Men at Lunch & The Central Park Five
By coincidence, I saw these two New York-centric documentaries back-to-back.
The former is about the famous 1930’s photograph of the construction workers sitting on a steel beam, casually having lunch despite the dangerous position that they’re in. The latter deals with a criminal case in the 1980’s where five teenage boys were wrongly convicted for the sexual assault of a jogger in Central Park.
Both of them portray New York as a place where many cultures come together, and sometimes clash, but I thought The Central Park Five did a better job of it. The five subjects are all very well-spoken, and through their interviews, you come to understand the racial tension that existed in New York at the time. By the end of the film, it’s a real relief that they were exonerated, but at the same time, you still feel angry and sad that they wasted so many years in prison.
Men at Lunch, on the other hand, does not have the same narrative strength. Essentially, it tries to tell the story of who those men on the beam were, but since nobody knows their identities for sure, it settles for making them into symbols of the many Irish immigrants who worked in construction at the time. That’s fine, but the film gets a little repetitive, and keeps telling us how brave they were, how hard life was during the Depression, how the construction workers shaped New York as a city, &c. I found it especially awkward when they tried to draw a connection between those men, and the men who are working now to build the new World Trade Centre tower. The 9/11 scenes seemed a bit out of place and exploitative to me.
Rating:
Men at Lunch: 5/10
The Central Park Five: 7/10
Thale
Towards the end of the festival, I get a little tired. I might have enjoyed this one more if I saw it earlier in the week. I realize that it’s a low-budget movie, and I respect what they did technically. Thale has some cool horror moments and some cool action moments, but maybe that’s the problem: it doesn’t feel like either a horror film or an action film. I couldn’t really get into the story because I didn’t know what the characters were after. But again, I was pretty tired.
Rating: 5/10
Tai Chi 0
This, on the other hand, was a much more suitable pace for a weary festival-goer. It’s basically a Chinese kung-fu film, mixed with the style of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (e.g., whenever someone does a kung-fu move, the name of the move is shown in stylized text on the screen), with some steampunk thrown in. Cartoonish action at its finest. It’s the first film in a 2-part series, so structurally, it’s a bit off: what you think will be the final battle is actually just setup for the sequel, which makes the previous battle the actual final battle, and a little unsatisfying.
Rating: 7/10
TIFF 2012: Part 4
Disconnect, Antiviral, As If We Were Catching a Cobra, The Bay, Smashed, Much Ado About Nothing
I’m going to go with a shorter, “rapid-fire” format today. I’m just tired, okay?
Disconnect
Reading the description, I was a bit concerned that this would turn into a morally unsubtle “the Internet is bad” type of story. I was pleasantly surprised that it doesn’t focus too much on the Internet itself; the Internet just a device to incite events and get the story going, and then mostly stays out of the way. The focus stays on the characters, which is as it should be. The characters sometimes behave in unrealistic ways in order to increase the drama, but I thought it was effective and was caught up in the film.
Rating: 7/10
Antiviral
A lot of the pleasure of watching this film comes from trying to figure out how the premise works. I didn’t read the description beforehand and I don’t know what it gives away, but I’m glad I went in not knowing anything. Unfortunately, once the premise is set up in the first act, the movie didn’t do much to keep me interested. There are some cool and creepy visual moments, but I couldn’t really understand any of the character motivations, and I didn’t really care what happened to them.
Rating: 5/10
As If We Were Catching a Cobra
A documentary about political cartoonists working during the Arab Spring sounded like an interesting premise, but the execution was a bit lacking. All the film is is a series of talking-head interviews with various cartoonists and artists. There was nothing really visual or cinematic going on, so it’s just watching people talk and reading lots and lots of subtitles. It was too much for me for an early morning screening, so I walked out, which is a rare occurrence for me. Maybe this material would make for a good book, though.
Rating: waived because I didn’t see the whole thing. But really it’s like a 3 or a 4.
The Bay
I keep telling myself that I’m tired of the whole “found footage” thing whenever I see one (I keep watching them though), but this one felt like a fresh experience. Usually, found footage films have to jump through hoops to justify why there are cameras present, or they just don’t justify it and everyone is left thinking “why don’t you put down the camera?!” the whole time. The Bay avoids this by mixing different camera sources, e.g. A TV news crew, security cameras, police car dashboard cameras. Because of this variety, it often feels more like a well-edited suspense film than a found footage film. It definitely kept me in suspense, although in hindsight, the “monsters” themselves are a little bit silly.
Rating: 7/10
Smashed
Good performances all around, but I thought this story about a young woman with a drinking problem oversimplifies its characters. I didn’t feel like there was much depth to them beyond whether they are drunk or sober, and what they think about other people being drunk or sober.
Rating: 5/10
Much Ado About Nothing
Wesley and Fred. Enough said.
Rating: 8/10
Blancanieves
I’m going to have trouble talking about this film (actually talking, verbally, I mean, not writing about it), because I can’t pronounce the title properly. It’s Spanish for “Snow White.” Maybe I’ll just call it “Snow White,” okay? Okay. So anyway, the movie is an adaptation of the Snow White story, transplanted into 1920’s Spain, and in particular, into the world of matadors. It was the “Golden Age of Bullfighting,” the director said in the Q & A.
The fairy tale reference is both a benefit and a detriment to the film, in my opinion. While it does add an other-worldly quality to the characters (especially the bullfighting dwarves), some elements felt like they were shoehorned in, like the poison apple, and the eternal slumber. I thought the story was strong enough to stand on its own without having to hang it on the framework of an existing fairy tale.
Rating: 7/10
Byzantium
There’s something a bit cheesy about the whole vampire thing, and how they’re supposed to be all mysterious and ethereal and romantic. Byzantium has that cheesiness, especially during the flashback scenes, which tell the origin story of the two main vampire characters. The Victoria-era costumes and sets are well-produced, but they’re, you know, cheesy. I think it might have bothered me more if I hadn’t recently been watching a lot of similarly historical scenes done with a lower budget on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (lower budget = more cheesy).
Stylistically and visually, I enjoyed the film, but I had some problems with the narrative. The aforementioned flashbacks are interspersed throughout the film, and the origin story arc is supposed to parallel the modern-day storyline. But about halfway through, I had already pieced together the mechanisms of how the characters became vampires, and after that, I was just waiting for what I already knew would happen to play out. As a result, I thought the flashbacks were starting to get in the way of the present narrative, and slowed down what is already a deliberately-paced movie.
Rating: 6/10
No
Speaking of cheesy, the 80’s were. Cheesy. Specifically, the media output of the 80’s (e.g. TV commercials, movies, etc.), when watched today, can often evoke cringes and bursts of awkward laughter.
The subject matter of No could have made for a very dark film—it follows a group of advertisers as they create TV commercials encouraging voters to vote against the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile’s 1988 referendum—but the fact that the commercials they create are 80’s commercials adds a lot of humour. There is a real danger involved (any election organized by a dictatorship is going to be fraught with corruption and threats) but when the anti-Pinochet “No” advertisers express their incendiary political ideas of freedom and democracy through commercials featuring dancers dressed in Day-Glo Spandex leotards, backed by synth-pop beats, it’s hard not to laugh at the contrast. The filmmakers behind No have perfectly achieved a balance between humour and solemnity.
Rating: 8/10
Frankly, I’m surprised I finished this book. I sort of saw it as part of my current project to work my way up to reading Infinite Jest. (Which is currently sitting on my dining room table. I’m afraid to shelve it lest the lack of a visual reminder will make me forget that I have it. It is also my hope that visitors will be impressed by the sight of the thing.)
Anyway, I figured I would read a bit of Everything and More, see what it’s like, and skim through the rest when the math got too hairy. Now, I’m not claiming that I understood all of the math and that it didn’t get hairy, or that I never skimmed through any of it at all, but I did follow the general gist for most of the way, or at least enough that I never felt like slamming the book closed and hurling it across the room.
This I credit to DFW’s writing style. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything where the text was so aware of its being read. There are constantly little asides and apologies (many in Wallace’s trademark footnotes) about how difficult a particular section is, how you might want to re-read this or that paragraph, how it’s all going to be OK in the end. These constant conversational reassurances do a lot to encourage the reader (me, at least) to keep going, despite the difficult math.
And there is a suspense to it all too. Cantor is mentioned near the beginning and is set up to be the Hero of the Story, the one whose theories are the ultimate culmination of everything I’m reading, and I genuinely felt the urge to know what Cantor did, like wanting to find out who the killer is in a mystery novel. Wallace does a good job of reminding us how each theory through history will be relevant to Cantor’s transfinite numbers, while making each theory interesting to learn about on its own. And while the actual proofs and formulae are explained well, I found the most enjoyment in the connective tissue about the like societal and cultural and historical contexts around each discovery, e.g. the geometric rigidity of the Greeks, the need to develop and accept infinitesimals in physics and science during the time of Newton and Leibniz, &c. I actually wish he had focussed on those contexts more, and I think he probably could have written a thousand-page book (it amazes me how much research must have gone into this as is). I would probably have still read it all.
Perdido Street Station is a great mix of setting, plot and character. I admit that for the first few chapters, I was a little weary. The main plot hadn’t kicked in yet, and I was just getting introduced to the characters, so it felt like the book was spending a lot of time describing the setting. I think it’s a weakness in my reading habits that setting doesn’t capture my attention as much as plot and character development, so I found myself starting to skim over some of the longer descriptive passages. However, the city of New Crobuzon is so unique that whenever my attention started to waver, some imaginative element of the world would pull me back in.
Once the plot started to get going, it really absorbed me. Almost every scene introduced an interesting new element, which made the world seem like it was constantly expanding.
If I had one problem with the book, it’s that there were maybe too many ideas. The fantasy setting was established early on, and it’s a world where anything goes, and anything can happen. This was cool most of the time because there was always a sense that something unexpected would happen. However, there were subplots and tangents which seemed to me like they were just put there to introduce a crazy idea. The meeting with the Ambassador from Hell comes to mind; there’s great imagery in that scene, but the character of the Ambassador, and the fact that our protagonists can freely communicate with Hell, never show up again.
This is a minor criticism, though, and overall, I enjoyed Perdido Street Station very much.
I spent my time with this book alternately impressed and frustrated at the writing style. The first-person narrator and title character is a chimpanzee named Bruno who has learned how to speak. It’s clear that from the process of learning language, he has fallen in love with it, so I guess it makes sense that the narrative is written in such a flowery style. It does read well in some parts, but at the same time, it feels like the author is trying too hard to use big words.
It was nearer to the end when I started to lean more towards frustration. Bruno’s friend Leon is introduced. I expected that the dialogue between the two would take a more casual tone than Bruno’s elaborate first-person narration. After all, no one talks like that in real life. But, it turns out that Leon is a Shakespearean actor, and he does talk like that.
I realize that in the world of the story, this can be explained by saying that Bruno’s speaking style throughout the entire narrative is influenced by his time with Leon. That makes logical sense, but it was still a decision by the author to have them talk that way. It made Leon seem not like a real character, but rather a device to deliver more fancy writing.
The book worked best when it focussed on Bruno’s icky but somehow touching relationship with Lydia. Unfortunately, it lost me once it became about his adventures with Leon. I would like to judge the book as a whole, but this is a case where the final impressions took away from my earlier enjoyment.
