to steal corporate secrets for rivaling companies, but his latest subject, a Japanese businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe), outwits him and then offers him a new job: the task of "inception," planting an idea in the head of a rival, rather than stealing one.

As far as its main plot goes, Inception is actually pretty straightforward. Cobb assembles a team to break into the mind of Robert Fischer, Jr. (Cillian Murphy), Saito's rival. Their goal is to subconsciously convince Fischer to break up his father's corporate empire. Where Inception gets a little complicated is with the introduction of a confusing subplot involving Cobb's wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), who killed herself some time prior to the events of the film. Mal continuously invades Cobb's subconscious, disrupting the dream worlds his team has constructed and threatening the success of their elaborate scheme.

Mal seems to represent the dangers of what Cobb and his team do, entering the dream world and manipulating other people's thoughts -- an exceptional violation of human dignity. [Spoilers] It is revealed that, years ago, Mal and Cobb had together become trapped in a "limbo" of their own dreams, and while Mal was content with remaining in that dream state, Cobb was unsatisfied with living a lie. He convinced Mal, through inception, that by "killing" themselves in the dream state they would return to their real lives. The inception worked, and both of them woke up back in the real world. But ideas, as Cobb explains to Saito at the beginning of the film, are resilient. And the idea Cobb planted in Mal's mind, that death leads to a greater reality, lingered even after she woke up in the real world. Eventually it drove her to commit suicide, and Cobb has lived with guilt and regret ever since. [End spoilers] The irony is that he is now trying to do to Fischer the very same thing that ruined his own life, endangering both himself and his team as they descend deeper and deeper into the dream world.

Inception speaks very strongly about the dangers of rejecting reality for selfish fantasy. Cobb has sacrificed so many meaningful things in his life -- including his relationships with his wife and his children -- because he has spent so much time in the dream world, tampering with things that shouldn't be tampered with. [Spoilers] At the end, we see him reunited with his children after successfully completing his job. But his happy ending comes about only because he has once again performed "inception" on another person, and an ambiguous closing shot leaves us to wonder whether he has really achieved real-life happiness at all. [End spoilers]

I feel like that's a very inadequate explanation of the film, but Inception really doesn't lend itself well to me trying to explain it. It's something you have to see for yourself. I recommend it wholeheartedly. After so many disappointments this summer, Inception is one movie that actually lives up to the hype.

As an aside... I didn't really pick up on this until I watched the credits rolling, but Nolan uses Edith Piaf's song "Non, je ne regrette rien" repeatedly in the film. In the context of Cobb's story, it's brilliant.

WORLD magazine has an excellent review of the film here.

photo meme

2010-05-19T16:50:00.006-04:00

At least I can say that I posted something.

Rules: Answer each of the questions below using the Flickr search engine, choosing each photo from the first three pages of results only. Copy the URL of your picks onto this site. Save and share.

1. First name?
2. Favorite food?
3. Hometown?
4. Favorite color?
5. Celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What do you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in the world?
11. One word that describes you?
12. ~~Livejournal~~ Blog name?

scum and villainy

2010-04-26T21:48:00.004-04:00

This week Plugged In is running an article entitled "The Vanishing Villain." The point of the article is that there really hasn't been an "old-fashioned" (read: one-dimensional) villain in a Hollywood movie for a long time; The Dark Knight's Joker might be the one exception. The author's main concern is that movies with antagonists who are merely "misunderstood" or who have complex ulterior motives could desensitize us to real evil, so that we won't know what to do when confronted with it.

I think his concern is legitimate, but for some reason I can't bring myself to accept that villains must be entirely evil. For one thing, I don't think that's realistic. Antagonists who shoot minions dead for letting open umbrellas wave in the wind (a scenario which apparently occurs in The Losers) are frankly ridiculous and probably do more towards desensitizing us to real evil than having a "misunderstood" villain might. For another, I don't think it's good storytelling.

I think of The Iliad, one of the most enduring works of literature in all of history. I think what has helped to make it so enduring is that there isn't really a defined villain, not in Plugged In's sense of the word. There are noble characters, or at least decent ones, on both sides. Most of those decent characters have faults -- major faults. It's part of being human. No one wants to see Mary Sues or Gary Stus as protagonists. Why should they want to see the equivalent in a villain?

That brings me to my last point. I don't think it's "post-modern" to want to see a villain whose motives are a little unclear and who has the potential to come back to the "good side." I think there is something Christian in wanting to see a villain who is as human as the next man, and in hoping to see that villain redeemed. (Plugged In apparently doesn't think so; the article pleads "Are there still villains out there that can't be helped with a hug? Are there dragons too dangerous to tame?") A villain who resembles me, to some extent, reminds me that there but for the grace of God go I. And if that villain is redeemed in the end, it reminds me that Christ's salvation can extend to the worst of sinners.

I guess I find it a little disturbing that Plugged In's reviewer wishes we had more irredeemable villains on the movie screens. I want to see more Raskolnikovs or Severus Snapes onscreen than Colonel Quaritchs. I want to see a villain with the potential to be redeemed. It makes the story more interesting. It reflects the truth of Christianity a lot better.

an apology and hvz

2010-04-09T19:04:00.002-04:00

I guess I'm making one of those apologetic posts to apologize for not writing more posts. Because I haven't written anything in a while. Except "discussion questions" for my Latin American history class readings... I could post those, conceivably.

<offtopic>(Someone just came by and stole my chair. Not sure why but I'm not one to question the inevitability of fate.)</offtopic>

The cold fact is that nothing much has happened here at Geneva this April... yet. I say "yet" because in about two days' time the most epic thing to ever happen at Geneva will happen at Geneva.

I am talking about Humans vs. Zombies.

I am pumped. I am just hoping that all of my enthusiasm will actually come to fruition, instead of going to waste if I become a zombie within the first ten minutes. If nothing else, it would be a waste of the $7 that went towards the buying of a nerf gun.

last lines

2010-03-29T21:46:00.008-04:00

Reading The Killer Angels again got me thinking about my favorite last lines from literature. Not necessarily my favorite endings -- I might do another post for that -- but the specific lines that stick in my head for a long time after I put the book down.

So here they are, starting with number five...

5. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.

From To Kill A Mockingbird, referring to Atticus Finch. I just like how this pretty much manages to sum up Atticus' character in one line -- thoughtful and reflective, loving, protective and dependable. The ultimate father figure.

4. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

From Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men; Sheriff Ed Tom Bell describing a dream he had about his father. An unexpected and powerful couple of ending lines, quoted almost word-for-word in the highly faithful film adaptation. I like it for its starkness and simplicity and the way it resolves things and leaves them unresolved at the same time.

I guess I like last lines about dreaming/sleeping and father-figures.

3. ...Because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I'd like to be and what I could be if...if only there were no other people in the world.

From The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank. I'm not sure why, but I love that this is the last line of her diary. So reflective and poetic... the fact that she was writing lines like this at thirteen or fourteen is amazing to me.

2. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.

The last line of The Killer Angels. A brilliant, profoundly ironic way to end a novel about the most devastating battle in a struggle which both sides saw as a struggle to defend freedom.

And finally, my favorite ending line from any novel...

1. He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.

Well, that seems kind of anticlimactic. But it's from For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway, and yes, it is the ending line that has stuck with me the most of all of 'em. I think it's because it brings everything full circle in such a powerful way... the novel begins with the line He lay on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. At the beginning, Robert Jordan knows that his objective is to blow the bridge, and he is willing to sacrifice his life doing it. At the end, everything that has happened over the course of the novel -- his love affair with Maria, Pablo's cowardice and redemption, the triumphs and ultimate failure of the Cause -- comes down to that one final act. The last few pages of the novel are painfully frantic and desperate. The last line is overwhelmingly peaceful. A great ending line for a great book.

And (speaking of "full circle") the runner-up...

Full circle, he thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs. Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever. I am legend.

From Richard Matheson's 1954 science-fiction novel I Am Legend. Vastly superior to the recent film adaption -- if only because, in the novel, the title actually makes sense.

That's all for now.

macroeconomics and dolphin-hunting

2010-03-26T15:30:00.006-04:00

I have been tempted to skip macroeconomics class every day this week. I have never been more out of my element than I am in that class. What makes it even worse is that I found out a couple days ago that I could have taken sociology or psychology for a core class instead. But I've held fast and I have not skipped yet. It will happen though. Sometime before the end of the semester, it will happen. I have never intentionally skipped a class before. It's going to happen with macroeconomics.

In other news, apparently Hayden Panettiere and her boyfriend have shown up at a fishing village in Japan trying to convince the villagers not to hold their annual dolphin hunt.^[1] Gee whiz. If it's not activists sneaking aboard whaling ships in the dead of night, it's Hollywood actresses disrupting dolphin hunts because they know there are better, more productive ways for fishermen to be earning income. ("We are trying to peacefully come up with better ideas as to how to generate income and utilize the nature here," in Panettiere's words.^[2]) I guess because Hollywood actresses are the go-to authorities on productive ways to earn income. (Did you notice she split an infinitive? Hollywood actresses are not the go-to authorities on grammar.)

there is baseball on tv

2010-03-24T15:15:00.004-04:00

in the Brig. It makes me happy. It makes me even happier that the Braves are playing the Phillies, and winning 4-0. In a situation that leading experts have characterized as "retarded," however, I wore my Braves jersey yesterday without realizing that today was the day they would be playing a PA team. Fail. :(

fyi

2010-03-23T17:52:00.007-04:00

I've started a list in the sidebar with links to some sites that are worth checking out. Many of them are private, non-profit organizations; all of them are really seeking to accomplish some worthwhile and positive things in local and global communities. I intend to keep adding to the list as I come across new stuff, so keep an eye out.

It's possible to love our neighbors and build community without depending on the government to step in. We just need to take the initiative -- even if it's something quick and easy like donating a portion of your eBay sales to the charity of your choice (check this out). Donate old clothes to the Salvation Army. Sell some unwanted stuff and give the proceeds to a ministry or charity. We don't need government intervention if we start acting more responsible as individuals.

</soapbox>

something to think about

2010-03-23T15:56:00.001-04:00

When the oppressed for justice looks in vain,
When his sore burden may no more be borne,
With fearless heart he makes appeal to Heaven,
And thence brings down his everlasting rights,
Which there abide, inalienably his,
And indestructible as are the stars.
Nature's primeval state returns again,
Where man stands hostile to his fellow-man;
And if all other means shall fail his need,
One last resource remains — his own good sword.

— Friedrich Schiller, William Tell (1804)

pretty much about books

2010-03-22T19:55:00.007-04:00

Here be nerdiness... you have been warned.

I finished reading The Killer Angels, Alice in Wonderland and The Maltese Falcon over the weekend. Which was incidentally one of the nicest weekends of the year so far, weatherly-speaking -- I spent most of it outside on Memorial Lawn with books. Reading The Maltese Falcon was pretty much like reading the screenplay for the movie -- same with The Killer Angels. Alice in Wonderland not so much. I did like the movie though. Sometimes taking liberties is a good thing.

Not sure what's next on the reading list. Got a stack of Star Wars books from a friend but I've been reluctant to start them because I tend to be disappointed with anything that's not written by Timothy Zahn. I still have not acquired the first volume of Death Note, the next step in my endeavor to start reading manga. I'm probably not going about this endeavor in the right way at all... I didn't start off with Akira or another classic, I started with Yana Toboso's Kuroshitsuji. But manga is one of those things where there's just so much of it that a n00b like myself has no idea where to begin. Kind of like the Star Wars expanded universe actually... or what the Star Wars EU is becoming.

I leave you with this piece of epic win.

rant (in 140 characters or less)

2010-03-18T16:33:00.001-04:00

As much as I'm paying to go to Geneva, you'd think they could afford to stock raisins and sunflower seeds in the salad line. :(

things i have accomplished over spring break

2010-03-13T21:30:00.006-05:00

A depressingly short and trivial list.

Started rereading The Killer Angels. Purchased it and The Maltese Falcon and intend to finish both in the near future. I also ordered The Gathering Storm, the 12th and final book of The Wheel of Time, on inter-library loan. (I did this in the hope that I'll be able to know how it all ends without having to read books 10 and 11... number 9 is as far as I ever got. But if we're all going to be honest I don't really remember what happened in books 1-9 either.) Also intend to purchase the first volume of Death Note when the funds become available.

Came up with a decent homemade chai mix, kind of based on this recipe.

Saw Alice in Wonderland. Twice.

Became addicted to Firefox Personas. Designed one with a Band of Brothers theme, here. The Pacific premieres tomorrow.

Got dragged by my roommate and mother all around the metro Atlanta area in search of wedding dress materials. In turn, I dragged my roommate to a Thrashers game. 5-2 loss to the Rangers.

Back to school on Monday. It does not feel like I've been home long enough.

confused

2010-03-02T19:17:00.007-05:00

Last year I think I had a speech, two papers, and four or five exams to wade through before I went home on spring break. This semester, the Semester of the Twelve Credits, I've got two short papers and one exam before I head back to Atlanta on Friday. Pretty nice, you say. It would be nice, I say, except that the prompt for my one paper reads like this:

In about three pages, reflect on the meaning of Endo's novel. You are welcome to explore episodes, encounters, or character developments that further your argument. Endo's novel is a profound, but troubling, exploration of the nature of suffering. I am not looking for a particular "interpretation" of the novel, but rather an engagement with the themes that Endo presents in Silence.

Now, I'm a big fan of yours, Dr. Doyle, but what does that even mean?

Is it even possible to talk about themes without including some kind of interpretation? I am stumped. Paper's due tomorrow. It's going to be a long night.

On a note which is totally unrelated to papers for Dr. Doyle but is somewhat related to confusion, this is one of the most confusing things I've seen on the web. Way to give us some context, silly AP person.

i wonder

2010-02-28T20:00:00.003-05:00

I wonder if this year's Olympics are enough to start generating some more hockey interest in the US -- certain parts of the US, that is. (Like Georgia, my homeland.) I haven't actually watched much except for the gold medal final today, but if I'm not mistaken I read that the viewership for this year's games is among the highest ever. And if Yahoo! News is any indicator, the men's hockey final was pretty much the defining event, even garnering comparisons to the Miracle on Ice.

useful information

2010-02-23T20:14:00.007-05:00

I found out today that drinking straight coconut milk isn't the smartest thing to do. Especially not if it's at room temperature... it probably would have been a little better if it had been cold. But I think it's probably meant more for cooking/baking than for plain consumption. However, it was somewhat improved by stirring in a packet of hot chocolate mix. So... yeah.

By the way, it's really sad, but this is me. :( I've definitely wished I could Photoshop aspects of real life before. Among other things, it would make painting the house a lot easier.

day eight... so far

2010-02-22T10:00:00.001-05:00

Eight hours into day eight, I'm not sure what to think about this season of 24. I didn't get into the show until last season, day seven, so I'm not an expert by any means. I think this season definitely still has potential, but so far there have been some disappointments, mostly having to do with Renee's character and with the idiotic Dana plot line, which I actually didn't mind until last week. Possible spoilers are ahead...

First of all, I understand that last season's finale ended on a bit of a cliffhanger for Renee's character, and I'm OK with the fact that she's kind of fallen to the dark side since then. That's not necessarily what bothers me. What bothers me is that she was introduced on day seven as a naive, by-the-book FBI agent who ends up being "corrupted" by Jack. But now, on day eight, it turns out that she had years of experience working undercover in the Russian mob prior to being an FBI agent. I just find it hard to believe that she would be the kind of person she was at the start of day seven if she had that kind of background.

That's still not as bad as the Dana plot line. I was willing to bypass the fact that apparently CTU doesn't run background checks on its employees -- probably there will still be some kind of explanation for that later on -- but last week's episode pretty much stretched my patience to the limit. Dana gets the reassurance from Cole that nothing she did in the past could change his feelings for her. At that point, I expected her to immediately tell him what exactly was going on with redneck guy and what exactly she had done that made it so easy for redneck guy to blackmail her. Instead, she is now apparently going to do what she should have done four episodes ago and take redneck guy out. Which would have been OK except for the conversation she just had with Cole. It makes no sense whatsoever.

All that being said, the rest of the plot is shaping up to be pretty good. As soon as the whole Dana thing gets tied off I'll be happy.

a list

2010-02-21T14:04:00.003-05:00

I've had enough with angst for a while. Today I give you a list of the most useful, interesting, or amusing things I've found on the web recently.

1. A time traveler's cheat sheet. It's exactly the kind of thing you'll want to have if you ever end up on a remote and Bob-fearing planet.

2. An idea of how Star Wars might have looked if it had taken place in our galaxy circa 1942.

3. A candid study of what stormtroopers do in their spare time.

4. An entire site devoted to the question, is Nickelback the worst band ever? To go along with this solemn reminder.

5. How Facebook might look if the Commies take over.

6. A funny story about a guy confusing his cat.

7. A writing exercise that gives you one minute to write whatever comes to mind about a single word.

8. Aldous Huxley's vision of the future compared to George Orwell's in a series of thought-provoking illustrations.

That's all for now.

thinking

2010-02-20T22:30:00.006-05:00

I think in this post I'm going to do what you're probably not supposed to do with a blog post. I'm just going to write for the sake of writing. I haven't posted in over a week now and I just need to get some thoughts out.

The past couple weeks have been pretty turbulent. There's school and everything and there was something else that had me really excited but I've found out it's not going to work out after all and so I'm trying to get over that. It's hard. Last semester I posted something about how I was probably not going to come back to Geneva next school year and then I had begun to think that I would be coming back to Geneva after all, at least I was going to make every effort to come back to Geneva, but now I know that's probably not going to happen. I'm not going to try to make it happen. There's no reason anymore for me to make it happen. I've been thinking things through and I know now that Geneva is just not where I'm supposed to be.

I've been thinking a lot of things through actually. Trying to figure out just who I am exactly. I guess that sounds pretty cliche but I'm one of those people who tries to be everything to everybody and in the past few days I've realized I don't want to be that kind of person anymore. I don't care about being that kind of person anymore. I want to be me but I don't really know who I am exactly. So that's what I'm trying to figure out right now.

I think one of the main problems is I've let myself be distracted from things that really matter to me. Not all of the things that matter to me, and not the most important ones. But some things. Like writing. I haven't written any fiction at all this year even though I came back from Rome thinking I would finally finish the novel I started two years ago now. I think somehow that when I was trying to be someone I'm not I convinced myself that writing the things I do is somehow stupid and childish. And that's a problem because it really is important to me and I was trying to pretend it wasn't. So I think one of the first things I'm going to do is start writing again. And this time I want to not care about it being stupid or childish. I think the only way that novel will ever get finished is if I stop caring about that.

money-making scheme

2010-02-11T13:04:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I got inspired to see if I could make a little extra cash. Which means I went through my CD and DVD collections to see if there was anything I never listen to or watch any more. Anything that failed the test is now on eBay. Because of my weird moral standards I decided I could only get rid of the music that I will actually end up deleting from my iTunes library too. So a few things are going to stay on my shelf that I would really rather not have on my shelf. I've got to face it... no matter how much my music tastes have changed since I was 15, I still have a couple of 3 Doors Down songs floating around in my library. I'm still wavering on Creed's greatest hits. It was a birthday present.

I also filled out a job application for a graphic/web designer position here at school. It won't open up til next semester but I figured I might as well apply. And speaking of web design, yes, I totally changed the layout here again. Basically I took it back down to the default Blogger layout and made a few minor modifications. It's simple, but I really like it.

same old

2010-01-19T23:20:00.004-05:00

This always happens. I blog for a year and a half or so and then I get tired of it. I like the idea of having a blog, I just don't like actually doing anything with it. Except changing the layout every now and then. I was all right with it when I was in Rome and had something exciting and purposeful to write about but now that I'm back in the States I feel like there's really nothing much to say. So then I start to think, well, maybe I should start drawing again and post that stuff here. Or start writing again. But it's the same kind of thing -- I'll sketch or write enthusiastically for about three months and then I'll get tired of it. I don't know why I get so unmotivated. I wish I didn't. How do you get rid of unmotivation?

home for the holidays

2009-12-17T11:10:00.004-05:00

Just a quick post to say that I'm back in the States. Adjusting hasn't been that hard except I still have the tendency to say or at least think "grazie" instead of "thank you" and it was a little odd to go to Fernbank Museum yesterday and actually be able to read all the little exhibit placards. :) I haven't been to a grocery store yet but I imagine that will seem pretty odd too. No more Mato Mato Squiz.

I start work again tomorrow, with Avatar opening. I went to see Brothers last night in Douglasville... good but intense. I have to admit that most of my interest in the movie was just because of U2's involvement with the soundtrack. But it was a good movie. Quite a departure from Spider-Man for Tobey Maguire.

there's no place like rome

2009-12-09T09:39:00.003-05:00

The projects are done... the digital gallery is done, the portfolio is done, the culture-making project is done.

The papers are done. No more readings, no more film reviews.

The classes are done. No more humanities, no more Italian, no more group field trips to art galleries and archaeological sites.

I'll be leaving Rome in three days. I'm excited to go home and I've been excited for a while. The past couple days have been hard though, and the next couple days will be harder. I'm beginning to realize that I'll miss this place. I'll miss squishing into the packed 90 bus to get to Termini. I'll miss Piazza della Repubblica and Piazza Navona and the Via del Corso. I'll miss the Borghese gardens. I'll miss cheap Chinese food and going for gelato afterwards (and yes, I'll miss seeing my gelato man...). I'll miss the tabacchi. I'll miss taking the 60 down to Piazza Venezia. I'll miss the Pantheon.

This place grows on you. Paris was a beautiful city and I wish I had more time to spend there. But Rome still wins. Rome feels like home. It felt good to come back from Florence or Venice or Athens and know that the convent was there waiting for us.

It's finally dawning on me that I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to come to Europe again, that this could be it. For some reason it was watching Angels & Demons the other night that really made me start thinking about that. I could laugh knowingly to myself when Tom Hanks is standing outside the Pantheon with that same old gelateria in the background... I loved being able to sit there and count off all the places I had been to. It's hard to think that in three days I won't be able to just hop on a bus and go to those places anymore.

Of course I'm excited to come home in time for Christmas. And I have already pinpointed the exact location of the Starbucks inside JFK, and it will be my first stop once I'm back on US soil. But I will be missing Rome a lot.

cinema paradiso

2009-12-05T04:00:00.006-05:00

Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1988 film Cinema Paradiso is a two-hour-long ode to cinema and film culture. The plot is fairly straightforward; much like Tornatore’s recent film Baarìa, it is a coming-of-age tale set in rural Sicily in the aftermath of World War II. Tornatore concerns himself more with character development than plot intricacy; he takes great pains to show how cinema, in particular, influences the lives of the film’s main characters.

The film was popular in both Italy and the United States upon its release, and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1989 Academy Awards. Still, it was not without its critics. Reviewers point to length and over-sentimentality as Cinema Paradiso’s main weaknesses. “Even at its most restrained and melancholy,” writes reviewer Nathan Rabin a June 2002 article for The A. V. Club, “Paradiso still wallows in shameless sentimentality…[it] runs on a cocktail of nostalgia, sentimentality, and cinephilia.” But Rabin goes on to admit that “Tornatore’s affection for film permeates every frame.” Cinema Paradiso is undoubtedly, unabashedly, a film-lover’s film. The magic of cinema is Tornatore’s main theme, and he uses the fictional movie house (the Cinema Paradiso) as the fulcrum of his entire story. Paradiso’s two main characters, a grizzled middle-aged projectionist named Alfredo and his obsessed young apprentice Salvatore, are bonded by their love of film. To them — and to the people of the small Sicilian town where Paradiso is set — film is a way of escaping the hardship and the ugliness of real life. The film turns bittersweet when both Alfredo and Salvatore lose their faith in movie magic. Before he dies, an old and blind Alfredo insists that Salvatore must “forget nostalgia” and go make a name for himself in the real world. But in the end, when Salvatore (now middle-aged himself) has become rich and powerful, he has still not achieved the same happiness he had while working as a projectionist at the Paradiso. It seems that Alfredo was blind both literally and figuratively; he failed to see that Salvatore could have found his true calling by staying in Sicily. When the movie house is destroyed at the end of the film to make room for a parking lot, it seems like a final loss of innocence — a loss of child-like faith in something beyond the material world.

Undeniably, Tornatore’s film is manipulative. “Tornatore knows the value of cute kids and easy emotion,” admits a 1988 review by the Variety staff. But despite the schmaltz, Cinema Paradiso still resonates with film lovers. For me, as a projectionist, it was particularly meaningful. I’ve panicked when a movie doesn’t get started on time and the audience gets restless, and I’ve cringed when a film “brain wraps” and I have to rush to shut the projector down and splice away the burned and melted frames. I smiled when Alfredo talks about seeing the same film a hundred times, or about being alone in the dark of the projection booth. And I agree with him. Nothing compares to seeing a film play out crisply and perfectly on the screen, especially if it’s a film that I’ve built; nothing compares to seeing the audience react to it. There is a magic in the movies, and underneath the saccharine, sappy coating, Tornatore’s film truly captures that.

football game

2009-12-04T07:10:00.005-05:00

Last night a group of us went to the Stadio Olimpico to see a football game, Roma vs. Basel. It was a good time. The atmosphere wasn't quite what I was expecting -- the crowd was loud and enthusiastic, but nowhere near as rowdy as I though they would be... I know nothing about football; maybe Basel isn't that big of a rival. It was about the same level of intensity as a hockey game. The one big difference is that people were setting off fireworks inside the stadium. It was an outdoor stadium but I'm pretty sure that would still be against fire safety regulations in the States. Apparently Rome has its own version of the Nasty Nest, too ... Curva Sud. Our Italian teacher warned us about it, but pretty much all that happened during the game was a bunch of cheering and flag-waving.

This is looking from our seats in Curva Nord towards Curva Sud:

thoughts on the communist manifesto

2009-11-29T06:27:00.003-05:00

(May or may not be coherent.)

Yesterday I read the Communist Manifesto in full for the first time. I'm a little embarrassed that I haven't done that before, since the study of communism is something I'd like to specialize in as a history major (and eventually, hopefully, full-fledged historian). After reading it through, I am even more convinced that communism, as Marx and his contemporaries originally envisioned it, is fundamentally a good idea -- if there is no concept of original sin.

I'll start off by saying that the Manifesto's critiques of capitalism are right in line with some of my own critiques of capitalism. For example, the Manifesto maintains that capitalism creates a society that does not value the family or the worth of human life, a society that enslaves individuals to the State and measures personal success merely by how much cold, hard capital you have. I agree with all of that. A purely capitalistic society is ugly, and for that reason I hesitate to call myself a capitalist.

The inherent flaw of the Manifesto, of communism, is that it assumes bourgeois society is godless.

This is most apparent when the Manifesto talks of bourgeois marriage. "The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production"; "Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common."

All true, if God is taken out of the equation. What the Manifesto is critiquing is a godless capitalist society. (That does not mean a society in which Christianity does not exist; but the Manifesto sees Christianity as an empty shell, a hypocritical and meaningless set of dogmas; or a corrupt political entity with ties to the aristocracy.) The Manifesto is critiquing a society in which no one, deep down in their hearts, really believes that God exists. It is a system set up precisely because God does not exist -- a system built on false assumptions.

In short, communism must assume that God does not exist, because if God did exist, communism would be irrelevant. If God did exist, communism becomes guilty of the false-dilemma fallacy. It is certainly a problem that bourgeois marriages tend to be faithless. But communism does not leave room for any other solution besides doing away with bourgeois society.

Continuing on that theme, all of the solutions to social ills that communism proposes assume that God does not exist. What communism advocates instead of faith in God is faith in humanity. It advocates faith in man's ability to live selflessly for the good of others. (In the end, that is. First, bourgeois societies must undergo brutal state despotism that does away with private property, inheritance rights, and private and home education, and institutes centralized banks, state-owned factories, heavy taxes, and "equable distribution of the population over the country." The ultimate hope of communism is that this despotism will somehow encourage personal responsibility so that eventually the State will become obsolete; "the public power will lose its political character". This has never happened in a society that claims to be communist.)

So, hand-in-hand with its disbelief in God, communism inherently, necessarily disbelieves in original sin. Communism becomes the ultimate rebellion against biblical truth. What makes it so dangerous is that many of its social critiques are legitimate, and the solutions it proposes seem logical to our human minds. Communism is proof that the most effective lies are the ones the contain a little bit of truth.

I still think that the best explanation of communism's shortcomings comes from Frank Zappa: "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."

letter to a historian

2009-11-23T16:51:00.004-05:00

An interesting assignment for humanities this week... we were instructed to write some words of advice for another person in our field of study, recommending how s/he might use Machiavellian principles to "get ahead." :) Mine is in the form of a letter.

My esteemed colleague and fellow historian,

I am writing in response to your recent inquiry, namely how to best use your abilities as a historian in service of the State. The very first thing to remember is that those who control the past may very well control the future — a principle very ably illustrated a while ago by Ingsoc in its governance of Oceania. And a historian is most certainly in control of the past. Realizing this, you then of course realize how very necessary it is to shape and influence the “past” in the minds of the common people — to subtly influence their perceptions until everything that is undesirable or insignificant about the “past” is forgotten, and everything that is desirable and good about the “past” is brought to the fore. In doing this you are creating the very purest form of history, a “national story” if you will, that can be used to rouse the people to action, to make them take pride in who they are, and in the achievements of their country — to make patriotic pride stir in their hearts. A people with that kind of pride can be a powerful force.

Of course there are those who will say that this kind of “revisionism” is wrong, that it is a sham or propaganda, that it is not true history. (But what is “true history” really? History has always depended on who is doing the telling of it.) You must remember that “revisionism,” as they call it, is merely the means to an end. The end is a stronger State, a more unified people — a State and a people with a real sense of national identity, forged out of the shining past. If you wish to be a true historian of the State, this is the only end worth achieving. If it is wrong to rewrite the past, it is a wrong that must be committed so that we may enjoy a better future. It is, quite frankly, a necessary wrong.

I will give you a few more examples. The first that comes to my mind is from the last great world war, the Second World War. If there was anyone who truly understood just how much power can come from shaping the past, it was Stalin. You may remember hearing about Katyń, about the atrocity that happened there — twenty thousand Poles massacred by Soviet forces. What you may not have heard is that for a long while, Stalin and his successors promulgated the myth that it was Hitler’s Nazis who had committed the act. What should have incited the Polish people and indeed the Russian people to anger at Joseph Stalin instead incited them to join the Soviet forces in the fight against the German National Socialists — and in fact the Soviets did not reveal the truth of the matter until nearly fifty years later! That, my friend, is historical genius. That is how history should be used for the service of the State. (And as you can see, it is a policy well-suited for war-time.)

There is another example. If you recall Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, you may well remember how by pointing his people to the past he gave them a clear direction for their future. Fascist Italy looked to Imperial Rome. Mussolini gave his people a very strong sense of national identity, and he did it very thoroughly, by saturating their architecture and their literature and their films with it. The sad fact that fascism failed in Italy only proves my earlier point, that sometimes you must commit necessary wrongs. Mussolini was unwilling to do what was necessary, dissolve his Grand Council and assume sole authority — but that is a discussion for another day.

I do hope that this will help you as you seek to serve our great State. Always remember that history is a powerful tool — perhaps the most powerful tool, because it affects all humans everywhere. How it affects them, of course, is entirely up to you.

venice

2009-11-23T06:17:00.004-05:00

I jostled my way through crowds to peer through the glass at old navigational charts and instruments in the Museo Correr...

I walked over the Ponte dei Sospiri and sighed as I caught a rushed glimpse of the Grand Canal through the bridge's grilled windows, even though the legends are mostly just legends and it was not called the Bridge of Sighs until Lord Byron coined the name in a 19th-century poem...

I sat huddled up on a gondola in a stiff cold breeze while the boatman pointed out Marco Polo's house, and the courthouse, and St. George's Anglican Church across the canal...

I wandered through all the little shops on the Ponte di Rialto, jewelry shops and glassware shops and paper shops and profumerie selling Venetian perfume for €79 a bottle...

I sipped on a drink called bicerin at the Caffè Florian and wondered how much the place had changed since the Hemingway years...

And then when night came I sat on a little wooden pier below the Accademia bridge and drank from a bottle of red wine and watched the boats go by.

invisible cities

2009-11-15T05:33:00.005-05:00

This is a response I wrote to Italo Calvino's short novel Invisible Cities, which we read for humanities class a while ago. The response was supposed to be addressed to students who will be participating in the Semester in Rome program in the future. I kind of like how it came out... I enjoy writing in the second-person form.

There is a point in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities when you realize, all of a sudden, that the author has not been talking about countless different cities, each with its own distinct quirks and characteristics. Instead, he has been talking about the same city, over and over again; the same city seen at different times, through different lenses. You realize that that city is Rome — and then you realize that it is not only Rome, but every city you’ve ever been in. You realize, finally, that Calvino is using “city” as almost an abstract concept, an ideal that exists outside of time and space. And you realize that the concept of “city” is what links Rome to New York or Pittsburgh or Atlanta; you realize that it links you to home even though you are five thousand miles away.

You see Rome in every manifestation of “city” that Calvino describes. Rome is Zobeide, the city of unfulfilled dreams — you can see it when you look at the ancient ruins of the Forum and you know that the might of Imperial Rome is gone without a trace; or when you stand underneath the balcony where Mussolini made his speeches and you know that the pomp and pretension of Italian fascism ended in brutal warfare and destruction. Rome is Adelma, the city whose inhabitants somehow remind you of people you know from back home; ordinary people going about their everyday lives, carrying groceries or bookbags, talking loudly on cell-phones. Rome is multi-faceted and self-contradictory — glorious like Clarice and beautiful like Andria, self-conscious like Valdrada and grimy like Olivia. Rome is anachronistic like Despina; modern metro tunnels run underground alongside the ancient tunnels of the catacombs.

Rome is Trude, the continuous city — “The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.” Similarly, it is Cecilia, a city indistinguishable from every other city, so that it seems to be everywhere. You see traces of Rome every place that you go; you see traces of every other place when you stay in Rome.

Rome, you realize, is a city like any other.

On one hand, there is nothing that can prepare you for being here. Nothing at home can prepare you for being in the Eternal City, surrounded and overwhelmed by so much history and culture. On the other hand, you have seen Rome every time you walk the sidewalks of Beaver Falls.

The concept of “city” is unchanging. Appearances change, of course. Trude does not look like Despina, and Olivia does not look like Clarice. Rome, on the surface, is a far cry from the young cities of the United States. But what Calvino is saying to you is that a city is more than its appearance, more than its architecture or its technology. A city is a community of living, breathing human beings, with all of the merits and flaws of human nature. And human nature does not change.

il buono, il brutto, il cattivo

2009-11-13T07:04:00.007-05:00

(Notice the lack of a "neorealism" tag on this post...)

Quite possibly, Sergio Leone’s 1966 epic The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo in Italian) is the most important western film ever made. This is not just because of its influence on the films that have come after it — other western films, and films like Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men — but because it is the culmination of all westerns that came before it. Leone uses the western archetypes established by John Huston, Howard Hawks, and most significantly John Ford to create something entirely new, an almost-fantastical epic that has become the quintessential western masterpiece.

Roger Ebert reviewed the film for a second time in August 2003, coinciding with the DVD release of the restored 180-minute cut. He writes, “Leone cares not at all about the practical or the plausible, and builds his great film on the rubbish of Western movie clichés, using style to elevate dreck into art.” Ebert’s point is valid, but the westerns that Leone references in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly are not “dreck.” The “clichés” are part of the western mythos that American directors like Ford and Hawks created throughout the thirties, forties, and fifties. Their films were already art of their own kind. Leone honors them by taking the western to a new level. He takes the western and makes it into an epic fantasy about questing for gold — and author Stephen King’s fantasy cycle The Dark Tower unapologetically draws from this merging of two different genres. Leone takes the western and makes it a war film, filled with cynical bantering about the nature of combat. He takes the essence of the western — what Ebert calls “clichés” — and makes it universally applicable. Reviewer John Nudge, writing for the online journal Images, calls The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly “the quintessential Spaghetti Western,” and goes on to say that spaghetti westerns have been strongly influencing the film industry for the thirty-five years since Leone’s film was released. Leone’s influence on modern cinema is unmistakable — and so is the influence of earlier western directors on Leone.

Most noticeable is the influence of John Ford. There are specific instances in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly that pay homage to Ford films. In one of the film’s opening sequences, a character is framed in silhouette in a doorway, with the interior of a room in the foreground and a wide open landscape through the doorway in the background. John Ford first used this iconic shot in his 1956 classic The Searchers, and it has since appeared in films like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds — two films that owe a great debt to both Ford and Leone. The bridge-blowing sequence in Leone’s film references a very similar sequence in Ford’s 1959 film The Horse Soldiers, when Union cavalry troops must destroy a bridge to slow down their Confederate pursuers. The runaway stagecoach filled with dead Confederate soldiers brings to mind the opening scene of Ford’s 1949 film She Wore a Yellow Ribbon — also featuring a runaway stagecoach carrying dead troops.

There are several other instances, but perhaps the most meaningful is the closing shot of Leone’s film. Clint Eastwood’s character, Blondie, takes his share of the gold treasure and rides away alone, as the camera slowly pans up to show us a broad, barren landscape around him. In the last three hours, we’ve seen a film that wholly re-imagines western tropes and conventions, unblinkingly shows us grit and grime and violence, and occasionally verges on the bizarre — and yet Leone still ends with this “clichéd” shot of the hero riding off alone into the sunset. With this shot, Leone seems to be reminding us where his film is coming from. The last three hours may have been something entirely different from what we were expecting, but with this ending shot, a tribute to the classic western, Leone brings everything back down to earth. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is a western. A western on a bigger, stranger scale than its predecessors, maybe, but a western nonetheless.

Leone does not denigrate the work of earlier western directors. It was not his goal to replace their “rubbish” with his “art.” Instead, he immortalizes their work by making the “western” into something that transcends genre lines. Without Leone, we would not have a Tarantino or a Robert Rodriguez. Without Howard Hawks or John Ford, we would not have a Leone.

i saw the pope!... and clint eastwood

2009-11-11T09:47:00.005-05:00

It's been kind of quiet around the convent lately. We're getting into the last part of the semester and so people are just kind of focusing on homework, papers, and final projects. I don't think I'll be doing any more major traveling, except for the planned trip to Venice that's coming up next week -- I'm thinking I'll just stick around Rome, maybe revisit some of the sites I saw earlier in the semester and finish up my Christmas shopping. :) Christmas decorations are starting to come out here and I imagine the city will be lovely during the holidays.

A couple of us went to St. Peter's two Sundays ago, trying to go to mass, but like good Protestants we forgot that it was All Saints' Day, or at least it didn't really register. So the buses were running very infrequently, and the Vatican was packed. We didn't get there in time for mass, but we did get to see the pope. (Old Benny, as our SD called him.) He made a public address from the window of his apartment, to much applause. It was an interesting experience.

What else has been going on? I saw The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly for the first time on Monday. We watched it for Italian Cinema class, so expect a review either today or tomorrow. :) At least it's not more neorealism. (Not that I mind the neorealist films. Mostly I enjoyed them. But it's nice to have a change.)

big deal on madonna street

2009-11-06T08:33:00.012-05:00

Written for my Italian Cinema class.

Mario Monicelli’s 1958 film I Soliti Ignoti (or The Big Deal on Madonna Street) blurs genre lines. It is directly inspired by the heist films that had their heyday in the fifties and sixties; the heist films are a throwback to the hard-boiled film noir of the forties. Additionally, I Soliti Ignoti deals with many of the same issues that inspired neorealist films like Roma, Città Aperta and Ladri di Biciclette — particularly poverty and drastic societal changes in post-war Italy. But I Soliti Ignoti is more accessible than a typical neorealist film because it relies on comedy to get its message across.

In his September 12, 2008 review for the review site “Ozus’ World,” Dennis Schwartz complains that the film “should have been funnier — it perhaps lost some of its charm by being imported across the Atlantic.” Undeniably, I Soliti Ignoti is a product of the post-war Italian film scene, and some understanding of the film’s historical and cultural context is necessary to fully appreciate it. I Soliti Ignoti is the indirect descendant of forties film noir by way of fifties heist films, and both noir films and heist films tended to be dark in tone. According to reviewer David Ng, writing for the online journal Images, heist movies of the time were “inextricably associated with images of weathered, beaten men in trench coats huddled over a safe in the dead of night. An air of heavy solemnity hung over the proceedings…What Big Deal on Madonna Street did was to take the same characters, scenarios, and images and to somehow make it funny.” Ng goes on to say, “[Big Deal on Madonna Street] pays tribute to its serious-minded antecedents while forging an entirely new direction for the genre.” I Soliti Ignoti may seem fairly unfunny to Schwartz, and a little somber according to our modern conception of comedy, but it managed to give its contemporary Italian audience a sense of optimism while still addressing the issues that dogged a culture emerging from the bleakness of fascism.

The issues at the heart of I Soliti Ignoti are the same issues that are dealt with in neorealist films like Ladri di Biciclette — most noticeably poverty. But what sets I Soliti Ignoti apart from its more serious counterparts is its ability to use a backdrop of desperation and oppression to set up comedic situations; and, conversely, to use comedy to put a kinder face on the hardships being faced by the Italian people. At the end of the film, we find it ironically funny when the indolent Peppe, despite all his best efforts, finds himself swept up into a mob of manual laborers seeking jobs for the day. And while the fact that Mario is an orphan is a grim reminder of the devastating toll that war took on Italy’s population, Monicelli uses it to create a number of playful comic scenarios involving umbrellas or three identical Donald Duck aprons. Ladri di Biciclette never really rose above its sense of despair; I Soliti Ignoti enabled its audience to laugh at the hardships they faced each day.

I Soliti Ignoti is not a mindless, meaningless comedy. It willingly deals with the serious issues of post-war Italian society, but it never gives into to the desolation and darkness of neorealism or noir. Instead, it encouraged its audience to find joy in spite of their circumstances.

nano angst

2009-11-03T13:42:00.003-05:00

A major writing rant follows. Feel free to ignore.

I'm a little over five thousand words into my NaNo novel. I hate it, and I'm not sure what can be done to make me like it. Maybe it's because my characters are about as complex as cardboard and have no redeeming qualities? I wanted it to be noirish, but I think I took it a little too far, because none of the characters are likable in the least. Maybe it's because I have no real plot yet. I know where I want it to end up, and I have two plot points to work with -- but two plot points is not going to get me 50,000 words. Right now my main character is just kind of puttering around feeling sorry for herself. And therein lies another problem -- this is the first time I've ever really worked with a female main character. For some odd, inexplicable reason, I prefer writing male characters, and that's what I'm used to. Getting used to a female main character is just weird.

But most likely it's because I've spent the last three years or so working with my fantasy stories, so nearly everything I've written has been set in the same universe, and I've been able to develop that universe down to the smallest detail. Having to work now in an entirely different universe has been extremely frustrating. I've gone from having elaborate back-stories and histories spanning thousands of fictional years to not being sure how old my main character is or even which country the story is set in. I just feel unprepared and unorganized.

november rain

2009-11-03T03:32:00.006-05:00

Yesterday I made several trips through the rain to get foodstuffs for our Halloween party at the convent. I got soaked, but it was worth it -- not only do I get to use "November Rain" as my blog post title, but the party was amazing! Even with very short notice and limited resources, the costumes were creative and hilarious. My roommate and her boyfriend dressed up quite convincingly as old people...

...in stark contrast to my Trinity costume:

We ate lots of Italian junk food, danced to "Thriller," played Mad Gab, and even went trick-or-treating to Dr. Cole's room. The only downside of the evening was that my coconut cream pie didn't get finished in time. :(

Now reality sets back in. I find it hard to believe there are less than forty days left in this semester; time has really flown by here. This is a Bad Thing. It's November 3rd and I have already fallen behind on my NaNo word count. I have a paper due tomorrow and another one Thursday. Time to start drinking copious amounts of coffee...

irish stew in rome

2009-10-31T13:36:00.004-04:00

For lunch today we went to a great place near Piazza Venezia: the Scholars' Lounge, an Irish pub/sports bar. The atmosphere there was amazing. It reminded me a little of the Brick Store Pub back in Atlanta, but a little more authentically Irish probably. It was a small, low-lit, crowded place, all decked out for Halloween, and everybody was concentrating on the Arsenal-Tottenham game being shown on the big-screen TVs. Arsenal scored twice while we there, which went over pretty well.

I noticed that the background music during the commentators' half-time analysis was U2's "Get On Your Boots." That made me happy. :)

another reading meme

2009-10-30T05:56:00.004-04:00

Stolen from user BigGirlBlue at Squidoo. Because I'm bored, and because I like books.

What have you just read?
I've just finished rereading Dante's Inferno. I read it in high school for a humanities class, and now I'm reading it in college for a humanities class.

What are you reading now?
Kathleen Norris' memoir Acedia & Me and Edward Lucas' The New Cold War. The former is for class, the latter is for fun.

Do you have any idea what you'll read when you're done with that?
I'll be reading Othello and The Prince for class.

What's the worst thing you were ever forced to read?
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis. The most bitter, depressing, disturbing book I've ever read.

What's one book you always recommend to just about anyone?
Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Very few people take me up on it though. :( They don't know what they're missing.

Admit it, sadly the librarians at your library know you on a first name basis, don't they?
No, I don't think so. They probably know my mother on a first-name basis, though. The joys of being a homeschool mom.

Is there a book you absolutely love, but for some reason, people never think it sounds interesting, or maybe they read it and don't like it at all?
See my answer about A Farewell to Arms above... but also An American Childhood by Annie Dillard, and (among the members of my family) Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Do you read books while you eat?
Yes, all the time. So much so that we had to institute a rule in my house that there were "no books at the the table".

While you bathe?
I've tried it before, yes.

While you watch movies or TV?
Sometimes during a game on TV. But when it comes to movies, I'm one of those people who stays glued to the screen.

While you listen to music?
Sometimes. Sometimes music distracts me too much; other times I like listening to it softly while reading.

While you're on the computer?
No. I'm not that good at multi-tasking.

When you were little did other children tease you about your reading habits?
Not really. I grew up among nerdy homeschoolers.

What's the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn't put it down?
I stayed up pretty late for Allegiance by Timothy Zahn and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Yes, I'm a nerd.

Have any books made you cry?
Quite a few. A Farewell to Arms has made me cry. A couple years ago The Silmarillion and parts of Lord of the Rings made me cry. P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster books made me laugh so hard that I cried.

it's almost november!

2009-10-30T05:13:00.006-04:00

I love this time of year. It's hot chocolate time. I made some this morning, experimenting with the Fior di Spesa "Cacao" mix I picked up at the Standa yesterday. It was some of the best hot chocolate I've ever had -- very rich and very dark, and not too sweet. The only downside is that there are just two packets of mix per box. This could get expensive.

Not only is it hot chocolate time, it's almost Reformation Day. I love the atmosphere surrounding Reformation Day. I really wish I had done some better trip-planning; it would be so cool to be able to spend this weekend in Wittenberg. I guess I'll just have to satisfy myself with staying in "unholy Rome" and renting Luther from iTunes. :)

After Reformation Day, of course, comes November 1 -- and the craziness begins. Yes, I am going to attempt to balance classwork and sight-seeing with frenzied fiction-writing and do NaNoWriMo while in Rome. It didn't work for me last year, trying to find time to write around my class schedule at Geneva, but that was my freshman year, my very first semester, and I had already done JulNoWriMo -- and I did come close. I think I got to about 40,000 words. So I am being optimistic about this year. And I am still entertaining the fanciful hope that I'll be able to finish a novel before I'm twenty. Finish one, I mean -- edited, rewritten, and everything. Wish me luck. :)

greece, part iii

2009-10-28T14:56:00.010-04:00

For our last day in Greece we got away from the city and went to the island of Aegina, a little over an hour's ferry ride from Athens' port, Piraeus. We just spent the afternoon strolling up and down the waterfront, window-shopping and pausing to eat seafood, souvlaki and baklava. There were cats everywhere... this one let me pet him:

The island was a quiet place. The port town we were in was a warren of stone houses and little shops and narrow cobblestone streets, with a long row of outdoor restaurants and cafes lining the waterfront road. There was very little automobile traffic, or any traffic for that matter. But it was raining nearly the whole time we were there. I guess that probably kept some of the crowds away. It just seemed like a quiet fishing village -- quite a contrast to the constant noise and grime of Athens. It was the first time on the trip I was really able to relax.

The next day, Tuesday, three of us got up at 5:30 AM to catch a bus to Patras, a port city about four hours west of Athens. Our ferry from Patras to Ancona, Italy left at 2:30 PM. I shelled out about 30 euros and got a dormitory room this time -- for the passage over, we camped out in a stairwell. :) The dorm room was nice. There were six bunks, but it turned out I was the only one who had booked it, so I got the place to myself.

It's kind of misleading to call the ship a "ferry" -- it was as posh as a cruise ship. There were two restaurants, three bars, shops, and a casino aboard. We spent most of our time in the lounges watching the oddest selection of movies on the ship's TV -- among them The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a martial arts movie called The Warlords, and a Bruce Willis movie called Hostage. We couldn't hear the dialogue for any of them, so my understanding of the last two is a little vague. I've seen The Assassination of Jesse James before.

Here's a picture of one of the lounges. Not too shabby.

Our plans for the rest of break have changed a little -- our trip to Barcelona fell through, so we're back in Rome now, resting up. I was looking forward to Spain, but I have to say I'm happy it turned out this way. Traveling stresses me way too much. I think it's because I like having things very organized, and I just don't know how to cope with things when they don't go according to plan. At least this way I know I'll get some rest before school starts back again.

I picked up a book in Greece called The New Cold War by Edward Lucas. I'm just about finished with it -- 22 hours on a boat gives you plenty of reading time. :) I'm not sure if it's available yet in the States, but I'd highly recommend reading it if you get the chance.

greece, part ii

2009-10-25T14:05:00.005-04:00

After spending some time walking around the city today, I have to admit that I'm not impressed with Athens. Apart from the Acropolis, it's dirty and ugly and smells bad. There's garbage littered everywhere. It looks like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie. I'd like to learn more about the economy and government here, and more about recent Greek history, because from what I can see the city is pretty much poverty-stricken. The touristy areas meld right into slums and red-light districts. There's such a contrast between the majesty of the Acropolis and the squalor down below.

greece

2009-10-25T07:38:00.006-04:00

Right now I'm sitting in the lobby of a hostel in Athens, Greece. It's pouring rain outside but it's not too cold... if this is Greece in late October, I'm afraid to know what it's like in July or August. I've been here for two full days now. Yesterday we climbed up to the Acropolis and saw the amphitheater of Dionysus and the Parthenon (not the Pantheon -- there's been some confusion). I'll post more pictures when I get the chance, but no guarantees as to how soon that will be. There is no wireless access at this place so I can't upload any pictures from my laptop. I tried going to Starbucks to use their wifi, but I didn't take my passport and apparently I needed it to be able to purchase a wireless card. So I had to satisfy myself with drinking a Mocha Coconut Frappuccino and people-watching. :(

It was raining a little when we went to the Parthenon, so the crowds weren't too bad and everything was very still and silent, except for the wind. I've been kind of disappointed because several of the places we've gone to recently have been under construction/renovation and the outsides are all covered in scaffolding, which makes it a littler harder to appreciate their beauty and historicity. But despite the modern construction equipment, the Parthenon was breathtaking. I didn't realize the Acropolis was so high, or that Athens, spread out below, was so huge. It is an astoundingly big city. The funny thing is, it just stops at the edges -- one moment there are flats and office buildings, the next moment there are green wooded slopes.

We're here in Athens for another day after this, and then three of us are off to Barcelona, via the South of France. At the moment we're not sure exactly where we're going to be staying in Barcelona. Hostels seem to be pretty cheap though, and a lot of them claim to have wireless access included in the price, so hopefully I'll be able to keep in touch a little more frequently.

changes

2009-10-20T03:30:00.003-04:00

It's been a rough couple of days. We have a ten-day break starting on Thursday, so this week has been full of rushed class- and homework, cramming, and trip-planning. On top of that, I've made the difficult decision to leave Geneva next semester.

It's been a possibility for a while, but I still feel like I've sprung it on people kind of unexpectedly. I wish I didn't have to break the news here in Rome. I don't want it to put a damper on the rest of this wonderful semester. But I didn't make the final decision until yesterday, and I couldn't realistically wait until we were back in the States to let people know that I won't be at Geneva in the spring. So it had to be now.

My trip to Florence this past weekend has kind of been lost in the shuffle already -- regrettably, because it was one of the things I was looking forward to the most. Maybe when I've had a couple days to get used to this new turn of events I'll be able to write about it. It deserves a post of its own. :)

I want to say thanks to everybody who's been commenting on this blog and on Facebook. You guys are such an encouragement to me, especially right now.

memoirs

2009-10-18T14:38:00.011-04:00

I'm in the middle of reading Kathleen Norris' memoir Acedia & Me for my humanities class. I don't know anything about Kathleen Norris, and I didn't know anything about the concept of "acedia" (a kind of spiritual torpor and boredom) until it came up in our discussion of The Inferno earlier this week. All I know is that I'm having trouble getting into the book. There are a couple of different reasons, but the big one has to do simply with the fact that it's memoir.

More and more, I'm bothered by the concept of memoirs and autobiographies. I feel that memoirs tend to be written by self-centered, egotistic people who think that everyone is entitled to their opinion. No one besides a self-centered, egotistic person would think that his or her life is of any interest whatsoever to the general public. It's the same thing with blogs. I feel the same way about this blog... I feel like I come off sounding self-important and stuck-up when I post things here. I mean, who am I? I'm not an expert on traveling, or on Italy, or on movies, or on being a projectionist, or on WWII history. I'm not helping anybody by blogging about this stuff; I'm not furthering anybody's knowledge or contributing to anybody's well-being. Maybe I technically have the right to write about it, but why would I entertain the idea that anybody cares about what I have to say, unless I'm self-important and stuck-up?

Basically, it just seems like it's close to impossible to write a blog entry, memoir, or autobiography about your life without saying something to the effect of, "I'm something special; you should be paying attention to me." How can you blog about yourself and be a humble, selfless kind of person? It's mutually exclusive. By blogging about myself, I feel like I'm just contributing to the constant flow of useless information that overwhelms us and drowns truly worthwhile information in irrelevance.

I'd like to hear people's thoughts on this. Is it selfish to write a personal blog?

la dolce vita

2009-10-15T14:35:00.004-04:00

Translated literally, La Dolce Vita means “the sweet life” — an ironic title, because by the end of the film we can see that the flashy, glamorous lifestyle portrayed onscreen is anything but “sweet.” According to reviewer Philip French, however, director Federico Fellini actually intended La Dolce Vita to mean “the sweetness of life,” a title with a slightly more nuanced meaning. By giving us a disturbing look at what happens when human beings reject the search for a higher purpose in life and surrender to their animal instincts, Fellini seems to be implying how sweet a meaningful life could be. But he never does more than imply. La Dolce Vita is a Dantean descent into hell, only there is no reemerging at the end.

In his January 1997 review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert describes the film’s main character, Marcello, as someone who “dreams of someday doing something good.” At the beginning of the film, Marcello does seem like a good-hearted, if flawed, character. He is beginning to be disillusioned with the shallow, materialistic life he leads as a gossip columnist; deep down, he still has literary aspirations. His live-in girlfriend Emma has dreams of her own, too — she wants to marry Marcello, have children, and establish a warm, loving home. Even the celebrities Marcello associates with have dreams of escaping their tabloid-cover lives and finding real happiness. French’s February 2008 review for The Observer compares the society figures of La Dolce Vita to the Lost Generation of post-World-War-I European and American intellectuals. Like so many members of the Lost Generation, Marcello and his fellow socialites never find the fulfillment they desire, partially because they cannot rid themselves of their old habits, partially because they have nowhere to turn. The teachings of the Church are portrayed as fabrications which deceive the illiterate and naive; marriage is portrayed as restrictive and doomed to fail. In the end, Marcello abandons his dreams and surrenders to the temporal pleasures of sex, drugs, and money. His friend Steiner, who recognizes the shallowness of the celebrity lifestyle, opts for detachment from the world — a choice which ultimately leads him to lose his own humanity. He ends up killing himself and his two children.

What makes La Dolce Vita such a hard film to watch is that — in a typically neorealist fashion — it fails to provide us with any solutions. Fellini shows us how truly miserable life can be when a person has no greater purpose than achieving financial success or getting sexual satisfaction, but he does not show us how such a life can be redeemed. When Marcello walks off-screen at the end of the film, he has forsaken his dreams once and for all; he has accepted his life of emptiness and misery. Christ — represented by a bloated fish that has washed up on the beach — is dead; there is no redemption to be found in Him. Fellini uses the character of an innocent, angelic-looking girl to suggest that there is an alternative to “the sweet life,” but he never does more than suggest. Marcello turns his back on the girl in the film’s closing shots.

La Dolce Vita is not only disturbing, but morally draining. Its scenes of debauchery and the degradation of the human body are sickening; its portrayal of religion — and religious institutions like marriage — is jaded and bitter. Sadly, it remains all too relevant today.

"with or without you" on guitar

2009-10-15T04:23:00.004-04:00

I found this video while "stumbling" today. The kid's name is Sungha Jung.

the sacred and the profane

2009-10-14T11:59:00.010-04:00

Today we went on an expedition to the Capuchin Crypt under the Church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini (say that three times fast), and then to the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. The crypt was slightly creepy. It houses the remains of over 4,000 Capuchin friars -- mostly just piles of skulls and other random bones, but some intact skeletons, dressed in their monks' robes and holding crucifixes. I found it a little odd and maybe a little disrespectful that the place is a tourist attraction, something people can gawk at. I felt the same way about Pompeii.

Santa Maria Maggiore was beautiful, but I just couldn't appreciate it. At the same time a communion service was being held in one of the chapels, people were buying shot glasses and jewelry in the church's souvenir store. I kept thinking about Jesus clearing out the money-changers and merchants from the Temple in Matthew 21. This was the exact same kind of thing. I was disappointed.

After visiting the churches we decided to juxtapose the sacred atmosphere with a totally secular one and go to lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe, just down the street from the Capuchin Crypt. It was pretty expensive, about €10 for my burger and €5 for my milkshake, but sometimes you've just got to splurge. :) We had a good time.

the boondock saints

2009-10-13T07:48:00.002-04:00

I watched The Boondock Saints for the first time a couple weeks ago. I wanted to write a review then, but I didn't have the time. So I'm posting one now.

I'm a sucker for crime dramas. I enjoyed watching Saints. I don't think it was particularly ground-breaking in any way, though the religious angle was interesting -- probably the religious angle is what makes it a little more memorable than a lot of other, similar movies. There's something about quasi-Scriptural monologues that can make any action movie seem really epic. (Think Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction: "There's a passage I got memorized... Ezekiel 25:17.") But in the case of Saints, the religious aspect also makes it a little more problematic than other, similar movies. We watch the brothers commit execution-style murders and relish it -- and then claim their actions are not only justified, but mandated, by God.

I'm a libertarian. I think the film raises some good questions about the ability of our bureaucratic American justice system to cope with the wickedness and scale of organized crime. My problem with the film is not necessarily that it shows the brothers stepping beyond the bounds of the law, under the illusion that they are on a God-given mission. My problem is that the film doesn't take the time or effort to show us what the larger consequences of their actions could be. The only purpose seems to be showing us just how cool it is to wear trench coats and black leather gloves and carry guns. The films pulls God into the equation without really exploring where the brothers' vigilantism could take them. That makes it flippant at best, blasphemous at worst. If the film delved a little deeper into the issue of whether or not vigilantism is ever morally right, it would not be as much of a problem. But The Boondock Saints is not that kind of film. Ultimately, it is just another action movie. And so it ends up making a mockery of the God that its protagonists claim to be serving.

The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day gets a limited US release this month. Maybe the sequel will improve upon the first film's moral shortcomings. Maybe that's too much to hope.

all the president's butter

2009-10-13T02:27:00.005-04:00

Grocery shopping over here is an experience. I've found that you can generally get most of the stuff you can get in the States -- there's even a Mexican food section at the local Standa supermarket. (By section, I mean a partition that's about two feet wide and four feet high.) It just comes in smaller quantities and there's usually only one or two different brands. I come from a fairly large family and I'm used to grocery shopping -- the once-a-pay-period, multiple-shopping-carts, stocking-up-for-a-siege-or-natural-disaster kind of grocery shopping. It doesn't work like that here. Most people buy the things they need on a day-to-day basis. And they simply buy less than most Americans do.

It is possible to get a few American brands here; you can get Frosted Flakes -- called "Frosties" -- and Coca-Cola. Italian Coke products tend to taste better than American ones, actually. I've been told that it's because they use real sugar, not corn syrup. A lot of our dairy products here seem to be French in origin. Our yogurt is the French brand Danone. The butter we have here is another French brand, President, and we get it in little individual packets; buying butter in two-pound quantities is pretty much unheard-of. Ketchup is unheard-of, too. What we've got instead is Mato Mato Squiz. I'm not sure which name is more unappealing. :)

new look

2009-10-12T17:59:00.002-04:00

I decided to give this place a new look for autumn. :) The image is one of my own, taken on Palatine Hill. Let me know what you think!

church

2009-10-11T14:32:00.008-04:00

I have now been in Rome for exactly one month.

I went back to St. Andrew's Church on Via XX Settembre this morning. The service is much more broadly evangelical than what I'm used to in the OPC and PCA churches I attend back home, but it's comforting to be able to look at an order of worship and see hymns that I recognize. :) The sermon was probably the best one I've heard since I've been here in Rome. It came from Luke 9:18-24, where Jesus asks his disciples "Who do you say that I am?". The message was mostly about Christ's identity, but it also touched on how we, as Christians, should be living our lives in a way that reflects our relationship with the Son of God.

I enjoyed both the sermon and the service, but I've got to admit I still have difficulty getting used to sitting under female ministers. I'm pretty much convinced that there shouldn't be women in the pulpit. Maybe I'm just too old-fashioned and Puritanical, but I feel like passages like 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 are pretty clear. Still, it's not something that has stopped me from enjoying attending Sunday services here in Rome. Maybe it would be different if I was a guy and the head of a household, but I'm not. A male minister is certainly my preference, but I feel like attending a church that occasionally has a female minister presiding is better than not attending church at all.

lazy saturday

2009-10-10T15:52:00.005-04:00

Today was a pretty relaxing day. My roommate was gone and I had the place to myself, so I slept in late and ate breakfast around ten thirty. Then I got a shower and went out shopping on my own. I took the metro to Piazza della Repubblica first and wandered around there. They were setting up for some sort of concert in the piazza; there was a big stage and some pretty hefty sound equipment, and Carabinieri standing around, and they were piping Pink Floyd through the speakers. (On The Run from Dark Side of the Moon.) I would have liked to stick around for a little bit and see what was going on, but I wanted to get to the grocery store before it got too late. So I came back to Via Nomentana and went down to the Standa and the Oviesse store on Corso Trieste for a while. I got back to the convent at around four. I was planning on doing some much-needed room-cleaning at that point, but for some reason I decided to procrastinate and watch Twilight with the SD and another girl. I don't know why. What's worse, I actually liked it. Fail. :(

In other news, Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize.

I think I'm going to try the Scottish Presbyterian church again tomorrow. I like that the service doesn't start till eleven. :)

hemingway and italy

2009-10-09T06:11:00.009-04:00

One of my original goals for this semester was to be able to go to all the places that show up in my all-time favorite novel, A Farewell to Arms -- Milan, Udine, maybe Montreux and Lausanne in Switzerland. Even if I don't end up making it to any of those places, it's still amazing to think that I'm so close to the places where Hemingway lived and got inspiration from. I read his short story "Cat in the Rain" again this morning. It's a really good story just by itself, but it's even better to read here in Italy. I can pretty much look out my window and see the same kind of things he describes. There's a war monument just down Via Nomentana at Porta Pia, palm trees in the parks along the street. Call me a nerd, but it's just the coolest thing.

You can read the story here.

ladri di biciclette

2009-10-08T10:50:00.006-04:00

Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 drama Ladri di Biciclette (The Bicycle Thieves) is not a neorealist film in the way it is shot. De Sica had no qualms about deliberately setting up his shots, or about using close-ups of grief-stricken faces for emotional impact when other neorealists preferred medium-long shots that kept their audiences at a real-life distance from the characters. Furthermore, while other neorealist directors intentionally refrained from making absolute moral statements, De Sica used the camera to transmit a clear message to his audience. In the end, what makes Ladri di Biciclette such a powerful film is that it successfully combines the harsh emotional impact of neorealism and the artistic camera-work of more traditional cinema with a message that allows us a modicum of hope.

In his March 1999 review of Ladri di Biciclette for the Sun-Times, Roger Ebert summarizes the “famous closing sequence of the movie” in a few simple words: “Ricci is tempted to steal a bicycle himself, continuing the cycle of theft and poverty.” But Ebert misses the point. Ricci is not just “tempted” to steal a bicycle. He does steal a bicycle. And by doing so, he finally and completely loses the moral high ground. He never regains it; the films ends with Ricci as a failed hero. De Sica deliberately rejects convention by allowing this to happen, by refusing to give us the ending we expect. We feel betrayed by Ricci, this character we have come to care for; we did not expect him to fail so utterly, or at least we do not expect him to remain a failure by the end. Reviewing the film for The Guardian in December 2008, Peter Bradshaw writes, “[Ricci] seems unable or unwilling to embrace the obvious redemptive moral — that his son is the important possession, not the wretched bicycle — and De Sica is unwilling to embrace it either, perhaps precisely because it is too obvious.” This is the most prominent neorealist aspect of Ladri di Biciclette: De Sica leaves his audience hanging, expecting a redemption that we never see.

That does not mean De Sica leaves us without hope. Ricci has lost the moral high ground by the end of the film, but his son has gained it. “[Bruno] is finally to be his father’s saviour,” says Bradshaw. De Sica shows this to us without using any dialogue. Instead, we merely see Bruno slide his hand inside his father’s as they walk down the street and the credits begin to roll. The shot is set up very carefully: Bruno in the lower right-hand corner, traditionally where the weak and helpless character might be; his father, the authority figure, towering above him to the left. The significance of the shot lies in the fact that we cannot see Ricci’s face. He may be the authority figure, but he has lost our trust and his credibility. Bruno is younger, weaker, maybe a little naive. But we can see his face. He is the new hope.

De Sica’s artistic vision might have distanced him from neorealist directors and critics who preferred more natural camera-work and lighting, but the Rome that De Sica shows us in Ladri di Biciclette is still heartbreakingly realistic, as is the hero who fails and who remains a failure when the screen goes black. The reason Ladri di Biciclette resounds so powerfully, though, is that the final shot still leaves us with a sense of hope for the future.

bastardi senza gloria

2009-10-07T04:33:00.007-04:00

Five of us went to see Inglourious Basterds at the Cinema Metropolitan in Piazza del Popolo last night. I had made sure beforehand that it was going to be an English-language (versione originale) showing, because three people in our group had never seen it before. We got to the cinema at about 19.00, got our tickets, and then wandered around outside in the shopping district for a little bit, waiting until they would let us into the auditorium. The place was pretty much like an American theater. Ticket prices were just about the same, €7.50 for an evening ticket. The only major differences were that there was no age restriction on seeing the movie -- just a warning about the violence, taped on the box office window -- and we had assigned seating. And there was a restaurant/bar actually inside the theater, serving gelato and mixed drinks. I can understand why people complain about our American concession stands now.

About thirty seconds into the film, I realized that I'd made kind of a big oversight. Two-thirds of Inglourious Basterds is subtitled even in the "English-language" version, because the dialogue is -- accurately enough -- mostly in French and German. And when the subtitles popped up on the screen, they weren't in English. They were in Italian. (The English parts were still in English, which was apparently enough to make this the English-language showing.) I felt pretty dumb for a little bit. Then the other girl who'd seen it before suggested that we switch seats around so that she and I could explain what was going on, line-by-line, to the people who had not seen it before. So that's what we ended up doing. We whisperingly translated a two-and-a-half-hour-long film in the middle of a packed theater. I think we did it quietly enough that it wasn't too much of a bother. Nobody told us to shut up, at least. I just feel kind of bad because Basterds is one of those movies where the dialogue is really important, and my rough translation just couldn't capture a lot of it.

Even with all of that craziness, we had a good time. Everyone in our group loved the movie, and the Italian audience was really into it too. They gave it an ovation at the end. The scene where Aldo Raine attempts to speak Italian ("Bahn-JOR-no", "GRAH-zee") was so much funnier here than it was in the States. There weren't just a few snorts or chuckles, like there was back home. Everyone in the audience was laughing out loud and clapping. And the Italian woman sitting beside me was particularly amused when Bridget Von Hammersmark exasperatedly asks the Basterds if Americans can speak any other language than English -- obviously, this woman's experience was that we can't. Sad but true.

All-in-all, it was a welcome break from neorealism. :)

adventures with eurail passes, part two

2009-10-05T18:23:00.007-04:00

So... I just spent a weekend in Paris.

It was amazing. The city was beautiful, the people were friendly, the food was delicious. (We found an excellent boulangerie/patisserie on the Rue de la Roquette. Croissant des amandes = pretty much the best thing I've ever had for breakfast.) I really wish I had a lot more time to spend there, because there are so many more places I'd like to see... Ernest Hemingway's old stomping grounds in Montparnasse, for example. But considering that we were there for less than 48 hours and managed to see the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and Notre Dame (plus had time to enjoy some excellent meals), I think we did pretty good.

The train rides to and from were an experience. Met an Egyptian guy, a Malaysian couple, a bloke from Manchester who's studying in Florence, and a Canuck from Vancouver who's been traveling around Europe for the past couple weeks. Had some really interesting conversations. :)

Here's me at the Pont Neuf, with the Eiffel Tower in the distance. I would like to point out that this is almost the exact same spot where Chris Cooper's character is standing in The Bourne Identity. :)

adventures with eurail passes, part one

2009-10-02T05:53:00.007-04:00

Yesterday was the first time I really felt like a pushy and obnoxious American tourist.

Three of us have these Eurail passes which allow us to travel by train in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and Greece. This weekend, we decided to go to Paris. We were going to leave on the 18.40 train last night and get into Paris at around 9.30 this morning. So we got to Termini, Rome's major train station, right at 16.00 yesterday afternoon and got in line so we could get our passes validated. After standing in line for about twenty minutes, we got to the counter and the lady stamped the passes -- and then told us that the train to Paris was booked full.

So now this is the scenario: the earliest we can leave is 18.40 tonight (Friday). Instead of having most of Friday and all day Saturday in Paris, we are now stuck with getting into Paris at 9.30 Saturday morning (with classes back here in Rome on Monday). And our Paris hotel was booked for Friday and Saturday, so we're going to end up paying the rate for two nights even though we're only going to be there for one.

We stood there at the counter trying to figure that all out. The lady just sat and looked at us impassively the whole time. She said maybe a total of three words. It took us a long time to make up our minds. I was pretty upset and I really had no idea what our best option was -- I was almost to the point of saying forget about the whole Paris thing, let's just stick in Rome for the weekend. (Put in perspective, it's a little ridiculous that that should feel like such an inconvenience...) But finally we decided to make reservations on tonight's train, and just have the one day in Paris. None of us were in particularly good moods as we left. I think the lady was pretty glad to see us go.

Today I feel like an idiot for being such a jerk about it. But lesson learned, I guess -- make train reservations a whole lot further in advance. And one day in Paris is still better than no day in Paris.

open city

2009-10-01T04:50:00.005-04:00

Written for Italian Cinema. A response to the question "What is the central theme of Open City, and how is it conveyed through the photography?"

Although Roberto Rosselini’s Roma, Città Aperta was produced and released in 1945, it feels much more recent. At a time when most war films — at least those produced in Hollywood — were star-driven vehicles intended to boost morale by glossing over the grittier aspects of war, Rosselini’s film is harshly realistic, living up to its title (in English, Città Aperta means “open city”). The camera never blinks, never shies away from showing us horror and tragedy firsthand. It was enough to cause American review boards to censor the film upon its U.S. release. But to censor Città Aperta is to sterilize its message. It is by no means an easy film to watch, but it was intended to portray reality, and it succeeds brilliantly in doing so. Città Aperta is an unembellished portrait of war-time Rome that gave Rosselini’s Italian audience a clear model of patriotism.

Rosselini’s willingness to show his audience the true face of Rome during the city’s German occupation is what makes his film so convincing. “When you glimpse looks of terror or anger in an extra in Open City,” wrote reviewer Phil Villarreal in a June 2006 article for the Arizona Daily Star, “you’re seeing a regular Joe recalling the emotions that stirred inside him just a few years before.” Bosley Crowther’s February 1946 New York Times review of the film has this to say: “[S]uch a picture as Open City would not likely be made under normal and established conditions. In the first place, it has the wind-blown look of a film shot from actualities, with the camera providentially on the scene…The stringent necessity of economy compelled the producers to make a film that has all the appearance and flavor of a straight documentary.” Crowther voices sentiments that Villarreal echoes: “[T]he feeling that pulses through [the film] gives evidence that it was inspired by artists whose own emotions had been deeply and recently stirred.”

So the Rome that Rosselini shows us in Città Aperta is the true Rome, laid bare for the camera. Simply because of the way it is filmed, the patriotism of Città Aperta’s primary protagonists hits us much more powerfully than the scrubbed, sanitized patriotism of a contemporaneous American film like The Sands of Iwo Jima. Rosselini’s characters are not larger-than-life heroes. They are living, breathing human beings. They have real faults and flaws. The camera shows us every aspect of their lives — the ordinary, the extraordinary, the beautiful, the ugly. Rosselini rarely uses close-ups or artistic shots. We see the characters as we would see them in real life — at eye-level, in full view as they run down the street. The camera reinforces Rosselini’s point: heroes and patriots are not superhuman. They are not perfect. They are ordinary, everyday people. They come from all different backgrounds and walks of life: a Catholic priest, a communist partisan fighter, a pregnant single mother, a group of boys who are barely old enough to remember life before the war, and certainly not old enough to remember life before fascism. They are all drastically different from one another, and they all have drastically different ideologies. But they have put aside their differences to fight for the same end. The priest, Don Pietro, tells his German captor that “[T]hose who fight for justice and truth walk in the path of God, and the paths of God are infinite.” This is the message Rosselini wanted to transmit to his audience: creed and profession and social status do not matter. Anyone can choose to fight for justice and truth. Anyone can help shape Italy’s future.

Rosselini’s unapologetically realistic style makes it easy for his audience to connect with the characters onscreen. Through those characters, Rosselini invites his audience to take a stand. Città Aperta was a call to arms, of sorts; Rosselini was calling on his fellow Italians to be patriots. But he was not condoning blind or jingoistic patriotism. Rather, he was calling for a conscientious patriotism, a patriotism founded on the ideals of justice and truth. Only by embracing that form of patriotism could Italy hope to rise above the ashes of war.

missing things

2009-09-30T07:34:00.006-04:00

I haven't really been homesick yet, which surprises me. I've always been kind of a homebody. But I think maybe it's because I was expecting so much of a culture shock when I got here, and there really hasn't been one. Granted, I haven't been very far outside of Rome itself yet. But so far, adjusting to life here has not been that hard at all.

That doesn't mean I haven't missed some things -- usually the most random things. I haven't missed peanut butter yet (that seems to be a big issue here, since the only place you can get it is at this really expensive American grocery by the Vatican), but I miss other things. I miss our local radio stations. I don't even listen to the radio that much, but I'll turn it on when I'm driving to and from work. Then I listen to a fairly equal mixture of Project 9-6-1, Rock 100.5, 97.1 The River, and 92.9 Dave FM. I miss those stations. I miss work. I really do. I miss Starbucks, that huge corporate monster. I miss Burger King's Mocha Joes. I miss going to siblings' soccer and baseball games. I miss going to Los Cowboys any time we have an excuse to celebrate. I'm bummed that I'm missing the Braves' playoff bid and that I'll miss U2's 360° tour and half of hockey season.

I wouldn't classify it as homesickness though. I can express my appreciation for all those things, part of my American culture, while I am truly enjoying living in an Italian culture that is simultaneously very similar to and drastically different from our own. One culture is not necessarily better than the other. One of the great things about this whole three-month study-abroad program is that I can learn to appreciate both cultures in their own way.

cabiria

2009-09-26T07:39:00.005-04:00

Written for my Italian Cinema class. We were supposed to respond to the question "What image of the Italian nation and people is presented in Cabiria?"

Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria is both remarkably innovative and an unmistakable product of its time. Technically, it’s brilliant. Each frame is as carefully and artistically composed as a painting. Its costumes and sets are magnificent; even in modern cinema, historical epics are hard-pressed to rival Cabiria’s attention to detail. Pastrone’s use of the trucking shot, which added fluid movement to his painterly scenes, was ground-breaking. But Cabiria is as much a twentieth-century political treatise as it is a masterpiece of early cinema. The content and message of the film were intended for a contemporary Italian culture that was trying to create a new mythology for itself.

Cabiria’s technical excellence is widely noted. Roger Ebert calls the complex film “beautiful and enthralling,” praising its “limitless scope and ambition.” He points out that Cabiria required thousands of extras, something that was unheard-of at the time and remained unusual until the extravagant historical epics of the 1950s and 1960s came on the scene — films like William Wyler’s Ben-Hur and Joseph Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra. Reviewer Carl Bennett praises Cabiria’s “stunning location photography, lavish costumes, ambitious special effects, and jaw-dropping gigantic sets full of intricate design detailings.” He goes on to say that “Cabiria succeeds on nearly all fronts.”

Pastrone’s masterpiece does merit the praise, but there is more to Cabiria than just technical achievement. At the film’s core is a clear message intended for an Italian audience that was struggling with a sense of national identity. The Rome that Pastrone sets up in Cabiria is the Rome he wanted his audience to bring to mind when they looked at their own contemporary Italy. In Cabiria, Rome is the civilizing light of the world, conquering barbarism, ending pagan ignorance. The Roman characters are uniformly generous, inventive, self-sacrificial, and kind-hearted, albeit proud and firm. Above all, they are community-minded. In a striking scene, a group of Roman slaves who have escaped a volcanic eruption equally divide up the treasures they have salvaged. Afterwards, they work together to eke out a living and keep each other safe. They are unselfish and loyal to the point of implausibility — a clear-cut model of community for the Italian people to emulate. In Pastrone’s vision, it is not the Roman Marc Antony who betrays his country and falls for an alluring foreign queen; it is a duplicitous North-African mercenary. Non-Roman characters are sometimes portrayed sympathetically, but in a rather patronizing way; they are misguided, naive, and pitiable. In fact, the only non-Roman portrayed in a truly positive light is Archimedes, who manages nearly single-handedly to fend off a Roman fleet; perhaps this is Pastrone’s way of acknowledging the debt that Rome owed to Grecian civilization.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Cabiria changed the way movies were made. The film’s influence on later epics, and on the film industry in general, is obvious. But it’s not enough to watch Cabiria for its innovation and achievement. To truly understand Pastrone’s creative vision, Cabiria must be seen in the light of its own historical context. Then, it becomes not only a magnificent early sword-and-sandals epic, but a powerful political statement.

pompeii for a day

2009-09-24T14:24:00.005-04:00

The last couple days have been pretty busy. Homework is starting to stack up a little bit and we had two major excursions this week: first to the Etruscan Museum in the Borghese Gardens on Tuesday, and then a day trip down to Pompeii yesterday. The Etruscan Museum was enjoyable, but Pompeii was unforgettable.

I really didn't realize just how huge the excavation site is. It's simply enormous. We got to the site at about 10.00 and stayed til around 16.00 and we didn't come close to seeing everything. Of the part that I saw, the highlight was definitely the Villa di Misteri, which was amazingly well-preserved. If you used your imagination a little, it wasn't hard to picture how the place might have looked two thousand years age -- despite the crowds, the site itself hasn't really become overly "touristy" yet. It's still an archaeological dig in progress, and it looks and feels like it.

The modern town outside the site, Pompei, is a neat little place itself. Very laid-back and friendly. We sat in the square for a little while and watched a group of kids play football (the real kind) in front of the church and some older men carry on a conversation by the town fountain. Very refreshing after the busyness of the big city. :)

food, glorious food

2009-09-19T05:44:00.010-04:00

Went to an excellent ristorante Cinese last night. It's about two blocks away from where we're staying, on the Via di S. Costanza, and it was really cheap and really good. Seven of us had a veritable feast for right at €60. I had a bowl of hot-and-sour soup and a big plate of Kung Pau chicken for just €6.30. This place definitely has the potential to become our regular haunt. :)

Next place to try is the Mexican restaurant I spotted a little ways up Via Nomentana.

One thing that has surprised me about Italian cuisine is the amount of meat Italians eat. They just don't eat that much at all. I'm not a big meat eater and it's still a lot less than I'm used to. We've basically been eating a diet of bread, yogurt, fruit, and cheese. But I've been reading in my Italian history book that Italy has never really been suited for the raising of beef or any kind of red meat. Grains, yes. Beef, no. So pasta sauce with ground hamburger is really not authentic at all. Olive Garden, you have been found out.

the tale of two basilicas

2009-09-18T04:47:00.009-04:00

I just finished reading through the book of Romans for my daily devotions this week. I didn't plan it that way at all. God's providence is just amazing and unexpected like that.

This week I visited two different basilicas, Saint Clement's and Saint Peter's. Saint Peter's was magnificent. I burned out the batteries on my camera twice snapping pictures. It was just unbelievable walking into this place and seeing the Pietà off to the right and so many great works of art hanging above the interred remains of Renaissance popes. Thinking about the time, effort, and money that went into it is staggering.

But Saint Clement's was a much more awe-inspiring experience.

Part of it is probably just that there were a lot less tourists there and you could actually sit down in the nave and just appreciate the beauty of the basilica in peace. But most of it was being able to go down to the remains of the third-century church below the present basilica (itself built in the Middle Ages). There was nothing magnificent or costly about that early church at all. Simple brick and earthen walls, plain crumbling archways instead of crisp, ornate Gothic ones. It was cool and dark and silent, except for the soft sound of spring water echoing on the walls, and you could almost feel 1800 years of history around you. The only thing going through my mind was wow, over and over again. There were early Christian symbols etched roughly on the walls; crosses, phrases in Greek lettering. I was standing where early Roman Christians had met in secret, risking their lives for their faith.

Compared to that, Saint Peter's just seemed so fake. Big and loud and shiny and fake.

I don't want to make it seem like going to the Vatican wasn't worthwhile. It was certainly worthwhile, just for the artwork and the architecture and the photo opportunities and the bird's-eye view of Rome from the basilica dome. It was worth it for the sight-seeing. But going to Saint Clement's was spiritually uplifting.

businessmen on a moped

2009-09-15T04:17:00.003-04:00

review of tuck

2009-09-14T14:34:00.005-04:00

I finished Stephen Lawhead's Tuck on the plane from Pittsburgh to New York. It's the third book in his King Raven trilogy, a reinterpretation of the Robin Hood legend that moves the setting of the story to Norman-occupied Wales in the 11th century. The first two books, Hood and Scarlet, were excellent. Tuck is a bit of a letdown. The quality and style of the writing hasn't changed at all, and it's obvious that Lawhead knows and loves his Welsh setting, but everything just feels rushed. There is little real conflict in the book; time and again the main characters face danger and death, only to escape with no injuries whatsoever. When they do incur casualties, it's almost like Lawhead is conceding that he had to have someone die for us to suspend our disbelief. Consequently the deaths don't carry any kind of emotional weight. The too-good-to-be-true ending seems to come out of nowhere. Most noticeably, the relationship between the Robin Hood figure -- here renamed Bran ap Brychan -- and his Lady Merian, after being gradually built up over the previous two books, is barely touched upon in Tuck. It just isn't really obvious that they care for each other beyond the "business" part of things -- putting together a rebellion, operating a hidden forest base, etc. Tuck is already a long book, but it could have been better if Lawhead had slowed things down a little bit and let the characters develop.

quick update

2009-09-14T06:27:00.002-04:00

I have now gotten through my first "class" here in Rome. It was basically just an introductory session for our humanities class, with our instructor Dr. Szabo outlining some of the major activities we'll be doing in the course. Our big project for the semester is to create a digital art gallery that documents a specific topic. I was a little disappointed that we had to choose from a preassigned list of topics, instead of coming up with our own -- something about Rome's military history would probably have been my first choice. I'm such a nerd. :( Anyway my group ended up with "angels" as our topic, but we're thinking about broadening it to focus on sacred or holy objects and images in Rome and all around Italy. Could be interesting.

We're meeting with our Italian language instructor after lunch. That should just about wrap up the academic stuff for today. Need to do laundry and get to the grocery store at some point.

just a typical sunday stroll

2009-09-13T13:22:00.013-04:00

Today we went to an English-language church service at the Rome Baptist Church on the Piazza San Lorenzo. The service was a generic, contemporary evangelical type of service, but it was really a great experience to be able to worship with believers from all different kinds of cultural backgrounds. The walk from the Spagna metro station to the church was amazing. We went past the Spanish Steps and then past just about every high-end fashion store you can think of: Gucci, Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Bulgari, Cartier, Prada... all along narrow cobblestone streets filled with pigeons, horse-drawn carriages, and tourists. Lots and lots of tourists. I was kind of hoping that Sunday would be a quieter day, but apparently not.

After church, we explored a little bit. Saw the huge monument built for Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of a united Italy. It was an impressive sight, but apparently most Romans hate the building, think it's way too over-the-top. You could see a distant glimpse of the Colosseum from the monument. We got on a bus to go to the Bocca della Verità, The Mouth of Truth, which makes an appearance in Roman Holiday (I just saw the movie for the first time last night. Yikes, Gregory Peck was an unbelievably attractive man.) Went a couple stops too far and had to wait for another bus to take us back, but we saw our first glimpse of the Tiber in the meantime. Afterwards we headed to lunch at a pizzeria called L'insalata Ricca and walked past the Pantheon on the way there. The pizza was very different from American pizza. The crust is a thin, cracker-like kind of bread, and there is less topping material than you'd get on a typical Papa John's pizza. I got the foccaccia primavera pizza, which was topped with olive oil, green herbs, raw tomatoes, and chunks of mozzarella cheese. A couple of us agreed to share our different pizzas around. They were all delicious. The pesto and diavola pizzas were probably my favorites.

The downside? I didn't have my camera the whole day. I made the mistake of bringing my smaller bag, not realizing we were going to be sight-seeing, and it was either the Bible or the camera in the bag. I opted for the Bible. Consequently my first day of actually seeing some of Rome's historical sites is not well-documented at all. :(

I need to pick up a sketchbook somewhere and get started on drawing some of this stuff. I also need to try out some of the local coffee shops. Those are my goals for this week. :)

rome at last

2009-09-11T15:58:00.007-04:00

I am here!

We got in at around 8.20 local time, which would be 2.20 AM Eastern time. The flight was long but uneventful, although some confusion arose when the in-flight movie came on and people kept pushing the buttons to summon the flight attendant instead of finding the controls for their headphones and the volume. Once we got to the Rome airport our baggage came through quickly and without problems. We took a shuttle bus to the convent. Spent the rest of the afternoon moving in, going over some basic orientation stuff, and catching naps here and there to try to deal with the jet lag. Went for gelato at around 20.30. It was pretty obvious we were all monolingual Americans but everyone tolerated us in good humor. :) And the gelato was deliciozo. Came back to the convent for a short game of Balderdash, and now it's lights out. Pretty early still by college-student standards, but everyone is just about exhausted. Our day tomorrow starts with breakfast at nine.

Here are some pictures I've snapped so far... this one is the view from our window:

And this was our first Italian meal -- cold salami and pork, fruit, and amazing crusty bread:

Finally, here is the gelato place, on the Via di S. Costanza:

I haven't even been here a day yet and I'm already thinking that I won't ever want to go home. :)

rome! ...not

2009-09-10T11:44:00.005-04:00

So I woke up at 6.30 yesterday morning to get on a plane from Atlanta to Pittsburgh. The plan at that point was to get into Pitt around 11.30, then fly from Pitt to Chicago at around 2.50 PM. The flight to Pitt went swimmingly, apart from running about half-an-hour late because of the morning traffic at Hartsfield-Jackson, and meeting up with the rest of the group and checking in at Pitt for the Chicago flight went swimmingly too. Things started to get interesting after that. Our plane apparently needed some maintenance work. By the time we had sat in the terminal for four hours we began to realize that we weren't going to make the Chicago flight. Tentatively we then planned to take a flight from Pitt to Paris, France, and then hop from Paris to Rome. That fell through. Eventually the airline just decided to put us up in a hotel for the night. Sixteen separate rooms in the DoubleTree in Moon, PA. Not half bad... jacuzzi, swimming pool, and a really nice restaurant that gave us food for free.

Anyway, we're now trying the whole thing over again. Airport security and all that jazz. This time we're flying into JFK in New York, not Chicago. If all goes according to plan (?), we should be in Rome tomorrow morning.

debating

2009-09-08T18:57:00.007-04:00

I hate arguing about politics. Mostly because I'm unbelievably awful at it. Everything that I plan to say vanishes in a cloud of smoke at the first sign of opposition and then I just stand there gaping and usually end up saying something that's exactly the opposite of what I actually believe. I hate that. The only time I ever felt like I was holding my own in a debate was when I was arguing with an adamant neocon Republican up at college about whether or not the U.S. should be involved in the Iraq War -- and the only reason I felt like I had succeeded that time was because I had to go to class before he could finish making his point. If I hadn't left/run away I probably would have been toast. I'm just no good at thinking on my feet. The problem is I'm a history major and it seems like whenever I talk about American history I end up getting into heated arguments with people. The solution is probably specializing in something really obscure, like the history of the cultural implications of the Garden Gnome Liberation Front, so that most room for debate is eliminated.

concert in the park

2009-09-05T23:30:00.010-04:00

Drove into Atlanta and saw Drivin N Cryin and Collective Soul in concert at Centennial Olympic Park this afternoon. The only Drivin N Cryin song I'm really familiar with is "Fly Me Courageous", and I wasn't too impressed with anything else they played. But Collective Soul was the main attraction and they did not disappoint. The setlist was fairly short, but good. The only thing I really regret not hearing was "She Said" and possibly "Forgiveness". (All right, and "Precious Declaration" and "Energy".) But considering the time constraints with the whole Alabama/Virginia Tech game thing going on, I was happy with what they did manage to fit in. "Shine" was excellent live and I got goosebumps hearing "The World I Know" and "Run".

I think the setlist went something like this:

Welcome All Again (Had not heard this one before and unfortunately can't remember much of it.)

Heavy

Listen

Tremble for My Beloved (First time I'd heard this one too. It was good, but loses some points for being on the Twilight soundtrack.)

Why, Pt. 2

December

Shine

Hollywood

The World I Know

Staring Down (Their latest single. Also good.)

Gel

Run

I didn't take my camera but I snapped a few shots with my cell phone. This is the best of them and you still can't see the stage very well. We were about thirty feet back, lucky enough to be behind some guy with his folding chairs so no one was standing directly in front of us. Which was good for me, because I'm short.

The best thing about it is that I was originally supposed to be working thirteen hours today. Instead I got someone to cover my shift, and I spent the day in Atlanta and don't have to worry about work again until December. :)

disaster narrowly avoided

2009-09-03T12:33:00.010-04:00

Near disaster yesterday. I built Gamer and put it on a platter and it was all ready to go before I realized that the Daybreakers trailer needed to be on there. As in, apparently men in dark suits and sunglasses would come to get me if it wasn't on there. (I don't know. All I know is there was a notice in the reel case that said that the trailers for Saw VI and Daybreakers must be played with all prints of Gamer. I had Saw VI on there, I didn't put Daybreakers.)

So I had the genius idea of removing the center ring, taking off the clear leader and just splicing the tail of the new trailer onto the head of the trailer that was already on there and then winding the new trailer around the center by hand. About thirty seconds after I started doing this I realized it wasn't going to work. Theoretically I think it could probably work for someone much wiser and more experienced. But it wasn't working for me. So then I had to tear it off and put the leader back on. Thankfully that worked -- there's only about thirty feet or so of leader -- but it still took me about fifteen minutes to do it. So now the film is sitting on the platter without a center ring and the leader vaguely resembling a plate of spaghetti.

But it could have been worse. Like this:

Apparently that's a print of Angels & Demons at some cinema in Australia. Instead of winding onto another platter after feeding through the projector, the film was just going down onto the floor. Quite possibly one of the scariest pictures I've ever seen. The blog I got this from said that the average film is about 12,000 feet long. Would they even bother to try rolling it all back up? I think if I were the theater manager I'd see about getting another print. *Shudder.*

things i actually got done at work

2009-08-28T11:29:00.006-04:00

Put together the 3D show. It took a while, mostly because I had to figure out which of the around 5,394 cues and policy clips to use. But it worked.

Built Halloween II. We didn't get Taking Woodstock.

Did the maintenance work on projector 7.

The knocking on projector number 3 is a problem that is apparently beyond my power to fix; the Allen wrenches accomplished nothing. On the good side of things, there were no Technicolor prints to break down. So altogether it was a pretty good day.

Just as an aside... I think the difference between digital and traditional projection formats can be summed up pretty easily. Consider the following scenarios.

Scenario 1: The Whiteout trailer needs to be added to Halloween II (traditional format).

Procedure: Get out the splicer/film cutter, the sprocket-hole counter, and a flashlight. Carefully cut off the tail of the trailer, making sure that the cut is in frame. (Use the flashlight to help see the individual frames, and count sprocket holes to make sure.) Splice the trailer onto the film. Then cut off the head. (If it's the first trailer on the film, you will also need scissors and cue tape so that you can add the show-open and possibly the scope-format cues.) Finally, even though you've been really careful, you still need to pray that the trailer ends up being in frame.

Compare that with...

Scenario 2: The Avatar trailer needs to be added to The Final Destination (digital format).

Procedure: Click to select the trailer. Drag and drop it into the show's playlist. Drag and drop cues if needed.

things to do at work today

2009-08-27T14:19:00.005-04:00

Figure out how to put together a 3D show (The Final Destination) on the digital projector.

Build Halloween II and possibly Taking Woodstock (not sure if we're getting that one).

Do weekly maintenance work on projector number 7.

Attempt to fix the knocking on projector number 3. Supposedly this can be achieved by using an Allen wrench to tighten the flywheel. We'll see.

Break down any Technicolor prints.

Have fun. (?)

terminator salvation wallpaper

2009-08-24T12:42:00.004-04:00

This is the first wallpaper I've made in a long time. It's fairly simple but I like how the colors ended up. It started out with an ugly red/gray/black scheme, which probably fits the tone of the movie, but not my aesthetic sensibilities. :) Yes, I did like Terminator Salvation.

Brushes: Hybrid Genesis, Garfcore
Images: Spill
Fonts: Georgia, Inkburrow

Click for full size (widescreen, 1280 x 800).

once upon a time... in nazi-occupied france

2009-08-23T14:47:00.011-04:00

I'm not familiar enough with Quentin Tarantino's previous work to write a really well-rounded review of Inglourious Basterds. I've seen Pulp Fiction, but I'm in no position to say whether or not Inglourious is typical of Tarantino's work or a different kind of animal altogether. What it is is an over-the-top Kelly's Heroes-type WWII yarn that smacks so much of 1960s-70s spaghetti westerns that it even borrows the theme from The Alamo as its main-title music. I'm not going to write a full review, but I will say that it's one of the best movies of the summer.

I'm also going to say that it's not a movie for everybody. I said it's over-the-top. What I mean by that is that rock ballads play in the background while bullets, flesh, and bright red blood fly in slow-motion through the air. This certainly isn't something you'd go to see for its historical accuracy. A little paradoxically, a lot of the (two-and-a-half-hour-long) movie is not action-oriented, but very much dialogue-driven. Some of the best scenes consist of sharp, clever, long stretches of dialogue. So if you go in expecting a mindless gorefest, you're going to be disappointed too. I'm not trying to make it sound like any of these are faults or flaws, though, because all of it works. It comes together brilliantly.

As Colonel Landa might say... bravo, Quentin Tarantino.

they may take our lives, but they will never take... our independence day!

2009-08-21T10:13:00.010-04:00

Especially in the right-wing political circles that I'm mostly familiar with, "freedom" is something that's on everybody's minds at the moment. There is concern that our freedoms and our traditional values are being threatened -- by ongoing moral decay in our society, by our government, by the zombie apocalypse. I think it's legitimate concern. The thing is, I don't think many people really understand what "freedom" is or what it entails. Too many Americans seem to confuse it with "license," or the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want. I admit I get a little irritated sometimes when I hear constant complaints about our "freedoms" being taken away. I'm about as libertarian as you can get, I think, but it irritates me.

I feel like Solzhenitsyn captured it best when he said this:

On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

[...]

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

Emphasis mine. I find it amazing that he said this over thirty years ago.

Americans, especially, do seem to think that having "freedom" means having "unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life." I mean, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is in our Declaration of Independence. (How much the Declaration is really a humanist document is a debate for another day.) But that is not freedom. Freedom is having the ability to find and fulfill what God has called you to do in life. This is why Ivan Denisovich was able to find true freedom even while he labored in a Siberian gulag. This is why it upsets me a little bit when people tarnish the concept of "freedom," an essentially spiritual concept, by equating it with a material concept like "the pursuit of happiness."

The most random illustration sticks out in my mind. I watched The Great Escape a couple nights ago -- still one of the greatest war movies ever made, and in my top five all-time favorite movies. There is a scene where Roger is describing his plan for the escape to the assembled "X Organization," and detailing what each member of the Organization will need to do in order for the plan to succeed. He bluntly tells the Organization's tailor, Griffith, that they will need 250 civilian outfits. Griffith simply tells him, "All right, Roger." He has no way of knowing where he'll get the materials for all of them. But it needs to be done, and he will find a way to do it.

That's not "freedom" in the way most Americans think of it. Making 250 civilian outfits while you're living in a prison camp and subsisting on Red Cross donations is a steep order. It's a lot of work. It's no fun. But the members of the X Organization recognized that individual license needed to be put aside if they were going to achieve real freedom, escape from the camp. To our modern American minds it would have been entirely understandable if Griffith had refused, said that Roger's demands were impossible. It was his right. And the important thing is that Roger would not have forced him to do it. But Griffith understood that sacrificing his time and effort would mean greater benefits down the road, and not just for himself. It's that kind of personal responsibility that I think Americans are most lacking right now.

never laugh at live dragons

2009-08-20T20:38:00.004-04:00

This is the image I started out with at about ten o' clock this morning. I did it in pencil first and then went over it with a Sharpie.

Twelve hours and about three hundred layers later, this is the drastically Photoshopped version.

worse days

2009-08-19T11:15:00.002-04:00

To make myself feel a little better I've started compiling a list of people who've had worse days at work than I did.

King Richard III of England on August 22, 1485. The famous "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse" incident.

George Armstrong Custer on June 25, 1876.

Captain Edward J. Smith on April 15, 1912.

Air Force Captain Bruce Kulka on March 11, 1958. Responsible for dropping a nuclear bomb on the town of Mars Bluff, South Carolina.

Steve Bartman on October 14, 2003. Not a work day, but bad enough to make the list. The fan who lost the Cubs their chance at the World Series.

bad day

2009-08-19T00:55:00.006-04:00

Unbelievably bad day at work today.

It should have been a really good day. It did start out all right and even after the first couple things went wrong I was still in a pretty good mood and felt like I could probably joke about it later. But things just got worse and worse. Finally at about 9 PM I realized there was no way this could be a good day and there was no way I would be able to joke about any of it. All I really wanted to do was cry. It was that bad.

It should have been a good day because there were no movies to break down, no movies to build, and little maintenance work to be done on the projectors. It was the 18th and projector number 8 is our digital projector which means that there is no oil to change or gears to regrease. On top of that it was a fairly short schedule and the last movie got out pretty early.

The first thing that went wrong was projector number three. When I threaded it for the first show I noticed it was knocking, making loud clattering noises. I was not very concerned because it was probably just that the oil and grease needed to be changed. I opened up the back and cleaned it and greased it all up again. It didn't do any good, the knocking was as bad as before. But that was just one thing wrong and it was not enough to ruin my day.

After that I went to start Bandslam on number four. I started it and then stood and watched while the projector shut itself off, the dowser went down and the film came sliding off the bottom roller and puddled onto the floor. But I didn't worry about it too much because we'd had this problem before and the solution had been simple. All I needed to do was wind the film all up tight again and pull the dowser up manually and that should start it back again. It worked for the first showing. After that, it didn't work. I tried eight times to start it back. We ended up having to cancel both the 7.20 and 10.00 shows.

Things were worse in general by time the 7.00 shows came around. The sound was fading noticeably in and out on G.I. Joe on number five. Badly enough that a customer came out and complained. I had no idea what to do about this one but I went to take a look at things anyway. The sound head readers seemed all right. But I noticed the screen on the sound tower said "reverted" instead of just "Dolby Digital" like it usually does.

At that point I decided to call one of our other projectionists who has a bit more experience than I do and explain the problems to him. I feel horrible because it was his day off and I ended up calling him three times before the night was over. But he told me to call this other guy who apparently is some kind of all-purpose projector guru.

I called this other guy. I got his voicemail. I waited twenty minutes and called again. It went to voicemail again and I decided to leave a message this time. I had my radio on me and just when I was getting ready to leave my message someone came through on the radio very loudly. I gave up on that message and tried the guy's home phone. No answer. I tried his cell again, successfully left a message this time. Then after waiting a little while with no response from him I called his home phone and got through to his wife. She told me that he was out coaching little league and probably left his phone in the truck. All right. At least I had made human contact. She told me he would call me back in a little while.

He called me back finally, about half an hour later. By then more customers had complained, this time about the sound in number three, which was being badly distorted because of the knocking. I tried to explain all this stuff to the guy. I'm not sure how much of it he got. I probably sounded pretty frantic and incoherent. He told me that he couldn't come in right away but he will be in tomorrow morning at 6 AM to take a look at things.

I don't work again till Saturday. Part of me feels bad about just kind of leaving all this stuff hanging for other people to deal with. Part of me really doesn't care at all. This is beyond Murphy's Law. This is like a curse of Morgoth or something.

shahrukh khan and airport security

2009-08-17T10:07:00.007-04:00

I am not sure how I feel about the whole Shahrukh Khan thing. It's the height of irony that Khan was detained because of his Muslim surname, considering that he came to the U.S. to promote his new film My Name is Khan, which is about the post-9/11 racial profiling of Muslims in the U.S. And regrettable that the incident has made him hesitant to visit the U.S. again. I've only seen one of his movies, Kal Ho Naa Ho, but I know he is a very talented actor and has huge star appeal even among non-Indians here in the U.S., and it is definitely disappointing to think this thing might distance him from those fans. I hope that does not happen.

I think there is a legitimate point in saying that racial prejudices play a little too much of a role in U.S. customs and airport security. There is still a lot of "paranoia" going around and it would be presumptuous and ignorant for me to say whether it's warranted or not when I'm sitting on a couch at home. But I also think it's ignorant to make blanket statements and say that strict airport security measures need to be completely done away with. If the reason for making statements like that is genuine concern for the amount of racial prejudice that exists in airport security systems, that's fine. But if it's just because security measures are personally inconvenient, that's something else.

I remember flying home from Pittsburgh for Christmas last year. There was a mixture of rain and snow falling pretty steadily and I heard so many complaints from passengers because they sent our plane through for deicing twice. It added a total of ten minutes onto the flight time. It just made me wonder if those ten minutes were so important that those people would really rather risk the plan crashing than lose a little bit of time like that. I think it's kind of the same thing for airport security. Racial profiling is wrong, and it's unfortunate that we live in a day and age where it plays such a large role. But that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water.

I'm not a Trekkie, but the title of the New York Post article about the incident made me smile a little bit: The Wrath of 'Profiled' Khan.

concerts

2009-08-16T22:38:00.005-04:00

I found out yesterday that Muse will be opening when U2's 360° Tour comes to Atlanta in October. That's going to be a good show. Almost makes me regret that I'm going to be in Italy and not Atlanta come October. Almost. But it looks like I may have the opportunity to see Dream Theater and Opeth in Rome. They're playing at the Palalottomatica Arena on October 27th. Figuring out how to buy tickets may be a little tricky; the ticketing sites are either all in Italian or have conflicting information. Guess I'll have to wait until a little closer to the concert date, and hope the prices don't run too steep.

On a totally unrelated note: apparently propriety and social convention dictate that the posters for Inglourious Basterds can't actually have the name "Inglourious Basterds" on them. The ones we have up at the theater just say "Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France... The new film from Quentin Tarantino". I wonder what will go up on our marquees and roadside sign?

trailers

2009-08-16T01:00:00.005-04:00

Today was the first time I had to switch out a trailer on a film. For some reason the powers that be decided that the 2012 trailer that was attached to our print of Julie & Julia needed to be taken off and replaced with a trailer for Did You Hear About the Morgans?. The first thing I did was put the new trailer on a separate platter. Then I had to figure out how to get the old trailer off. Of course 2012 had to be the trailer that came attached to the movie (there's always one attached trailer; all the others are added separately), so that meant it came behind three other trailers, and removing it involved some delicate splicing and a lot of stress. One I had gotten it out, all I had to do was thread the film to the platter with the new trailer and splice it together. Actually it was all pretty simple in theory. But I tend to get really nervous whenever I have to work directly with the film.

I guess the thing I don't understand is why the trailers had to be switched out at all. I could understand it if the trailer that was getting replaced was for a movie that had since been released. But 2012 doesn't come out until November. The only other thing I can think of is that someone somewhere realized that the crowd that's going to see Julie & Julia (mostly female, and mostly 50+) probably isn't the same crowd that's going to jump to see an end-of-the-world disaster flick. But if that's the case, why attach the 2012 trailer to begin with?

Other than that, work went well. I just realized it's past 1.00. So when I said "today" up above, I meant yesterday.

work

2009-08-14T23:57:00.007-04:00

I had Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday off from work this week. It's the longest break I've had in a while. It really did seem like a long time, especially by the time I went back to work on Thursday. I actually had to get used to the sound of projectors clattering again. Three days and I was already out of practice. I had two movies to build: The Time Traveler's Wife and Bandslam. I went in at 2.45 in the afternoon. It took me till 10.30 that night to get those two movies built and on platters. Thankfully our other projectionist had built District 9 and The Goods on Wednesday. I don't know what I would have done if I'd had to build all four of them. I probably would have been there until the theater opened today.

I've got a fourteen-hour day tomorrow. I'm hoping it goes smoothly. Murphy's Law has seemed to be especially true for me lately.

here's what's happening

2009-08-14T23:47:00.002-04:00

I've decided to move all the bits and pieces of my fantasy-novel-writing to another blog made specifically for that purpose. That blog will be open to invited readers only. If you really really want to read it, let me know and I'll consider. Meanwhile, this place here is going to stay open to all readers. All, like, three of them. And it'll be more along the lines of a real blog instead of the pseudo-portfolio thing I was trying to pull off.

At least that's the plan as of right now. We'll see how long it lasts.

jared leto vector art

2009-08-11T16:58:00.006-04:00

This is my first attempt making "vector art" using Photoshop. My original image was this shot of Jared Leto. Several hours and a couple hundred layers later, this is the finished product:

The color version is here. Apologies for the small resolution; the original image was only 400 x 500.

rome, part i

2009-08-10T11:57:00.005-04:00

Exactly one month from yesterday I will be leaving for a semester abroad in Rome, Italy.

I'm starting to feel a little less overwhelmed by thought of being in Europe for three months. I've bought my books, put together a wardrobe, got enough in savings that I am pretty sure I won't starve while I'm over there. I've got batteries and adapters and spare bedsheets and new walking shoes. I know how to say "where is the bathroom?" (dov'e il bagno?) and "do you speak English?" (parla inglese?). All of that is out of the way. I feel like I can really start looking forward to this now.

I wonder how much I'm going to laugh at this post when it's December and it's all over. I don't think I'll be speaking Italian like a native by then but I'll probably know more than just a few survival phrases. I wonder how much my preconceived American notions of what Europe is like will have changed. I wonder what it will feel like to have lived in the Eternal City, a place filled with so much history that it gives me goosebumps just looking at pictures online.

Thirty more days. I'll fly up to Pittsburgh from here in Atlanta and meet up with the rest of the group there. Then it's Pittsburgh to Chicago to Rome.