Thursday, March 8th, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut – Timequake (1)
“You have been sick, but now your well again and there is work to do.” This is one of the repetive mantras Vonnegut uses as a shield against the futility of being, and the certainty of destruction and decay. In a touching and hilarious collection of ramblings and biographical fragments, he explores the frailty of the human spirit, and it’s extraordinary strength in finding the good among the evil. “We’re here to help each other through whatever this is.” Indeed.
From Jonathan Lethem, who recently masterfully argued the fruitfulness of apropriating someone else’s intellectual property and turning it into something original of one’s own, and Carter Scholz, whom I hadn’t heard of before, comes this set of reinventions of Kafka’s themes with the frame of American culture. Witty, dark and unexpected, these stories toy with great ideas in a very delightful way. My favorite of the bunch is easily Lethem’s and Scholz’ collaboration on the story of how Kafka and Capra collaborated to make “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Great stuff.
Maybe it was because I had felt to be in a similar place to Mastroiani’s manic director recently, or maybe it’s just the fact that Fellini can make you feel things you didn’t realize you had in you, but in the final scene’s taking down of the main character’s overblown ego machine it felt like part of me was coming down with it, in oddly satisfying melancholy.
Not knowing much about the conditions in the south african townships, this beautiful movie left me with the feeling of having been there, and a deep sympathy for its deeply troubled protagonist. While the story is troubling and uplifting at the same time, the cinematography is gorgeous, and the desert townships with the downtown areas as a backdrop are weirder than anything out of dystopian scifi could have been thirty years ago.
This is horrible. Not because it is just obviously bad, for it isn’t. The science is as solidly done as you’d expect of Clarke, and the outline of the story sort of makes sense, if you buy that we can predict novae from looking at neutrinos. But the details all are oh, so wrong. All the mistakes that give science fiction a bad name are here, in a thickly layered mistake cake, with an extra topping of whipped mistake cream. Things that we should understand from what we witness we are told in the abstract, dialogue stilts around just to get information to us, instead of of its own merit, characters psychology makes no sense whatsoever, the underlying wordview is deeply technocratic and single minded – he creates a utopian society of love and respect that sounds like a hippie teenager’s wet dream by having past artistic output censored and culture start from a carefully prepared blank slate. That notion alone already has so many things wrong with it, I won’t count. Bah.
Finally, the non-sucking sequel to the Matrix. While V is still wordy and rich in pseudophilobabble, it is mostly stylish and ironic enough to get away with it. Weaving and Portman both are excellent, him being all the more impressive for doing it all from under a cheesy mask. A comic book version of political discourse still, at least this impromptu is enjoyable to watch and visually pleasing.
I almost didn’t buy this when I saw it at the local Salvation Army store. Who needs another book on Yosemite, sporting pretty pictures of waterfalls and sunsets? But as it turns out, Brower not only knows many of the key players of Yosemite’s recent cultural and natural history firsthand, he also writes engagingly and knowledgeably about this intriguing stretch of land. The discussion of a supposed dichotomy of artistic concepts battling over the park could have been spared, but the rest of the book is a joy, and the picture really are gorgeous. Makes me want to go up there again.
The beginning of this movie is excrutiating. We observe the inner workings of a dysfunctional family, partly through the perspective of the suicidal academic uncle, and the acting and writing is excellent enough to make the pain of what is going on palpable. There also are funny jokes, made more poignant by the underlying darkness, and a developing plot of the little daughter embarking upon a beauty queen endeavor that is obviously doomed. A dark comedy is well on its way, but then the author and the directors couple take a wrong exit, and turn the whole thing into one more suada on how the importance of being oneself and the overarching formative power of familial love. That weary propaganda piece is hard to bear from a mainstream outlet, but to see a supposedly indie movie pander this, and betray all it was trying to show us in a feelgood finale pitting the family unit against the shallow and vain outside world, is hard to bear. The movie still has its nice moments, but overall is a disappointment.