Lost In Translation

New Cult Canon: Fallen Angels

Wong Kar Wai's film, Fallen Angels, gets the AV Club treatment. I guess it just as easily could have been Days of Being Wild, Chunking Express, or In The Mood For Love:

Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels almost plays better in the memory than onscreen, which isn't meant as an insult. I've seen the film three times now, and every time, it slips through my consciousness like a beautiful vapor, not unlike the tracks of neon blur that pass its characters by as they zip through the urban nightscape on fast-moving trains and motorcycles. There's very little tangible narrative architecture; true to Wong's jazz-like improvisational style, he doesn't seem to know where he's going until he riffs his way there, and he expects his audience to live similarly in the moment. Storytelling means virtually nothing to him—connecting these images into something cohesive seems like a headache at best, a production-stalling nightmare at worst. He winds up making mood mean more to his work than perhaps any other major filmmaker.

For this column, I could have selected any number of Wong's films—Chungking Express, Happy Together, In The Mood For Love, 2046, et al.—but Fallen Angels, while not his best movie, is probably the sharpest distillation of his nocturnal, ultra-romantic sensibility. It's a film of glimmering surfaces, with nothing to pin it down other than its characters' collective melancholy. The moments that linger are wholly cinematic: a motorcycle speeding at double time through a highway tunnel, the lines of a woman's body as she prowls a would-be lover's apartment in latex and fishnets, the driving rain that beckons strangers to play in the streets, the golden glow of a jukebox against black bangs and ruby-red lipstick. Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle supply seductive images like these with stunning regularity, but as each shot yields quickly to the next, they flutter away into the ether. It's hard to make a great argument for their cumulative value, but as pure sensory experience, movies like Fallen Angels are a rare treasure.

Fallen Angels features very little dialogue, but interior monologues like the one quoted above are rampant, and granted to all three of the major characters. There's a simple reason for this: They're in a Wong Kar-wai movie, which means they spend far more time trying and failing to connect than actually connecting. Along with a wave of contemporaries like Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?) and Hou Hsiao-hsien (Flowers Of Shanghai), Wong is a poet of urban alienation and ennui, though his sense of whimsy, his swooning romanticism, and his—let's face it—"cool" set him apart from the rest. His characters tend to exist in a perpetual state of longing, and the world conspires in subtle and unsubtle ways to either keep them apart, or limit their interaction to a brief, tantalizing taste. They can grow and learn and maybe find some peace in their lives, but nobody's walking arm-in-arm into the sunset.

Illumination: Akasaka

Tropic Thunder / The Visitor

I made the mistake of reading too much about Tropic Thunder before I saw it , but what I read made me want to see it. And while it was worthwhile for Robert Downey Jr.’s performance alone, Ben Stiller got the biggest laugh on a sight gag near the end of the movie (I wonder if anyone laughed as hard as I did at that scene). Seems like Jack Black was somewhat wasted or under used in this film. The Simple Jack (I Am Sam) movie-within-a-movie was absolutely hilarious as was the discussion about it between Downey and Stiller. However, if I hadn’t know about it would been much funnier.   

The Visitor directed by Thomas McCarthy on the other hand somehow slipped under the radar. It was a brilliant piece of film making. Richard Jenkins, whom I mainly know from Six Feet Under, puts in a nuanced performance as an aimless college professor sleepwalking through life since his wife has died. He life is changed when he finds that his apartment in New York has been rented to a couple of illegal aliens a charismatic Syrian drummer and his Senegalese girlfriend. His life is forever changed when allows them to stay with him as they look for another apartment. This is a complex movie that is several films at once: a New York film, a post 9-11 film, a love story, a tragedy, a character portrait, and more.

Suffering Souls

There was a fascinating article about psychopaths by John Seabrook last month in The New Yorker:

At thirty-eight, Kiehl is one of the world’s leading younger investigators in psychopathy, the condition of moral emptiness that affects between fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the North American prison population, and is believed by some psychologists to exist in one per cent of the general adult male population. (Female psychopaths are thought to be much rarer.) Psychopaths don’t exhibit the manias, hysterias, and neuroses that are present in other types of mental illness. Their main defect, what psychologists call “severe emotional detachment”—a total lack of empathy and remorse—is concealed, and harder to describe than the symptoms of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. This absence of easily readable signs has led to debate among mental-health practitioners about what qualifies as psychopathy and how to diagnose it. Psychopathy isn’t identified as a disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association’s canon; instead, a more general term, “antisocial personality disorder,” known as A.P.D., covers the condition.

There is also little consensus among researchers about what causes psychopathy. Considerable evidence, including several large-scale studies of twins, points toward a genetic component. Yet psychopaths are more likely to come from neglectful families than from loving, nurturing ones. Psychopathy could be dimensional, like high blood pressure, or it might be categorical, like leukemia. Researchers argue over whether tests used to measure it should focus on behavior or attempt to incorporate personality traits—like deceitfulness, glibness, and lack of remorse—as well. The only point on which everyone agrees is that psychopathy is extremely difficult to treat. And for some researchers the word “psychopath” has been tainted by its long and seamy relationship with criminality and popular culture, which began with true-crime pulps and continues today in TV shows like CBS’s “Criminal Minds” and in the work of authors like Thomas Harris and Patricia Cornwell. The word is so loaded with baleful connotations that it tends to empurple any surrounding prose.

Kiehl is frustrated by the lack of respect shown to psychopathy by the mental-health establishment. “Think about it,” he told me. “Crime is a trillion-dollar-a-year problem. The average psychopath will be convicted of four violent crimes by the age of forty. And yet hardly anyone is funding research into the science. Schizophrenia, which causes much less crime, has a hundred times more research money devoted to it.” I asked why, and Kiehl said, “Because schizophrenics are seen as victims, and psychopaths are seen as predators. The former we feel empathy for, the latter we lock up.” 

NY Times Notable Books 2008

Here's annual list of Notable Books for 2008 from The NY Times. I am looking forward to reading the short story collections by Tobias Wolff, Out Story Begins, and Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth. There's an interesting book on WWII, Retribution: The Battle For Japan, 1944-45.