Lost In Translation

Two Modern Classics

The House Next Door blog has write ups of two of my favorite contemporary love stories: Wong Kar Wai's Days of Being Wild and Alex Cox's Sid and Nancy.

Here's a bit from the Days of Being Wild piece:

This is a director who has always positioned himself as a diasporal, transnational artist—and as a Shanghainese man raised in Hong Kong, perhaps that was always his fate. It’s not a stretch to envision My Blueberry Nights, however risible, as Wong’s idea of graduating from his own diaspora to big-time internationalism. No matter how tempting it is to treat his films as luxury art objects and ignore their sociopolitical underpinnings, their collective worldview is much broader than their chic surfaces suggest, and Days of Being Wild and its sequels in particular illustrate the Hong Kong identity in flux. What makes them resonate as a group is how they rhyme rootlessness and the ever-elusive “home” with the agonies of impossible love. IfMy Blueberry Nights reduced the Wong aesthetic to shtick, then a revisit to his first great film can shock us back into reverence. Almost 20 years later, the richness of its vision has only deepened.

And here's a bit from the Sid and Nancy piece:

Sid & Nancy, Alex Cox’s heartfelt take on the true-life relationship between Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen—a love that ended when Sid stabbed Nancy to death in the Chelsea Hotel, then died of a drug overdose while awaiting trial—could easily have been just another rock biopic. Instead, through the use of fantasy-tinged reenactments (favoring the surreal in lieu of the straightforward), Cox transforms this gritty tabloid story into something deeper. It's a perfect example of finding truth through fictionalization.

The Shape of Things To Come

I’ve always considered Greil Marcus one of America’s more profound and interesting cultural critics. I found his old Real Life Rock Top 10 columns for Salon, and now for The Believer magazine, eclectic and interesting.  He shows this once again with his fascinating book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. He looks at the American tradition and where it is going by looking at cultural artifacts as diverse as sermons by John Winthrop, the novels of Philip Roth, the films of David Lynch, the music of David Thomas and Pere Ubu, and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg.  Marcus mixes his eclectic knowledge of history and high and low culture to explain what it means to be an American today.  He clearly understands the significance of the puritan tradition in a modern context.  He sees the values of society reflected in pulp fiction, popular music, literature, TV, films, and other works of art. There is a prologue and an epilogue and in between are the following sections: Philip Roth and the Lost republic, American Berserk: Bill Pullman’s Face, American Pastoral: Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer, Crank Prophet Bestride America, Grinning: David Thomas. I’m not sure I can summarize Marcus’ conclusions, but getting to the end was a enjoyable and fascinating trip.

Che, Part 1

Stephen Soderbergh is one of my favorite directors, not only because of his skill as a storyteller, but because he has an interest in telling many different kinds of stories. Who would have guessed that he had an interest in the revolutionary politics of Che Guevara? This, Che, Part 1, is my kind of film; a film set in an exotic locale with a historically based political story. I like how he is telling the story chronologically interspersed with future clips of Guevara addressing the United Nations in black and white, some have suggested because compared to the work he was doing in Cuba and South America, the UN is rhetorical, thus less than real.  However, I think he wanted to emphasize the America position of communism being a black and white proposition: “us vs. them.”  Benicio Del Toro is impressive as the mythic hero, perhaps, no one can live up to his myth, but I really enjoyed the first installment.

Harajuku: Ground Zero

I was in Harajuku the other day and thought I would check out my old apartment from 6 years ago and this is what I found! A parking lot!