Lost In Translation

The Diamond As Big As The Ritz

A couple of weeks ago when I was watching an episode of Mad Men (Episode 3: "The Benefactor") one of the characters made a reference to the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story “The Diamond As Big As The Ritz.”  I went through a phase in college where I read everything he wrote and several books about him, but I couldn’t remember the content of the story at all. So I went back and read the story and found that it wasn’t all that interesting the second time around.  It was a sort of fantasy story about ridiculously wealthy people, I can see a time where I might have appreciated it more.  I seem to remember really liking the short stories.  I can clearly remember some stories like “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.”  At any rate, I still think The Great Gatsby is closet thing the great American novel and one of my favorite books of all time.

Fieldwork

I really wanted to read Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski as soon as I read about it when it was short-listed for the National Book Award last year.  It is a fascinating murder story set in the hill tribe region of Northern Thailand near Chang Mai, a place that I have visited several times in the past.  It concerns the murder of a missionary named David Walker by an anthropologist who had gone native so to speak.  But it is more than a mystery story, it is also a fictionalized memoir, and a well-researched and fictionalized account of the Dyalo tribe based on the real life Lisu tribe of Northern Thailand.  Some of the missionary Walker family history was a bit of a struggle for me to get to get through, but generally speaking it was exotic and smart.  The author knows a lot about Thailand, anthropology, and missionaries that show through in the well-paced mystery that is at the center of the novel.

I Live In Fear

The last film in the Kurosawa Post War Eclipse series is I Live in Fear; also know as Record of A Living Being (1955).  Toshiro Mifune plays a wealthy industrialist that is obsessed with nuclear destruction.  He is convinced the world will end in flames, and wants to move his large family (he has at least two other children born out of wedlock with mistresses).  He has already started construction on an underground bunker in Amori that he has abandoned for the Brazil plan and his family is trying to get him declared incompetent so they can save the family business, a foundry.  The film shows the chotei (Family Court) process which ends with the father reluctantly being declared incompetent. I guess Kurosawa is trying to show that the only sane man is treated as being insane, but it is hard to for me to be sympathetic to him, Mifune is all swagger playing out of character by 20-30 years of age. To be honest, I think this was my least favorite film in the series.  They are all interesting in what they say about Kurosawa’s vision of the world, but I think The Idiot was probably the best made film in the series despite the length and lack of a director’s cut..

The Idiot

Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Idiot, from Eclipse Series 7: Postwar Kurosawa, was the follow up to the internationally acclaimed Rashomon.  It is an unusual film one that reportedly edited down from 4 and a half hours to 166 minutes.  That’s still quite a chore for me, I watched it in intervals, but I have to say that there are some amazing sequences and a compelling story of love, desire and will in winter wilds of Hokkaido.  I have read in his autobiography that he was a huge fan of Dostoyevsky.  However, I can’t report on how closely it follows, the book however it has been said that he follows the story quite closely. I have only tackled Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Notes From the Underground back in my ambitious undergraduate days.  Although, I must say this inspires me to pick up The Idiot at some point.

The New Cult Canon: Sonatine

Takeshi Kitano's second best yakuza film, Sonatine, gets the AV Club treatment:

One of the questions Kitano asks is, "What do gangsters do when they're not shooting each other?" The gangster genre is traditionally all about incident, about moving the story forward like a steamroller, and scrapping any elements that don't pay it service. Kitano wonders what goes on between the notes, when his yakuza thugs are removed from all that plotting and shooting, and have a little free time on their hands. (Hence the Tarantino connection, given how the gangsters inReservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction discuss the finer points of Madonna's "Like A Virgin" and McDonald's burgers in France.) As Murakawa and his clan hang out on the beach, waiting for what's certain to be discouraging news about their future, you'd think this stretch of time would be pregnant with tension. Instead, they revert to infectious, childlike behavior, as if tacitly acknowledging that their sojourn on Okinawa's beautiful beaches may be their last days in the sun.

Many of Kitano's movies feature some playtime, but unlike something like his sickly sweet 1999 road comedy Kikujiro,Sonatine's dark yakuza-movie underpinnings rescue it from being overly cute. It also helps that the games are charmingly whimsical: Sumo wrestling matches created first from paper cut-outs and then on a life-size circle on the beach; skeet-shooting contests with a Frisbee and a handgun; homemade traps built from giant holes carved out in the sand; a mock gangland shootout staged with fireworks and cardboard shields. And all of it under brilliant blue skies and a backdrop that's endless ocean on one side and rolling hills on the other. Suddenly, in the middle of a gangster movie, Kitano has transported the audience to a dreamlike idyll.

The Father Of All Things

Tom Bissell is a contributing editor at Harper’s, and I originally read a version of his book, The Father Of All Things, in that magazine. In the piece he mentioned that his father was a friend of Phillip Caputo’s, and that led me to read his excellent Vietnam memoir.  The book is an intriguing mix of memoir, travelogue, and history about Vietnam and Bissell’s connection through his father encapsulated in their 10-day trip to Vietnam together. This kind of approach always intrigues me as we get to see a personalized version of a big story and it also makes a place that I have visited seem knowable. In Section Two: "An Illness Caused By Youth or A Few Questions About The Vietnam War," the discussion is framed by four very interesting questions:

1) Was Ho Chi Mihn a Stalinist?

2) Why were the leaders of South Vietnam so corrupt and incompetent?

3) Could the United States have won the war in Vietnam?

4) What was the Soviet Union actually attempting to accomplish in Vietnam?   

There are two other aspects aside for the writing that impressed me in this volume as well.  Every other pare (the odd pages) had headings that summarized the contents of the odd pages, which I thought was really cool.  Furthermore in the bibliography, Bissell included notes on selected volumes to explain why he thought the particular book was useful or amusing or whatever.  I really enjoyed this volume mostly because of the author’s bias, it is almost postmodern in his full disclosure.  I’ve been to Vietnam twice and I would go again in a heartbeat, this book makes me want to do it sooner than later.

Primer: Woody Allen

The AV Club looks at the lengthy career of Woody Allen.  And Nathan Rabin and Scott Tobias list their Top 5 Woody Allen movies:

The Essentials

1. Annie Hall (1977)
In this great evolutionary step forward, Allen moved beyond the vaudevillian shtick of his early films to a new dramatic and emotional richness while diligently preserving the funny. It's a valentine to Diane Keaton at her most irresistible, a jaundiced New Yorker's take on the vast intellectual wasteland that is Los Angeles, and a playfully postmodern comedy with a big, vital heart.

2. Purple Rose Of Cairo (1985)
Like 1980's shamefully underrated Pennies From Heaven,Allen's 1984 masterpiece eked bottomless pathos and surprising humor out of the unbridgeable gulf between the dizzy, sophisticated movies of the Depression and the ever-suffering dreamers in the audience.

3. Hannah And Her Sisters (1986)
Perfectly integrating a serious take on familial and romantic relationships with deft comedic business, Allen's comedy-drama orchestrates a complicated series of loves and betrayals with clarity and sophistication.

4. Bananas (1972)
Allen paid homage to the wiseass, anarchic spirit of his heroes the Marx brothers, specifically Duck Soup (which also appears in a key scene in Hannah And Her Sisters), in this zany 1971 political satire.

5. Husbands And Wives (1992)
The public collapse of Allen's marriage to Mia Farrow brought an unvarnished immediacy to his 1992 drama, which unloads so much emotional baggage that he spent subsequent years fleeing to inconsequential comedies.

My Top 5 is as follows: 

1. Hannah And Her Sisters

2. Crimes And Misdemeanors

3. Husbands And Wives

4. Annie Hall

5. Manhattan Murder Mystery

Interview: Naomi Klein

There's an interesting interview with Naomi Klein on the AV Club page:

In her current best-selling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism, journalist Naomi Klein takes aim at Chicago School Of Economics guru Milton Friedman's notion that "only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change." Around the globe, Klein finds examples of how the implementation of what she's coined "the shock doctrine" is used to exploit a public reeling from natural or man-made disasters to implement economic and social policies to which they would never have otherwise submitted. "Disaster capitalism," as she calls it, has cropped up in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, the occupation of Iraq, and of course, our own backyard in the aftermath of September 11. On the eve of the Beijing Olympics and the increasing noise of our Presidential campaign, Klein sat down with The A.V. Club to discuss offshore oil drilling, the price of gas, Barack Obama, Fox News, Lou Dobbs, and the shame of the Summer Games.

Photography As A Weapon

There's an interesting post on Errol Morris' Zoom blog on The NT Times website about doctored photographs:

As almost everyone knows by now, various major daily newspaper published, on July 10, a photograph of four Iranian missiles streaking heavenward; then Little Green Footballs (significantly, a blog and not a daily newspaper) provided evidence that the photograph had been faked. Later, many of those same papers published a Whitman’s sampler of retractions and apologies. For me it raised a series of questions about images.[1] Do they provide illustration of a text or an idea of evidence of some underlying reality or both? And if they are evidence, don’t we have to know that the evidence is reliable, that it can be trusted?

Scandal

Scandal was made the same year as his breakthrough masterpiece, Rashomon in1950, but is considered a lesser work (Eclipse Series 7: Postwar Kurosawa).  However, it is revealing about Kurosawa’s view of morality, society, and overall worldview.  He sees that he new found individualism and freedom if unchecked can cause some problems and it seems as if he has had his share of problems with the press.  It is a depiction of American values that have been absorbed through the occupation, Mifune rides an American motorcycle and we often hear American music.  The story is about a libel reported by a gossip magazine about a liaison between Mifune, who portrays a famous artist and a singer. He hires a down and out lawyer, expertly played by Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura, with an ailing daughter.  It is minor Kurosawa but interesting in what it reveals about the filmmaker in context of his oeuvre.