Sailing: An Odd Essay

Watch Half a Movie, Part Three: Divided We Fall

I caught this film a couple of weeks ago, in the morning. I didn't have to be at work for several hours, my wife had left, and I was looking for a reason not to get out of bed. I was looking for such a reason in the television. It was kind of a fluke that I hit the Independent Film Channel. I remembered that channel 550 was one of the channels we occasionally checked on, so I punched that in.

I was intrigued immediately, despite the fact that the scene was simply three people having dinner: a young wife and her slightly older husband, and a substantialy older boor of a man who dominated the conversation. The decor (as well as the synopsis given by the "info" button), made it clear this took place in Czechoslovakia during World War Two. They were eating a pig's head and had lots of food laid out. The young couple's tension made it clear they were at great risk, having hoarded this much much food and served such a feast. The boorish man went on about how nice it was of them to help him by feeding him this way, how these were the sorts of things friends did to help each other. But it was obvious he had some power over the married couple, and that they did not want him there. They were anxious about what he might do, and about something else, and they did their best to lighten the situation with casual conversation. But every time they said something, the boorish man cut them off. Finally, the doorbell rings and the couple has to pick up the entire feast by balling it into the tablecloth and throwing it into the pantry, where you catch a glimpse of a man hidden there in the dark. The boor tells them that to divert suspicion, they should skin a rabbit and make it look like they were having a simple dinner. So now they have to waste a rabbit as well as a massive, illegally stored quantity of pork.

I got all these details from five random minutes in the middle of a movie because, gee whiz, those Czechs could act. A gesture here, a forced smile there, a reluctantly chewed mouthful of food. I was in agony for them. It turns out the boorish man was a supposed nazi sympathizer who had been a friend of the family before the occupation. The couple is hiding a Jew in their pantry, and to keep suspicions away from themselves, they have to pretend to support the Nazis, too. This is very hard on the husband, who now faces ridicule from people in his community who once thought him a decent man. Oh, and the couple has been trying to have kids for years, without success. This is important, later on.

Okay, I don't want to give away any more of the plot, because this is now one of my few favorite movies* which I immediately want everyone to see. So I'll just make vague bullet points about why it was awesome:

• The leading actress was completely lovely in a way no American actresses are ever lovely.
• The characters were human beings which did not have pre-assigned roles obvious from the beginning of the movie. Nobody was the hero, nobody was the villian--not obviously. Everyone struggles with their choices, and everyone does things they are proud of and things they are not.
• The plot twists genuinely shocked and surprised me. It was complex and surprising, but also perfectly sensible and simple to follow.
• The camera took time to dwell on faces. The faces said as much as the dialog.
• It also captured the spirit of an Eastern Europoean town at that time. It took time to dwell on details. The architecture, a cobblestone street, the way the leaded windows opened. The world felt old and comfortable, and all the more vulnerable for that.
• The characters changed. Aren't characters supposed to change, as they move through stories? When's the last time a film character changed in a way that surprised you?
• The film was subtitled. The characters were speaking, I would imagine, Czech. I find Russian and Eastern European languages charming, when spoken by men, and when spoken by women, downright sexy.

I've said that the film I blogged about yesterday, Life is Beautiful, had the humor/horror slider pushed too far to the funny side. The slider in this film was pushed pretty heavily in the other direction. In fact, I thought the info button made a mistake with it's classification of "humor." Clearly Italian and Czech interpretations of humor are very different. The Czech take on Humor, for whatever reason, resonates deeply within me.

I've enjoyed the animations of Jiri Trinka, and many of the qualities he captured with clay were present in this movie: a patient appreciation of subtlety and detail, ambiguity, natural beauty mixed with fear and horror. Is it only the Czechs that do this so well? Is it an Eastern European thing? Russia too? And why them? And what other movies and animations should I seek out?

Please tell me, because this movie was as if custom built for my personality, and I want to find others like it.
.....
* Other favorite movies:

• Slaghterhouse Five
  
• American Beauty
  
• Donnie Darko
  
• Blade Runner
  

And I think that's about it. In fact, I generally don't even like movies. Which is why I only write about them when I'm pretty enthusiastic, one way or the other. And why I only watch half of them, if I can get away with it.

Yours,
Nate

Watch Half a Movie, Part Two: Life Is Beautiful

My wife was already halfway into the Italian film Life is Beautiful when I went to bed last night. I'd heard so many raves about this movie that I decided to give it a try. The synopsis I'd heard was, "An Italian family survives life in a concentration camp by turning the experience into a game for their little boy, and telling him that if they win, they can take home a military tank." This synopsis was entirely accurate and complete. It was usually followed by commentaries about how wonderful it was that they could use humor to survive the most horrifying of situations.

I hopped into the story at about the middle, just where the family gets loaded into the trains. I missed a lot of characterization regarding why the father was such a jokester, how he won the mother's heart despite the fact that he was a poor Jewish waiter while she was a rich aristocrat. There were probably a lot of pranks and malarkey involved, which I was happy to miss out on.

So I got right into the concentration camp bits, and I have to say they left me feeling...not as affected as I expected to feel. I think this was for three reasons. First, the movie was dubbed, and the people they picked to do the voice-overs had the most rediculously exaggerated Italian accents. Was this necessary? If the film is being translated into English, shouldn't the characters talk like...English people? When I read Petrarch, or Italo Calvino, should I narrate the story in my head with the voice of a New York City pizza-shop owner? Anyway, it made the movie feel a bit like a hastily improvised skit on Saturday Night Live.

Second, a hyperactive farce set in a concentration camp just felt wrong. The wild, Italian gesticulations, the loony-bumpkin music, the depictions of escapades that would have gotten them immediately shot if this were a real concentration camp, it all kind of ruined what emotional power the picture could have had. I understand that the filmmakers had to walk a pretty fine line, here. To show how people used humor to survive the horrific, they had to make the movie, well, humorous. And it could very well be that the Italian brand of humor just doesn't work for me. (I've had no greater exposure to it before and therefore have no real opinion.) I tend to be pretty dour, myself, and would have pushed the humor/somber slider a few notches towards the dark side to satisfy my own tastes. (And yes, I'm perfectly aware that this movie was not created for me, specifically.)

Finally, they were only in the camp for about three days. Maybe time was supposed to have passed between scenes, but there was no indication of this. When the camp is finally liberated by the Americans, you think, "Gee, thank goodness they were only incarcerated for the last week of the war. They wouldn't have survived running around like crazy lunatics any longer."

The film did have a couple of touching moments. The mother's ignorance about what she is getting into as she enters the camp, the father's meeting with a nazi doctor he knew before the war and who is clearly going nuts because of the atrocities he has to commit, an elderly Jewish man about to head into the showers comforting a female Nazi guard who has just tripped. These are the scenes of horror that make the protagonists humorous game seem more heroic. And perhaps the filmmakers assumed we've been exposed to enough horrific images of the holocaust that they don't need to dwell on the worst bits. A passing reference to soap-rendering and a glimpse of a pit of bodies through the fog should be enough to bring the whole of Schindler's List to the surface of our consciousness.

In the end, I just couldn't get past those accents. If I were Italian, I'd be pretty pissed about that.

.....

I have one more half-movie to talk about, which I'll get to tomorrow. It's another WWII "humor" film, but set in Czechoslovakia. I haven't been able to get it out of my head for two weeks.

Yours,
Nate

Watch Half a Movie, Get Angry

I've been watching a lot of movies from the middle on the Independent Film Channel. Either I'm flipping channels or passing through the room where my wife is watching something. And I think I like this method of screening films. If they can catch me from any old random section and carry my interest through to the end, they're worth picking up on Netflix and giving a proper viewing. If not, I can just flip past, or leave the room. Why watch the first half an hour to see if it's going to be any good? Why not just get to the meat?

In any case, my wife was watching a miserable piece last night which sucked me right in. Not miserable in terms of quality, rather, miserable in how it made me feel. I have no idea what it was called because IFC does not post schedules movies gone by, as far as I can tell. Anyway, it was a period film set in Europe in the late 1800s about a Jewish boy and a girl from some non-Jewish but equally hardcore religion who love each other. I missed out on how they came to meet and why they loved each other, but they loved each other enough for the girl to get pregnant out of wedlock. Both families got pissed. The girl's brother did this "calling out" ceremony in their church to shame her in front of the entire community about her pre-marital relations. Nice religion, fella. Her family at first insisted that she marry the boy, which they both wanted to do, but when they found out he was a Jew they changed their minds and hid her away without telling him where she went. Meanwhile the boy's family sent him to the city, presumaly to seek his fortune. Really he ended up with relatives that made him work all day for no money. He wanted to leave to find his lover and marry her, but his parents invoked this "you'd be dead to me" line that parents use when their kids make things so uncomfortable for them that they want to kill them, but they don't want to actually get their hands dirty. The Jewish parents then met with the pregnant girl to tell her that she is never to see their son again. The girl told them, "This is your grandchild! Don't you understand that?" They said, "No, that's not our grandchild, that's a mistake."

So then the boy decided he cannot live without this girl. He walked back to her town and asked her brother where she was, and the brother beat the crap out of him until the boy was bleeding from everywhere and could hardly walk, but the boy just kept getting back up and asking "Where is she? Where is she?" Finally he managed to grab a shovel and smash the brother in the kneecaps. The brother finally relented and told him that she's staying with an aunt who lives to the North across some barren snow-filled rocky fields, which the boy proceeded to travel over on foot. He collapsed at the aunt's doorstep. His lover and her aunt nursed him for a few days, until he died. As soon as he died, the girl went into labor, had the baby, and then gave it up for adoption, as her family forced her to do.

So in all, a wrenching, miserable experience. I'm glad I only took in the last forty minutes. And what I mostly wanted when it was over was to see both of the families suffer for what they had done. I wanted to see the boy's parents so distraught over the loss of their son that they hung themselves, and I wanted that brother to castrate himself for being such a dick. But then I realized that their traditions and religions would convince them they had done no wrong, and though they might feel bad about what had happened, they would have seen it as inevitable.

I told my wife that what would have made the ending really great would be that the girl, who is now a ruined woman with nothing to live for and nothing to lse, went about some particularly sadistic revenge on both of their parents. A real, break into their house, tie them down, beat them almost senseless, and then cut off all their fingers one joint at a time (and make the boy's mother watch her husband bleed to death before kicking her fat head straight off her neck off with the heel of her boot) kind of revenge. Now that would have made for some catharsis. My wife laughed and told me this was a particulary American response.

Like she's from France, or something!

Man, I know this was just a movie, but it's got me really fired up. It showed, so effectively, the terrible cruelties families can commit on their own members to satisfy the dictates of their society and their religion. It made me uncomfortable, because I really hated that Jewish family in the movie. But I hated the other one just as much. The kinds of cruelties people commit in the names of their creeds just piss me off. Moslem, Jewish, Nazi, Catholic, what the fuck ever. If they're not flying jets into skyscrapers, they're telling you what you can't eat on weekends, they're burning witches and torturing heretics, they're thanking god they were not born a woman, they're gassing Jews and homosexuals, they're tearing the clitorises out of African girls, they're keeping people who love each other apart.

I am so glad I live in a time and a place where the society makes an attempt, at least, to behave rationally, and where human happiness comes before the dictates of centuries-old fairy tales.

I think that's why period films depress me so damned much: They make me realize what a small amount of time and place has enjoyed our kind of rational freedom, and that 99.9% of the people who have walked this Earth have done it under the yoke of terrible, terrible ideas.

.....

Can anyone tell me what this movie was called, by the way?

Yours,
Nate

Full Cape For Sale in Mashpee, MA

Come on, you know you want to buy my house.

Actually, it'll be rather sad to see it go. I've gotten used to having lots of space (four bedrooms) and being able to walk to work. And of course, there's all the work we've put in to the place. But it's time to move on.

Really, you should buy it now. Houses aren't getting any cheaper around here, and interest rates aren't going to go down again. And it's Cape Cod, right? Everybody wants to live on Cape Cod!

New Finds

A couple of online journals I've discovered recently, and found myself returning to on a regular basis:

Searchblog: An online diary the writer started to help her in her battle with depression. I haven't had to struggle too seriously with these issues lately myself, thank goodness. As I get busier and more stressed out (certainly not happier in any simple sense), the old-fashioned crippling depression just doesn't have a gap to force itself into. But I'm always aware it could be waiting for me. Is the pace of my life a solution to it or just a heavy blanket covering it over? Should it ever come back I hope I can face it with the courage she shows.

Feeling Faye Wong: Reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon gave me the desire to visit the Philippines. All the exotic weirdness of Japan but with some real grittiness left, too. Tropical weather and a hint of danger! And more English speakers, perhaps? (I don't know what I'm talking about, but that's the impression I got from the book. Which I recommend.) Anyway, this woman was born there, and she certainly writes in English well enough. Female, Catholic, Philippina...sounds like an interesting mix to me.

What Really Happened

Well, my vacation didn't find me doing any of those things which I said I was going to do. I didn't raise a hammer, actually. This makes me a bit of a liar. It also makes me a bit more relaxed.

We did have a bit of unpleasantness, but it was different from the unpleasantness I anticipated in the post displayed below this one and written two weeks previous to it. Maybe I'll write about it, eventually. Once the proverbial dust has settled, and the lawyers have been paid. Maybe not. If I do write about it, it will be at length, certainly. Suffice it to say we came out of it smiling and ready to move on.

The vacation did involve: three days at the beach, two of which involved swimming at the beach. Several hours in a hot tub. The hot tub belonged to the same woman who had the beach sticker. It occurs to me as I write this that much of the vacation involved mooching off of people who are close to us and feeling not a bit guilty about it. It also involved some barbecues in the sandy backyard of this woman's new home. The hot tub is in that backyard too. The woman is very dear to my wife and I, by the way, for reasons that go beyond the barbecue, sticker, and tub. We would feed her our last hot-dog, or kill for her, if she asked. This is why we didn't feel guilty about the mooching.

She also made margaritas.

Also: a Fourth of July cruise in my mum's boyfriend's new (used) trawler. This is his dream boat, it seems. The one he's been fixing up and selling ever-bigger sailboats to eventually purchase. And I can see why. It has more square footage than a five million dollar Manhattan apartment, and he can take it with him. Like a turtle--that lives on the surface of the water.

[This living on a boat idea has really lodged itself somewhere in the back of my cerebrum. It's working its way down to the regions where more basic desires and needs are filed.]

The thing was a good deal, of course, and requires tons of attention to keep the engines running and get the teak all shiny and conspicuous-consumption radiant again. From our perspective, though, coming out the ass-end of mid-vacation unpleasantness and ready to eat shrimp and watch fireworks and have our loved ones wait on us, man, it could have been The Minnow, but for those six hours it was our Love Boat.

Click on the link and look at the pictures, already. We couldn't have asked for a better end to our vacation.

More intelligent game, book, and culture related posts to come soon, I promise. Here: take this picture of Montgomery looking at Oliver's ass to hold you over. Click on the damn thing, already. It's your favorite desktop wallpaper. You know it is.