Mingji Liu

Even more reviews!

By Mingji Liu ·

Monthly and quarterly review round-ups, 2018–2019, collected from various sources. Oldest first.

22 February 2018 — Amateur film criticism: 2018 Academy Awards edition

Call Me by Your Name

A dreamy, sun-gilded film that explores what it’s like to lounge around topless, drive Fiats, toy with stone fruit, cycle the countryside showing too much leg, and do other decadent European shit. Oh, and it’s about a ‘forbidden’ gay romance, or something. It’s comfy, lackadaisical, and there’s not a single genuinely challenging or provocative idea in sight. When Sufjan bloody Stevens starts playing, you know it just wants to indulge in zero-thought frolic. That said: some morons have accused this film of being predatory pederast propaganda. Pffft. About the worst thing the film abuses is its runtime. You really start to feel it drag in the final quarter.

Darkest Hour

Looked boring. Didn’t watch. The trailer was positively constipated, given how hard it was straining for effect. Do we really need a movie in 2017-18 reminding us that Winston Churchill was an important historical figure? Does the movie mention all the stupid shit Churchill wanted to do, like re-arm the Nazis immediately after the war so he could invade the Soviet Union? Piss off, movie.

Dunkirk

A bloodless, gruel-coloured music video to a Hans Zimmer SoundCloud mixtape. It kept me mostly engaged, but people who are claiming this is one of the greatest war movies ever made should sit the fuck back down. Of its three interwoven stories, the only one worth watching (for its sheer technical brilliance) is the Spitfire sequence. That’s an 8/10 piece of cinema right there. The rest of the movie is 6/10 at best.

Dunkirk? More like ‘Dumb, irk’.

Get Out

Get Out is amazing. Get Out deserves to win Best Picture because Get Out is clearly the best picture. I’ve seen it, like, maybe three times already. It’s just that ferociously clever and fantastically re-watchable. There’s very little I can say that hasn’t been said already. If this film doesn’t win big, then we are truly living in the darkest timeline.

Lady Bird

I’m going to take a little poo on this movie simply because it was disproportionately praised to high heaven when it initially came out. First, the good stuff:

Great. Now to kick this film in its face a bit:

Charming. Enjoyable. But its whole is not greater than the sum of its parts.

Phantom Thread

I absolutely loved this movie. Who knew that the world of 1950s London high fashion could be so thrilling to watch? It is relentlessly focussed and meticulous in its construction — ten minutes in and I was utterly immersed. The film manages to make simple scenes of characters taking tape measurements, cutting and sewing fabric, or even eating breakfast fascinating to watch. Daniel Day-Lewis is magnetic and unrecognisable and [insert-obvious-praise-here]. It’s a bit sad to think this might be his final acting role. At its core, it’s a film about idolisation, control, dependency, and focus. And wow, what an ending.

The Post

Have zero interest in seeing this. Look, I didn’t care about Spotlight when it came out; I’m not going to start caring now. Yes, robust and independent journalism is an essential check against the temples of power. No, I don’t need a self-aggrandising Spielberg movie to remind me of this.

“But Mingji,” you say, “Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep are, like, really good actors who give really solid performances.”

And then I reply, “Sorry, what the fuck did you just say? All I heard was ‘blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I’ll have another fresh lemon wedge with my ice tea’.”

Next!

The Shape of Water

How much green is too much green? This movie. Green, green, green, green, green. Green buses, green pies, green mints, green soap. It’s all a bit too much, I’m afraid. Questionable colour palette aside, this movie was fun; it was a lot of fun in fact. Sally Hawkins was a thrill and Doug Jones makes the most out of every rubber suit he’s squeezed into. But let’s be honest here, this movie should never have been nominated. As much as I admire Guillermo del Toro as the next dysfunctional nerd, subtlety isn’t his strong suit. The film is populated with absurd 1950s Americana caricatures, plot devices are telegraphed from ten miles away, and the Google-translate dialogue is often laughably on-the-nose. It’s good, but it’s no Pan’s Labyrinth.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

A woman is raped and murdered in a small town. Her mother puts up billboards to call out the unsolved crime to the local police. What ensues is a brutal and pitch-black funny drama with a wildly unpredictable story. Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell, and Woody Harrelson were all superb. In the end, the film offers a deranged vision of small town optimistic nihilism that’s hard to shake off.

Highly recommended. Ferociously well-written. Not sure why Peter Dinklage was in it. Shame about the deer scene.

7 June 2018 — The May 2018 review round-up

Queer Eye (2018)

If the nefarious Hollywood gay agenda is so powerful, then why did it take so long for this show to return to us? Can you believe it’s been over ten years? Because it’s been so goddamn long, I have only hazy recollections of the original, which means I’m not entirely sure how well the reboot stacks up. I certainly observe a strong tonal shift. No longer is Queer Eye merely a light-hearted makeover show aimed at bourgeois coastal elites. Now it’s all about tackling the hard-hitting issues deep in the American heartland. Police brutality! Religion! Racial politics! Men crying! So many salty, manly tears! While the attempt is creditable, I do wish it could’ve squeezed in some more practical lifestyle tips. After all, some of us poor fools still need to learn how to cut onions properly and pick the right suit ties.

And what of the heroic Fab Five themselves? Well, if the Fab Five were the gay Avengers, then clearly Antoni is Hawkeye. What exactly, pray tell, qualifies him to be the “food and wine” expert? Jonathan and Tan earn their keep by actually offering interesting fashion and grooming advice, while the only thing I’m able to learn off Bobby is that I need Pinterest and infinite money. Lastly, Karamo, despite being the most charismatic of the bunch, seems to be given little to do on the show except run corporate team building exercises. But these are surely only growing pains for the reboot. I’m also aware of the recent news that they’ve been spotted wandering the peripheral wastelands of Canberra (aka “country NSW”). One can only hope they’re there to save some hapless battler from his rissole.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

My hopes for this film spiked at around the five-minute mark when a giant rubber sewer worm, voiced by no other than Linda fucking Hunt, shows up to berate the main characters. But alas, my hopes were dashed. If only the film had doubled down on its initial weirdness. Instead, it had to slump into comfortable mediocrity. At best, the story is a rejected Firefly script. At worst, it’s just another unfocussed action movie with horrible pacing issues. Not even Donald Glover’s excellent Lando cosplay was able to save it. There’s nothing more to say.

As an aside: I want to address some misguided virtue signalling that I’ve recently started to hear more and more, claiming that the original 1977 Star Wars contains retrograde values and displays paper-thin masculine aesthetics. Wait. Really? What movie were you people watching? The original Star Wars is inundated with counter-cultural influences. A young, impressionable man is exposed to New Age Eastern mumbo jumbo and joins a ragtag coalition of political aspirants to defeat a sterile, British-American hegemonic monoculture. A greedy smuggler from the lumpenproletariat becomes “woke” and swoops in at the last minute to save the pro-democracy underdogs. Hell, one of the main characters is essentially a Sasquatch: a mash-up of Native American folklore and the fantasies of bong-smoking hippies out in Cascadia.

As for the characters themselves, I can count only two faults: (1) the cast is entirely white, and (2) Chewbacca doesn’t get a medal at the end. But problematic masculine archetypes they are not. It’s very clear that the film deliberately opts not to depict Luke and Han as classic male film leads. Luke’s an awkward, whiney teen that seems to constantly annoy everyone around him; while Han, despite talking himself up as a hotshot, is shown throughout the film to be a bumbling misfit who is completely out of his depth. Further, Princess Leia seems to be the only person out of the trio who is genuinely competent and able to grasp what is actually at stake.

Atlanta, season two

Speaking of Donald Glover, season two of Atlanta remains true to form. The characters are more fleshed out and the episodes remain thrillingly hilarious (and at times, thrillingly uncomfortable) to watch. However, I’m not entirely sure about its choice to tone down the very surreal and satirical elements of the first season (think the black Justin Bieber gag or the talk show episode) in favour of a strain of grimier, darker comedy. This is probably inevitable, given the dire state of things in the Land of the Free. In fact, I count three episodes this season that draw directly on horror elements from Jordan Peele’s Get Out — again, cementing my belief that Get Out should’ve won Best Picture.

Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe

There’s not much I can say that hasn’t already been said elsewhere about this little book (it’s, uh, good?). One thing I’ll note: while the original novel is lauded for standing out from all the pro-imperialist literature around at the time, while I was reading it, I was repeatedly reminded of an equally stupid narrative that persists in one form or another to this day — one which infantilises indigenous cultures as naive and noble savages that were helplessly crushed by the brute force of the coloniser, while offering little resistance. Achebe, of course, reminds us that these were complex people, struggling with their own personal issues and moral quandaries, and that they were often subjugated through sophisticated, divide-and-conquer strategies which gradually sundered entire communities apart. In that sense, the main protagonist, Okonkwo, is supposed to be unsympathetic. The reader is forced to confront the multidimensionality of him and his society. Just as how with some stories “you have to earn your happy ending”, this book demands the reader to work for its tragic conclusion.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo

Former Vox editor-in-chief Ezra Klein stated that he wanted to kill himself after reading this book, since in his mind it was the book that every journalist hopes to eventually write one day. I’m afraid he might have exaggerated a tad. The book itself is an intimate examination of life in a Mumbai slum, and elaborates on the hopes and struggles of a select handful of the slum’s inhabitants. While the pages are indeed brimming with sympathetic humanity, it’s not exactly mind-blowing in its revelations and suggests few, if any, solutions. The writing often becomes lost in its pursuit for poetic transience in a small corner of the Global South, which is both the book’s strongest and weakest quality.

Deadpool 2

I have this belief that the original 2016 Deadpool possessed a nervous, bottled-up energy as a result of how no one making it really knew whether it would end up being commercially successful, which gave the film a charming, sort-of indie movie vibe. The sequel, on the other hand, is drunkenly giddy with its guaranteed success. As a result, the movie grants itself too much permission to meander around unconstrained (leading to some tedious scenes), while trolling and mocking the audience with geeky glee. Some jokes land with ferocious precision, but just as many flop to the ground like half-dead haddock. It’s a decent enough film, but I won’t be rushing off to see it again anytime soon.

Foxtrot, directed by Samuel Maoz

There’s a dance called the foxtrot. Forward, forward, side, stop. Back, back, side, stop. No matter what you do you end up where you started. It’s simple.

One of the best foreign films I’ve seen in a long time. I left the theatre mesmerised. Without spoiling too much, Foxtrot is an Israeli film that opens with a family being informed that their son, a soldier in the IDF, has just died. Things become very, very strange from there. At times it’s a Pinteresque drama, at times it’s a black comedy, at times it’s forebodingly surreal. From scene to scene, you have no idea what is going to happen next. While the film is by no means anti-Israeli (despite being denounced as such by Israel’s Culture Minister), it presents a vision of a country that has sacrificed all the wrong things, has lost sight of its founding values, and become trapped in cycles of violence and trauma. Highly recommended.

My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante

Ah yes, the mysterious Elena Ferrante. It’s a fantastic book that has been praised up Mt Vesuvius and back. Someone once asked me whether I thought a male author could’ve ever written such a book. I’ll straight up be very gauche and say that I highly doubt it. Perhaps a male author in close stakeholder consultation with a crack team of Italian female child psychologists could pull this book off convincingly. Perhaps. The book is richly intimate in its depiction of the jealousies, rivalries, and nascent desires of its two young, female heroines. The contrast between the characters’ girlhood journeys and the violence of their impoverished Neapolitan neighbourhood is often a startling one. I see references to Girardian theories of mimetic desires, mimetic contagion, and scapegoating mechanisms in the book, although I’ll need to read the sequels to confirm this pet theory of mine.

Lastly, some Wallace Stevens poems I enjoyed:

5 July 2018 — Critiques de juin 2018

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

I kind of loved this book. I think I’ll slide it into my (unranked) list of top twenty novels I’ve ever read. Like most people, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect of the book given its notorious reputation. What I got, to my surprise, was some absolutely razor-sharp prose (punctuated, however, by utterly gratuitous tracts of French). As well as being an exercise in sculpting a narrative voice par excellence, the book also manages to be a sprawling tour of Americana — with wonderful interludes about the aesthetics of American landscapes, films, magazines, cars, tennis, suburban life, etc., where the obvious is rendered unfamiliar by artful script.

And the puns, the allusions, the humour! I wasn’t expecting the book to be so funny. Consider, for example, the “Mr. Taxovich” sequence, or the line about what “the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow”. There are the subtle jabs at the Kinsey Reports (“Dr Blanche Schwarzmann”) and the less-than-subtle jabs at psychotherapy (“He did not use a fountain pen which fact… meant that the patient was a repressed undinist”) throughout the novel. In the climactic showdown between Humbert and Quilty, the action even pauses so that Nabokov can do a parody of T.S. Eliot. Ha!

Oh, and there’s also the pedophilia, kidnapping, and rape.

That is where Lolita is at its most confounding. Despite its disturbed subject matter, it’s not profane or churlishly explicit in the slightest — it’s all too tastefully written. My baby’s-first-thesis-about-Lolita is simply that the book tries to throw the reader through an ethical obstacle course. While the foolish reader becomes completely seduced by Humbert’s character and goes along for the ride, and the puritanical reader won’t get past the first third of the book, it’s the reader that’s able to appreciate the wordsmithery but remain alert to the moral implications who, I believe, the novel is seeking to test.

But I suspect that those readers will stumble at a hoop eventually. Maybe they felt relief when Humbert and Dolores escaped after being spotted on the hilltop? Maybe they got irritated at Dolores for her materialistic demands in Beardsley? Or got angry at her for deceiving H.H. at the hospital? I certainly failed. For me, I wavered when I became engaged with Humbert’s drunken, murderous crusade to murder Quilty. I got really into Humbert’s raging, rampage for revenge — and in doing so, I lost the game.

For anyone unsure of whether or not to give Lolita a go, I seriously recommend it. Ignore the salacious knee-jerk reactions. Just don’t buy the versions of the book that show a little girl sucking a pink lollipop on the cover. Then you’ll actually look like a creep if you read it on the train to work. Order a respectable hardcover, like I did, with an austere dust jacket, a bound bookmark, and nice thick margins you can jot your scandalised notes in.

The Expanse, season 3

I don’t know how I feel about Jeff Bezos anymore. On one hand, he runs a soul-destroying hypercorporation and probably eats babies. But on the other hand, he did help revive The Expanse for a fourth season after the Syfy channel cancelled it. Thank you, I guess?

Whenever the writing for an episode hits an effective rhythm, the show becomes truly excellent, with characters, action, and dialogue in compact lockstep. As someone who enjoys the books as pulpy rocketpunk yarns (note: they’re actually not that well-written and have super pretentious titles like Leviathan Wakes and Persepolis Rising), it’s surprising how well the show runners were able to improve on the source material. Nevertheless, there are times — such as in the final two episodes — when the show felt frenetically rushed, with attention deficit pacing issues.

I’ve seen reviews suggesting that the show is Game of Thrones in space. What nonsense! It’s an operatic morality play with spaceship pilots, plus some realpolitik grumblings sprinkled on top as decorations. The real charm is in how scientifically accurate it tries to be, despite having magic alien goo and space marines. It’s perhaps the only sci-fi show that considers thrust and spin gravity. It has accurate depictions of what fire and teardrops would look like in microgravity. Hell, the show even shows off the Coriolis effect and casually mentions the Orch-OR hypothesis of consciousness. A good show for hapless nerds like me.

The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz

A collection of surreal short stories by the tragic Polish writer Bruno Schulz, describing his early childhood in Drohobych, Poland. Pretty much all he wrote was this book and another short story collection, before being murdered by an SS officer in a Jewish ghetto.

Schulz’s writing is beautiful — even if at times, it inches right up to the city limits of purple prose country. Consider his stunning description of the titular ‘Street of Crocodiles’ itself, where modernity and foreign vices breached the altstadt of his Galician upbringing:

In an atmosphere of excessive facility, every whim flies high, a passing excitement swells into an empty parasitic growth; a light gray vegetation of fluffy weeds, of colorless poppies sprouts forth, made from a weightless fabric of nightmares and hashish. Over the whole area there floats the lazy licentious smell of sin, and the houses, the shops, the people seem sometimes no more than a shiver on its feverish body, the gooseflesh of its febrile dreams.

It’s hard to say which story is the best. The final one, about the apocalyptic (and morbidly humorous) arrival of a comet is a highlight. His story about becoming lost at night on his way home on a winter’s night, walking past the cinnamon shops, is deliriously dreamlike. The cockroach sequence — which describes his mentally unhinged father’s entomophobia — is a direct response to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

(An aside: While reading it, I was amused by how clearly The Street of Crocodiles served as a source of inspiration for the New Weird author, China Miéville — it’s directly referenced in The City & the City, and entire scenes are either directly transposed or alluded to in Perdido Street Station and Iron Council.)

Isle of Dogs, Wes Anderson

According to the Internet, this film is cultural appropriation by the (skinny, hipster) white devil, with offensive stereotypes and white saviour tropes. Now, some have made convincing claims that it’s not great on this front, which have been counteracted with rebuttals that it’s actually pretty great on this front.

I personally don’t find these cultural appropriation charges that compelling. Half the film is entirely in (deliberately unsubtitled) Japanese with Japanese voice actors, and the one or two white characters seemed a bit useless. But more importantly, I sniff a bit of insincerity among naysayers. How many of them would care enough to watch, say, a Hirokazu Kore-eda film that’s actually about contemporary Japan? Or be interested in anime for reasons other than because they were entertained by how weird and alien it was? Where were these people when Disney churned out a mashup city called San Fransokyo? Or when Warner Bros. made the very, very awful Lego Ninjago movie? Or when The Last Airbender used the four Platonic elements rather than the five Chinese elements? Huh? HUH?

But I digress.

I think it would be a shame to skip this film since it has some of the most fabulous art direction I’ve ever seen in a stop-motion film — certainly a step up from Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. It could be roughly 73% more racist and I’d still stand by that opinion. Further, as far as I’m concerned, it has some of the most well crafted “dog humour” kicking around onscreen. I’m not kidding! Internet exposure has really lowered the quality of canine-related humour. Everyone, please. Dogs are funniest when the comedy contextually and thematically interfaces with the biological, behavioural, and cultural realities of Canis familiaris in human society — not when the dog’s a gif with comic sans dialogue, or dressed up “cute”, or doing clumsy tricks on some shoddy vertical YouTube video. Sheesh, you people.

31 July 2018 — The July 2018 dust-up

Hannah Gadsby: Nanette

Short quip: Yeah, it’s pretty good. Longer quip: I’m not convinced it’s some revolutionary shakeup of the stand-up world, as some have heralded the act as. It’s more precision strike, face-heel turn performance art than an actual routine. Gadsby’s critique of stand-up as a sterile (and in her case, self-flagellating) art form is an uncontroversial clarion call when you think about it. I hope few people actually think live audience comedy can be a rousing force for social change. Even the most explosive comic monologues can run the risk of coming across as toothless, fly-by-night stuff that merely satiates the converted (who self-select based on their ability to afford the tickets and theatre bar menu). Point is, most stand-up has — as the Kiwis say — always been a bit half-pie.

(For more on the limitations of comedy: see Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History episode on how Enfield’s Loadsamoney skits backfired, that recent Minefield episode on the inherent weaknesses of political satire, and all the commentary regarding how Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest show doesn’t actually say anything meaningful.)

The Story of a New Name, Elena Ferrante

I felt chained to an intolerable pact of friendship. How tortuous everything was. It was I who had dragged Lila to Ischia. I had used her to pursue Nino, hopelessly… I had put myself in her service and now I was playing the role of the servant who comes to the aid of her mistress. I was covering for her adultery. I was preparing it. I was helping her take Nino, take him in my place, be fucked—yes, fucked—fucked by him for a whole day and a whole night… I stared at the sparkling sea, and the long livid array of clouds that was moving from the horizon toward the blue sky, toward the white streak of condensation, and I could barely see them, Nino and Lila, black dots. I couldn’t tell if they were swimming toward the mass of clouds on the horizon or turning back. I wished that they would drown and that death would take from them the joys of the next day.

Ah, the adolescent dramas! The Vesuvian passions! The internecine squabbles of a cloistered, working class Neapolitan neighbourhood! While not as structurally sound as My Brilliant Friend (the Ischia scenes really drag out the middle and Elena’s university sequence feels overly rushed), The Story of a New Name takes the story of Lila and Elena’s friendship to feverish heights and restless nadirs.

Elena’s personal story was my favourite — I felt a close affinity to her struggles with her studies, with her sense of impostor syndrome, with her attempts to process trauma. Lila’s story, on the other hand, made me hate her on one page, and then feel utter horror at her fate on the next in a way that only great fiction can do.

Along with the development of their friendship, elements only hinted at in the previous book (the Camorra, the hypocritical social values, the darkness of the younger male characters) begin to fully reveal themselves in this instalment. Likewise, all the side characters become hopelessly entangled in petty alliances and convulsive rivalries (though unfortunately, aside from the central duo, none of the supporting female characters seem as vividly rendered as their male counterparts).

The book also takes an anthropological stance of sorts. Despite the narrative’s repeated references to Marxism and class conflict (Elena claims to be a Trotskyite, her high school mentor is a Communist, etc.), it makes clear that the conflict among its characters is largely of their own making. The characters reserve their most genuine horror, resentment, and anger towards those they most resemble and have close social and familial ties with. Shakespeare, more than any other theorist, explains the suffering of these people, a Girardian might say.

A thrill to read. Two down, two to go.

The Master, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

The premise is certainly intriguing: A puerile, alcoholic navy sailor (Joaquin Phoenix) returns to America after the Second World War a broken drifter, and accidentally befriends the charismatic cult leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of the Church-of-Not-Scientology. Don’t go into this expecting to learn something deep about post-war veterans or cult movements. It’s a character study piece — an exploration of how a person of pure, uninhibited id can become unlikely bedfellows with someone of cold, calculating ego (the film’s famous processing scene, for instance, is a standout scene in this regard).

A beautifully directed film that makes for pleasant evening viewing. That’s about it, I suppose. Beyond appreciating how skilfully shot and acted it is, I didn’t feel particularly invested in the story. The trailers for The Master were almost entirely composed of scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut, which hints to me that the film itself is largely a string of well-directed scenes picked out from a large bucket of well-directed scenes. I suppose the lack of ‘tautness’ or ‘necessity’ in the narrative bothered me. You get a medal for service to the craft, but don’t expect me to watch you again anytime soon, movie.

All in all, glad I saw it, but I don’t think it imparted on me some tangible sense of wisdom or understanding the way that There Will Be Blood or Phantom Thread did.

In the Mood for Love, dir. Wong Kar-wai

Again, a carefully crafted film that I’m glad I saw but wouldn’t rush back to anytime soon. In a few years time, I doubt I’ll remember much about this film except that it largely consisted of scenes of sexy Hong Kong actors sitting in claustrophobic and colourfully retro sets eating yum cha. It’s a slow burn film, people.

The premise? It’s 1960s Hong Kong, and a man and a woman (played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung), who are neighbours in an apartment, discover that both their spouses are cheating on them with each other. Out of this unbearable sorrow, an intimate but chaste relationship begins to form between the two of them. And slowly, their relationship evolves in unexpected ways as — spoilers! (although none of you kids were planning on watching a Cantonese arthouse film anyway) — they begin to mimic how their unfaithful spouses might interact with each other, and rehearse how they might confront their spouses (all the while eating yum cha, of course).

Did I get much of this? Eh.

It’s been called one of the best Hong Kong films ever made — but if you are unfamiliar with the cinema of Hong Kong, start with this film at your own risk. The good stuff is in the schlock, people! Go watch something like John Woo’s Hard Boiled, it’s fucking amazing.

For Esmé — with Love and Squalor, and Other Stories, J.D. Salinger

J.D. Salinger wrote more than The Catcher in the Rye, y’know. He also wrote some famous short stories and a bunch of novellas that no one cares about.

I’ll make a sheepish admission: I struggle a bit with short stories, particularly classic dead white man ones. I read them, sort of appreciate them, and then skim through an online discussion of the story that dives into all its deep symbolism and references that I didn’t get and feel like a dumbass.

Thankfully, I managed to finish this collection with my self-esteem intact. I’d even say it was very enjoyable. It’s a collection with great variety, although common themes include the brokenness of Second World War veterans and the spiritual sterility of post-WWII American consumerism. The dialogue, especially, is sharply written.

The two most famous Salinger stories in this book, “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor” and “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” were probably among my least favourite. I preferred weirder ones, like “De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” (a humorous story about a pompous art impersonator) or “Teddy” (about a precocious young child, who may or may not be the reincarnation of an Eastern religious guru).

Reading can be fun and for the whole family.

A Quiet Place, dir. John Krasinski

A science-fiction horror movie that stars Emily Blunt and Jim from the US version of The Office. It’s about bullet-proof space monsters that hunt by sound, so everyone has to do an Elmer Fudd and be ‘vewy, vewy quiet’.

Most notable for having an interesting soundscape — most of the film is silent, with characters communicating in American Sign Language — and a decent inclusion of people with disabilities (one of the actors is actually deaf). If I can make one recommendation: Turn the subtitles off and just focus on the actors and their nonverbal communication. Most of the scenes can be understood through context, anyway.

Okay, now for what I actually want to discuss: This film is super pro-life. I briefly heard about this angle of the film and thought it would be subtle. But no. This film is super, duper pro-life. The central crisis of the film (spoilers, I suppose) is that a family hiding from the monsters in the countryside must prepare for the birth of a baby.

Now, you may be asking yourself: Why would these characters want to have a screaming human baby in a post-apocalyptic setting with hyperacoustic demon aliens? Why wouldn’t the parents in this household think rationally and consider abortion as an option? Because that’s the whole point! At no point in the film, despite the family being in constant mortal danger, do they even remotely consider sacrificing the baby for the survival of the collective.

In one of the few scenes of spoken dialogue in the film, Emily Blunt’s character whispers: “I can still feel the weight in my arms. Small but so heavy… But my hands were free… so I could’ve carried him. I should’ve carried him”. Yikes. “Who are we if we can’t protect them? Who are we?” she says, though not quite directly at the camera.

And you know what? I respect that. I respect works of art that have a coherent sense of conviction; even if they espouse values I don’t personally hold. For instance, one of my favourite science fiction novels of all time, A Canticle for Leibowitz, is intensely steeped in Catholicism (the “Wandering Jew” shows up repeatedly and, at one point, it’s implied that one of the characters is the Second Coming of Christ).

Anyway, the abortion debate in America is weird, man. I’m not sure I fully understand it. It can’t be explained away in terms of a minority cohort having a stranglehold on public discussion or engaging in policy capture. The issue is deeply divisive across the nation in a way that few other industrialised Western countries experience. According to a 2018 Gallup poll, it goes 48% either way, ladies and gentlemen.

Anyway, A Quiet Place is effective. Worth a watch. But remember that John Krasinski is probably helping dismantle Roe v. Wade. Now think about that the next time you see him flirt with Pam on The Office.

Next month: Going to smash out some more Nabokov and hopefully see some international films I’ve heard good things about at MIFF.

28 August 2018 — August 2018 reviews

One-Punch Man, season one

Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

A favourite, or so I think, of my old housemates. This anime is the story of Saitama, an unemployed sararīman who decides to become a superhero just for the fun of it. He has no deep motivations or internal conflicts. He has no unusual backstory. He does not train particularly hard. Yet, in a very short span of time, he ends up as essentially the most powerful being in the universe, able to turn gigantic monsters into crimson giblets with a single, unenthusiastic punch. And now he’s bored and his life feels empty. Ah, existential brilliance.

This absurd premise provides an incredible canvas for existential pondering. Ennui and malaise circle this show like insatiable sharks. The show presents a host of colourful side characters that stand up to insurmountable challenge, only for their valour to be revealed as illusory when Saitama steps in to punch their obstacles away in an instant. The show depicts an array of villains with fiendish abilities who, an augenblick after being introduced, are reduced to raining viscera with a single knuckle sandwich.

Can there be meaningful struggle if the gods can simply solve your problems? What would get you out of bed every morning if you knew there was nothing left in life that could challenge you? Such is the artful puzzle of One-Punch Man.

Along with these philosophical musings, the show also presents an imaginative institution known as the “Hero Association” which ranks and manages superheroes around the world. This fictional construct is especially interesting to me, given that I’ve been thinking about accountability and performance frameworks a lot recently in my professional capacity. A few lessons can be drawn from the show regarding this:

Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov

A thousand years ago five minutes were Equal to forty ounces of fine sand. Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and Infinite aftertime: above your head They close like giant wings, and you are dead.

— John Shade

In the left margin and parallel to it: “In the Middle Ages an hour was equal to 480 ounces of fine sand or 22,560 atoms.” I am unable to check either this statement or the poet’s calculations in regard to five minutes, i.e., three hundred seconds, since I do not see how 480 can be divided by 300 or vice versa, but perhaps I am only tired.

— Charles Kinbote

A marvellous, yet difficult book by Vladimir Nabokov. I carved out much of my reading time this month so I could absorb it properly. It first came to my attention when I watched Blade Runner 2049, which heavily references it.

So what is Pale Fire about? (Spoilers, by the way…) Charles Kinbote, an eccentric scholar and infatuated admirer of the famous Appalachian poet John Shade, has acquired Shade’s final masterpiece: the 999 lines of an unfinished 1,000 line poem in heroic couplets titled “Pale Fire”. Hiding in a cabin in the woods, Kinbote writes his own masterpiece in the form of an extensive commentary of the poem. It very quickly becomes apparent, however, that this is no straightforward exegesis.

While Shade’s poem is autobiographical in nature, exploring subjects such as his marriage, his tragic personal loss and his grand aesthetic and metaphysical philosophy, Kinbote flagrantly misinterprets or ignores lines from the poem wholesale in his textual analysis. Things rapidly get weirder as he uses his commentary as an opportunity to ramble about the political machinations of a (quite possibly nonexistent) country called Zembla…

Nabokov’s book is presented in four parts: [1] A foreword by Kinbote, [2] Shade’s poem in its entirety (which is itself a fairly solid poem), [3] Kinbote’s commentary, and [4] an index compiled by the commentator as well. In order to fully piece together the story, the reader is forced to jump back and forth between the poem and the commentary, while occasionally referring to the ridiculously abstruse index.

The book is a hilarious puzzle box, with jigsaw pieces composed of Nabokov’s alluring (and sometimes frightfully enigmatic) prose. It takes the reader through a thematic obstacle course, exploring ideas such as infatuation and hero worship, world building as aesthetic form, theology and thanatology, critiques of modern literary analysis, intelligentsia refugees, and the fostering of creativity.

Simply put, this book is awesome.

And blood-black nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

Disenchantment, Matt Groening

It sucks! BOREDOM and TEDIOUS JOKES await! Hurrah!

The new Netflix show by the creator of The Simpsons and Futurama set in a “wacky” fantasy setting that is “laden with adult humour”. The first episode does a decent enough job and the animation quality is top-notch, but the show quickly wears out its welcome. The serialised format is uninteresting. The jokes are not as clever as the writers think they are. And none of the characters are terribly engaging, with Eric Andre’s talents wasted as a voice actor.

One thing which killed it for me is how the joke setup/payoff structure really lacked rhythm. It’s strangely hard to land the timing of a joke in animation (something which I think a show like Rick and Morty is under-appreciated for) and it’s blatantly apparent here.

By the way, when did The Simpsons well and truly die for you? (You better not be one of those weirdos that still watch the new episodes on a regular basis.) For me, it was after the season eleven finale “Behind the Laughter”. They should’ve called it quits after that. A meteor should’ve hit Fox studios lot. Can you believe they’re about to release season thirty? When they got Don Hertzfeldt to come in as a guest animator to do a couch gag, did they not realise that he was making fun of the fact that The Simpsons would go on forever and turn into incoherent fucking garbage?

— Fin. —

30 September 2018 — A spoilerific September 2018 round-up

Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and Parts Unknown

I’ve been in a bad slump lately, so I’ve been watching some old Anthony Bourdain episodes to stimulate the psyche. They’re equally joyful and dreadfully upsetting to watch. What a loss. What a pity. What a font of zeal. A cosmopolitan explorer par excellence. A man who raged and raged, and did so with TV shows that peered beyond exotic sensuality and documented the vitality of other worlds, warts and all.

There’s the episode where he goes to Iran with a mission to show American audiences that it isn’t just a country full of psychopaths. There’s the one where he goes to Laos and meditates on whether travel shows like his will negatively bolster tourism, thus ruining the very charm of the country that those travellers seek. He walks around Shanghai’s local food streets and wonders: What does it even mean to be a foodie? Surely that would mean China’s 1.5 billion people are all foodies? He goes to Libya (after the 2012 Benghazi attack, mind you) and eats fast food with former rebel fighters while discussing the future of the country.

I should get the DVD box sets. Wait. Do they do box sets anymore? Or is everything up on the Amazon Stanflix Foxnet cloud floating above our heads in the luminiferous aether? I can’t even remember the last time I even handled an optical disc. How would I even play the damn thing?

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

This book was run-of-the-mill. Sorry Murakami millennial fangirls. This book was Run. Of. The. Mill. It was ok with a capital Oh and Kay.

A work of speculative fiction that ping-pongs between two separate narratives: One is a mildly futuristic Tokyo where nefarious hackers are in an arms race with people with preternatural bio-computational abilities. The other is a strange, stilted fable set in a mysterious and walled-off town in the wilderness. Sounds intriguing, right?

Nup. The novel is not cyberpunk enough to play effectively with the genre. Nor is it noir or ‘hard-boiled’ enough to play with that genre. The technobabble wasn’t even that impressive as ludicrous technobabble. And when it tried to pull some mind-benders on me, I just thought about how Philip K. Dick would’ve executed it better. Diet K. Dick, you could call this book.

And, of course, there it is: That stoic, jazz listening, whiskey drinking Murakami male protagonist. That’s some real Nobel Prize in Literature material you got there, mate.1

There’s also a sequence near the end where the main character believes he has only 24 hours to live and Murakami goes on to write what is very obviously his personal fantasy about what would constitute a perfect day (hint: it involves watching classic American films, listening to jazz, referencing Russian and German literature, eating Italian food, and having lots of sex). Perhaps I am overly harsh. It’s decently written, but nothing lingers or leaves much of an impression.

Red Sorghum, dir. Zhang Yimou

When my grandfather pissed in the pots, it was meant to be a prank. But it was so strange—the wine in those pots became better.

Baijiu! Sweet, burning baijiu! The drink of choice for hearty Chinese peasants and bored Canberra undergraduates everywhere.

Red Sorghum is the 1988 debut film of Zhang Yimou, a director I sincerely admire, and based off a novel by Nobel Prize laureate Mo Yan. It tells the story of a woman who becomes the owner of a sorghum liquor distillery in a dusty, backwater part of old China.

The film’s lush, bold colours help underpin its bold, simplistic characters. It has one of the greatest drinking songs ever put to film. Red Sorghum depicts a countryside where life was short, passionate and joyful, but also one where it was short, violent and unpredictable. This is reflected fully in the film’s narrative structure:

  1. Act One. Our female lead is married off to a distillery owner. After some dramatic turns, she takes over the distillery.
  2. Act Two. Some bandit troubles. Hot peasant action. The distillery flourishes.
  3. Act Three. THE JAPANESE INVADE CHINA AND EVERYONE DIES.

You can probably guess that the film has some jarring structural qualities to it. Nevertheless, it’s a solid flick from the distant reaches of the Orient. Made me want to drink some cheap Asian grain liquor. Maybe watch this instead of Crazy Rich Asians. You subtitle hating philistines.

5 November 2018 — Low-effort October 2018 reviews

Christ, it’s November already and I’m twenty-seven. Ne cherchez plus mon coeur; les bêtes l’ont mangé. “My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.”

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena Ferrante

Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time only in that situation. I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition. I had wanted to become something—here was the point—only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind. My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her.

It just keeps getting better and better. I recently learnt that some of my colleagues stopped partway through My Brilliant Friend, the first book in the saga. What fools! They don’t know what they are missing out on. Has there ever been a more intoxicating and toxic friendship depicted on page than that of Elena Greco and Lila Carracci?

Our main characters are older and more successful than ever before, but still they are haunted by the same fears and desires, and still scarred by their upbringing in an impoverished Neapolitan neighbourhood. They struggle with marriage, with motherhood, with their own ambitions and identities. And whether they want to or not, they are swept up by the chaos of Italian politics, of radical left-wing movements, of fascists and crime syndicates, and burgeoning ideas such as feminism and information technology.

Disaffection and dissatisfaction (and not to mention, death) is everywhere. Frequently, Elena summarises her predicament in clipped statements such as “I suffered” or “I was suffering greatly”. Characters manage to escape the close-knit bickering and nigh-incestuous entanglements of their old neighbourhood, only to feel more wretched and unbalanced.

The book is still one about mimicry—mimicry of desires and re-enacting the sins of our forebears. We suffer the past because it is all we know. Consider the horror of this scene, when Elena goes to look for her daughter, who is playing with another child:

At a certain point I went to look for Dede. I found her in the hall with Mirko and her doll. They were pretending to be a mother and father with their baby, but it wasn’t peaceful: they were pretending to have a fight. I stopped. Dede instructed Mirko: You have to hit me, understand? The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game, we were a chain of shadows who had always been on the stage with the same burden of love, hatred, desire, and violence.

The arc of justice is also present throughout the story, but it is depicted as a fickle arc. Lila and Elena become involved with progressive political forces that are revealed to be infested with internecine squabbling and blind principles that generate more harm than good.

I’ll readily admit that I’ve reached the point—hundreds upon hundreds of pages into this series—where I’m embarrassingly invested in the outrage and scandal that befall Ferrante’s dramatis personae. For example, I was utterly enthralled when Elena is snared into a dinner party in her old neighbourhood and discovers that her sister is engaged to Marcello Solara, a Camorrista. That sequence is, in my opinion, the highlight of the book: Ferrante turns dinner conversations into a microcosmic social struggle, where rivalries and alliances are revealed, and the prestige of individuals are elevated or hewn in a series of whiplash exchanges.

It does not help (or maybe it helps a lot), that I am reminded of characters in real life. Elena, for instance, reminds me of a dear and close friend. Nino reminds me of someone. Franco reminds me of someone. I’m sure I’ve met a number of Mariarosas and Pietros. My god! And I’ve never even stepped foot in garbage-strewn Naples…

Three down, one more book to go.

(Fun fact: I’ve noticed that a number of English versions of Ferrante’s novels have weird typos and typographical errors in their back cover blurbs. What the hell?)

Once Upon a Time in the West, dir. Sergio Leone

Long, harsh stares and laconic dialogue. An Ennio Morricone score upon a sun-scorched wasteland. Close-up shots of grizzled gunslingers. The sudden flash of gunmetal and the just and unjust alike are dead on the ground, smoke wafting from their wounds. The quick and the dead.

What’s not to love?

The premise: A bloody conflict is brewing in the town of Flagstone over a precious tract of land inherited by Jill McBain, a former New Orleans prostitute. As battle lines are drawn in the sand, an enigmatic harmonica playing gunslinger and a wily bandit named Cheyenne must face off against an imperious railway magnate and Frank, his vicious gun-for-hire.

Once Upon a Time in the West is frequently considered one of the greatest westerns ever made, so there’s not much I can really say. I will quickly note the following though:

I worry I’m becoming a dumber movie watcher. No, seriously. For some reason, I had trouble following the fact that Cheyenne had been framed and Frank’s men were posing as members of his gang. It took a while for this plot point to click with me (and only after a quick scan of the Wikipedia summary for clarification). But in hindsight, it really shouldn’t have demanded much effort to figure out. Perhaps there’s something about my exposure to modern media that is adversely affecting my attention span and ability to interpret certain plot details.

It’s fascinating how immediately the film accepts the demise of the Wild West. After all, the central conflict is over Flagstone becoming a railway station, with the ‘good guys’ in the film effectively fighting for the creation of the very instrument (the railway and its civilising forces) that will destroy their free-roaming way of life. The story never pauses to reflect on this theme and instead presents it as plain, unsentimental fact. The final shot of the film is effectively one that portrays the rugged and the dead being slowly crowded out by the forces of American industry.

The sexual voice in this film is unexpectedly stark. At one point, Jill McBain plainly states that if she were to be gang raped by bandits, she wouldn’t bat an eye given her past occupation as a ‘fallen woman’. Likewise, near the end of the film, Cheyenne cheekily tells her that she shouldn’t be offended if one of the railway workers under her command gives her a pat on the behind, because their existence is a tough lot and they’ve ‘earned it’. My surprise is more due to the fact that the film ‘feels’ like a much older film than it actually is—Once Upon a Time in the West was released in 1968 after all, which places it well within the right timeframe.

Raise the Red Lantern, dir. Zhang Yimou

Spoilers: This film has red lanterns.

This is a film that I’m glad to have revisited. I first saw it as a child (weird, I know), and I didn’t really get it then. For one thing, I wasn’t old enough to appreciate the film’s bold use of colours and striking cinematography.

Set during the tumultuous Warlords Era in the Republic of China, the film tells the tragic tale of a young woman who has become a concubine to a wealthy man. At first, it appears that she’s trapped within his manse and stifled by his family’s arcane traditions, but very quickly she adapts to her circumstances and finds herself viciously competing with the other concubines for the man’s affections.

The film depicts how insidious a system of patriarchy can be. Cleverly, the man’s face is never directly shown, and is instead obscured, off-camera, or filmed at a distance. Instead, the system acts invisibly as the concubines plot against one another, not fully realising they are caught up in the chambers of a much larger social machine.

A cold, distant film at times, it deserves a deliberate and patient reading. It’s a contemporary Chinese classic. Check it out!

11 December 2018 — The best books, films and TV shows I read/watched this year

Call these my summer recommendations or my favourites of the year. Some of you asked for a ‘best of’ post (how flattering), so here it is!

Note that most of these things weren’t actually published or released in 2018. Rather, they’re more what I landed on this year via my own eclectic interests and pursuits. Anyway, let’s begin the count down…

Top five books

(#5) The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (2015)

A galvanising fantasy novel set on a supercontinent wracked by natural disasters, where countless civilisations have risen and fallen over aeons. What it’s actually about is survival, dignity, minority rights, oppression and hegemony. The entire trilogy won her the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row, an unprecedented feat.

(#4) Winter by Ali Smith (2017)

Book two of the (still-to-be-finished) seasonal quartet by Ali Smith, a series of UK novels widely lauded as an immediate response to Brexit. Better than her first entry, Autumn, by a mile. The characters are more engaging, the jokes are funnier, and the social justice angle is more convincing and impactful. The use of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline as a key metaphor is simply beautiful.

(#3) The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien (1990)

A novel about the Vietnam War that questions what it means to be authentic and truthful when recounting moments of human extremes. The narrative voice throughout is measured and magnanimous, while discussing one of the most disgraceful events of the 20th century. Think non-linear narratives; think the fragility of memory; and think the haunting conflicts—both external and internal—that change the human soul forever.

(#2) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

My second favourite book of the year. Some call it ‘creepy’ or ‘off-putting’ or whatever. Wrong, wrong, wrong! It’s a book of stunning aesthetic excess, layered with wordplay and clever literary jabs, which proves that you can weave a story about beauty from just about any subject matter. My god, if I could construct sentences with half the virtuosity of Nabokov, I’d actually be a good writer.

(#1) The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante (2012-2015)

So I’m cheating a bit by calling this entire series my favourite book of the year, but the four books might as well be treated as a single book (indeed, that is what Ferrante has suggested it should be treated as). It’s epic in scope. It’s intimate in focus. Some of the scenes that Ferrante is able to construct around the intensity of human emotions and interpersonal conflict are spectacular to read.

Top five films

(#5) The Death of Stalin, dir. Armando Iannucci (2017)

Who knew that the violent scramble for power in the Soviet Union following Stalin’s demise would make such a great black comedy? It’s buffoonishly funny and filled with quotable lines. But peel off Scaramouche’s face and you see the film for what it is: An exploration into tyranny and the naked workings of totalitarian power structures. And in an age of crumbling democratic norms and growing authoritarian overtures around the globe, this is exactly the kind of comedy we need more of.

(#4) Phantom Thread, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson (2017)

PTA and Daniel Day-Lewis do it again. I wasn’t expecting to be so mesmerised by a film about the 1950s fashion scene in London. It’s a film about unbreakable focus, perfectionism and the sheer force of personality that some people can possess in their creative and industrious pursuits—and the vulnerabilities that these individuals can carry with them.

(#3) Burning, dir. Lee Chang-dong (2018)

Korean director Lee Chang-dong is a legend. Oasis and Poetry are both fantastic dramas. (Fun fact: He was also formerly South Korea’s Minister of Culture and Tourism. Could you imagine Mitch Fifield trying to direct a film?) With his latest film, Lee Chang-dong has transformed a Murakami short story into a brooding mystery about wealth inequality, male rage, youth poverty and crumbling social norms in Seoul and its agrarian surrounds.

(#2) Antichrist, dir. Lars von Trier (2009)

If I told you that a film where a man ejaculates blood, and a woman performs female circumcision on herself would turn out to be one of my favourite movies of the year, then you might think I’m deranged. This film was able to unnerve me and induce a sense of primal terror inside me like nothing I’d ever seen before. On top of that, the film has some undeniably beautiful cinematography and a meticulous, yet cryptic, screenplay.

(#1) Foxtrot, dir. Samuel Maoz (2017)

Top film of the year. An Israeli film sizzling with grim socio-political allegory that whiplashes (or rather, foxtrots) across different tones, from military drama to absurdism to black comedy. It tackles the ideas of endless conflict, self-fulfilling prophecy, and the loss of a nation’s genealogical ideals in a thought provoking and masterful way. I was thrilled throughout. I’ll definitely be watching this again in the near future.

Some good TV shows

(#3) The Good Place, season two (2017)

Playfully inventive and intelligently unpredictable. S2 was able to take the twist ending from S1 and use it to blow up the entire premise. More than that, S2 had some heart. Not that lame Captain Planet ‘heart’ stuff. It had a real, squelching red muscle, squirting blood from its severed aorta and pulmonary veins. Yeah!

(#2) The Expanse, season three (2018)

Too much science fiction these days is preoccupied with eschaton and explosions and escapism. Instead, this show presents a spacefaring vision of humanity where, despite the continuation of factionalism, realpolitiks and struggles for resources, hope is possible. The show asserts that people can overcome fear, heal conflict, and unite to solve grave challenges in the face of the unknown. We need more shows like this one right now.

(#1) My Brilliant Friend (2018)

Fantastico! Splendido! As an adaptation of the first book in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, it’s everything I wanted and more. The acting, the set design, the music, the cinematography, it is all so outstanding. A brilliant miniseries. It’s doggedly faithful to the books and brings the tragic saga to life, warts and sunspots and all. Recommended to readers and non-readers alike.

Books and screen content on thin ice

6 May 2019 — First quarter 2019 reviews: books

Haven’t done one of these review compilations in a while — been too busy focussing on my creative writing and my new personal blog. These are some perfunctory thoughts on things I read in the first three months of this year (I’ll do films/TV reviews in a separate post). So let’s not waste time and jump right into it. We’re busy, busy people after all.

The Obelisk Gate by N.K. Jemisin

Entry number two into Jemisin’s award winning Broken Earth trilogy. A story about prejudice, persecution, coexistence, and a mother trying to find her daughter following a supernatural, geological apocalypse that has rained ash and hellfire on the entire world. I named the first entry, The Fifth Season, one of my favourite books of last year and there’s not much more I can add here that I haven’t mentioned already. It’s a deliriously original fantasy novel with some genuine emotional force behind it — the author herself has gone on the record and stated that writing these books almost emotionally broke her.

The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin

Third entry of her trilogy, right after The Obelisk Gate. Now, you might say it’s a story about people with the telekinetic ability to move mountains, trigger volcanoes, and trigger earthquakes, but really it’s a story about oppression, resistance, dignity, and inter-generational trauma. Dwell on that sentence, nerds.

A strong conclusion to the series, noting that the cohesion and clarity of her fantastical concepts began to fall apart towards the end as the story raced towards its fervent, high drama conclusions. Don’t get me wrong, I’d take compelling, warm-blooded characters and psychological interplay over cold, calculated world-building any day of the week, but the book did leave me a bit befuddled on certain details. I follow N.K. Jemisin on Twitter (fun fact: she live streams herself playing video games during her writing breaks) so I might tweet her annoying questions about the books since I’m a jackass.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

I challenge you to a duel!’ bawled the cat, sailing over their heads on the swinging chandelier, and the Browning was again in his paw… The cat took aim and, flying like a pendulum over the heads of the visitors, opened fire on them.

Considered a classic of Russian literature and 20th century political satire. It’s a story that primarily concerns the devil (as in the literal, goddamn devil) and his retinue visiting the atheistic Soviet Union in disguise and creating unbridled havoc across Russian society.

The origin story for the book itself is utterly fascinating: Bulgakov initially began writing The Master and Margarita in the late 1920s, around the time his writing career was destroyed by the Russian authorities after they denounced him for creating ideologically disagreeable plays. Depressed with Russia’s political climate, he actually burnt his original manuscript for the novel, thinking it would never see the light. He did later return to writing it, but the book was not formally published until 1967, 27 years after his death.

There’s a lot to unpack in this novel. The first is its political commentary. For instance, subtle references to the secret police and its practices of state terror are made throughout the narrative. The dismal communal housing policies of Moscow are critiqued. The government’s use of show trials and psychiatric institutes as instruments of oppression are highlighted in key chapters. The book even makes fun of Soviet currency policies. And Bulgakov especially has it out for artists who pandered to the regime; going as far as writing thinly veiled versions of real-life artists who had politically denounced him.

The second is the novel’s fantastical side. Along with commentary of Russian life under the Soviet Union, Bulgakov weaves in some wild elements. Witches cause carnage around Moscow. Vampires terrorise theatre administrators. A large line-up of infamous murderers and tyrants from throughout history attend a Satanic Ball. There’s also The Master and Margarita’s story-within-a-story involving a decidedly non-Biblical version of Pontius Pilate and the trial of Jesus.

There are some very minor plot inconsistencies (since Bulgakov died before properly finalising the manuscript) as well as some general oddities about the book. Why are there so many Freemason references? Why are many of the characters named after non-Russian composers? Why did Bulgakov include this little thing or mention that little thing? Who knows??

I enjoyed it, but I never fully “fell” into the story, always keeping it somewhat at arms length. In fact, I found myself treating it more like a document to intellectually study, carefully reading each chapter and then reading all the commentary around it. That is perhaps inevitable given that much of the book requires a certain level of prerequisite knowledge about its political and cultural context.

I certainly didn’t regret reading it and would recommend it to anyone who finds the premise intriguing — just recognise that most Western readers will likely need a bit of guidance in order to appreciate it on a deeper level.

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Some people were aghast when I told them I didn’t like this book that much. Well, too bad Zadie Smith fans. I am your reckoning.

This book is a commentary on the British immigration experience and the impact of multiculturalism on London and — hey, you know what? I don’t actually care that much. This is what I will say: This is a book that strains for effect. Everyone in the book is a quirky, wacky character. Every shop, every neighbourhood, every interaction, every observation is full up to pussy’s bow with quirk. “Look at me,” the book shouts at you, “look how zany and offbeat everything is. Everything’s craaaazy!”

When everything in a book tries to claim an odd, skewed version of reality, it all rapidly starts to lose its lustre. The narrative and tone started off strong, but after every hundred pages or so the charm began to steadily wear off. Then the book simply crashed into itself in the last twenty pages with a tangle of plot threads that went nowhere.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Yeah, it was fine. Had more good ideas than dumb ideas (of which there were a few). I, uh, haven’t got much more to say beyond that. It’s a book. It has pages. I give it a 6.5 out of 10.

Spring by Ali Smith

The third and latest entry into Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, a series of short novels trying to decipher life in the UK in a post-Brexit vote, Trumpian world. Autumn was okay and pleasant in parts. Winter was charming. As for Spring, it’s fine I suppose? A little better than Autumn but lacking the emotional sinews that made Winter really work for me.

Smith has really ramped up the magical realism aspects in this one. There are some excellent sequences, such as the parts focussed on immigration detention camps, as well as some wry commentary on literary history, but I found the overall story too fragmented for my liking. Anyway, here’s to Summer topping off the whole Quartet project next year.

Seamus Heaney: New Selected Poems, 1966-1987

An extraordinary poetry collection from start to finish. I absolutely loved it and read almost every poem in the book multiple times.

This collection covers the earlier half of the career of Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and Nobel laureate in Literature. The poems are lyrical, imaginative, and utterly dedicated to the task of perfecting every line. Major topics include his reflections on his childhood, his pastoral environment, the local people, Irish identity, and (of course) The Troubles.

Some highlights from the collection:

Charlotte by David Foenkinos

Well, fuck.

That was depressing.

Charlotte by the French author David Foenkinos
is a best-selling novel
written in a prose poetry style similar
to the format you’re reading right now.
It chronicles the tragic life of real-life
German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon,
including her
upbringing in a family cursed by suicides,
her emergence as a gifted artist
under the Nazi regime, her life
in hiding in the South of France,
and finally, her capture and murder during the Holocaust.

So what to make of this book?
While it was touching at times, it felt more
interested in trying to introduce Salomon to readers
(like me)
who are unfamiliar with her than trying
to do something bold with the narrative
(outside of prose poetry).

A few themes felt strangely under-serviced,
including the question around how
autobiographical her art actually was, as well as
the sensational allegations that she murdered
her own grandfather while the two of them were on the run
from Nazi authorities.

Its brevity,
along with the very utilitarian English translation I read,
probably did not assist.
Nevertheless, it is
worth a read if the book’s topic or poetic style intrigues you.

10 May 2019 — First quarter 2019 reviews: film and TV

Spoilers: Television sucks and films can be tolerable sometimes. Time for some quick-ish review on things I watched in the first quarter of this year. You know the drill — here I’ll write some nonsense which you’ll respond to disagreeably in even more incoherent and unconvincing terms, which I will then resentfully ignore. Audacter calumniare, semper aliquid haeret!

The Third Man, dir. by Carol Reed

This film is awesome! It’s considered a classic and one of the best British films ever made. What more is there to say? Go and watch it if you haven’t already.

The only observation I’ll make is that I’m surprised by how “modern”, for lack of a better word, the film’s sensibilities come across despite being a black-and-white film made in 1949 (e.g. its cynical, post-war attitude). You could easily transplant the dialogue from the famous Ferris wheel scene into a contemporary, world weary drama. In my mind, most movies from around that time come across as positively quaint and this film feels like it’s in a league of its own.

True Detective, season 3

Overly brooding and self-serious for what was effectively a shaggy-dog story about the fragility of family and memory. The lead characters were fairly compelling, but it got a bit boring for stretches. A part of me wishes that True Detective doubled down on the nightmarish, cosmic horror aspects from its first season and had, I dunno, Mahershala Ali fighting Shub-Niggurath in the Ozarks or something.

Truth be told, television irks me more than it delights. I think claims that we’re living in some Golden Age of TV are overrated. It’s still a dreadful time-sink and — to be unduly honest — I get irritated when people try to recommend me their twenty favourite Netflix shows of the month. You seriously want me to burn away fifty hours of my life just to vaguely follow a single TV story line? Right. Relative to a good book or film, I struggle to think of any episodic stories that can remain masterful and interesting over a sustained period of time. Point is, once Game of Thrones wraps up, I think I’ll avoid television as a medium indefinitely.

Captain Marvel, dir. by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck

It wasn’t a great film and it wasn’t a bad film. I spent a non-trivial amount of time while watching it wondering why sci-fi guns are always depicted as having glowing bits attached to them and making very audible “whuuurpp” power-up sounds. Wouldn’t that potentially give away your position to the enemy? Doesn’t seem like good weapon design to me.

Other than that, the film also taught me that if you pay Ben Mendelsohn enough, he’ll put on a stupid green, goblin mask and pretend to act. I also tried to come up with an edgy interpretation that the film’s main twist is actually a critique of contemporary refugee politics (e.g. there’s a group of “fanatical aliens” that turn out to be persecuted and wrongly demonised by hegemonic powers) but my heart wasn’t in it. It’s a mildly amusing comic book movie, I suppose.

Star Trek: Discovery, season 2

It was very loud and somewhat confusing. I’m not sure I like Star Trek anymore. I’m not even sure I liked it that much to begin with. I’ll say this though: Despite its schlocky, frenetic story and embarrassing, mawkish attempts at character drama, I was never bored by it. It was too dumb to be boring. It was a show that was fun to laugh at — though, sadly, never to laugh with. That’s all I have to say.

Calvary, dir. by John Michael McDonagh

Father James is having a really bad week.

While performing confessionals, a survivor of Catholic sexual abuse threatens to murder him in one week’s time, arguing that the death of a “good priest” would be more impactful than the death of a bad one. The following day, his daughter (from the life he had prior to his entry into the priesthood) comes to stay with him following a suicide attempt. To top it off, many members of his congregation seem openly rude and disdainful of him, despite his sincere attempts to perform his pastoral duties and provide spiritual guidance as best he can. Also, Dylan Moran shows up partway through the film and he looks old, tired, and fat.

And for some reason, this movie is classified as an Irish black comedy. While it had dark moments aplenty, I don’t think I laughed once while watching this. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed this film as a straight-up drama. The characters were compelling, the dialogue was excellent, and the story was contemplative and humanistic, despite its frequent bleakness.

Now here’s a personal admission that’ll make undoubtedly some of my friends uncomfortable: I have a genuine soft spot — despite my secular, irreligious external life — for religious notions of guilt, solace, redemption, dignity, and forgiveness. Theological ideas, as well as the value of religious institutions and norms in modern society, interests me on an intellectual level, and not in that insouciant way some atheists I know pretend at. This film touches on many of these themes in surprisingly skilful ways.

Do I have any nitpicks? Sure. At times the film becomes a little too much of a Tourism Ireland commercial with all its sweeping panoramic shots. I also had some minor technical quibbles (e.g. its use of slow motion and its unnecessary use of CGI in brief night shots). But overall, I found this film outstanding.

Avengers: Endgame, dir. by Anthony and Joe Russo

Avengers: Endgame was an engaging and entertaining film that was also the death of cinema. It was surprisingly emotional at points despite being the death of cinema. It was well-acted despite being the death of cinema. The finale was a tour de force that signalled the death of cinema. I’m also glad almost no one in the audience clapped during “this scene was made for clapping” moments. Cinema has died and I feel a great burden has been lifted. I am finally free.

28 June 2019 — Second quarter 2019: some book reviews

Books are shit. Reading is for ingrates.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Contrary to popular belief, Pnin — rather than Lolita — was Nabokov’s first breakthrough English language novel. It tells a relatively straightforward story about a hapless assistant professor in Russian named Timofey Pnin, an intellectual living in exile in the United States following the Russian Revolution. He can’t manage train timetables, perplexes people with his mangled English, and is mocked by academic colleagues behind his back.

Over seven chapters, each acting as a vignette with a loose narrative arc linking them, we learn about Pnin’s eccentricities and bumbling antics, before learning about his utterly tragic background. For every bundle of funny moments, there are sad reminders (drawn from Nabokov’s own experiences) about what Russian émigrés lived through in the first half of the twentieth century.

It is pretty good and about as Nabokovian as Nabokov can possibly be, without the dense prose and puzzle-like architecture of his later books. There are constant allusions to reflections and mirroring, something which Pale Fire was also obsessed with. There’s a great deal of mockery of psychoanalysis, Nabokov’s great loathing. The scholarly lifestyle and the world of the intelligentsia are thoroughly lampooned. And like Lolita, which had extraordinary, beautiful passages about road tripping through America, Pnin has vivid descriptions of fictional, small town America. Nabokov, interestingly, was both an admirer and critic of Norman Rockwell and very likely sought to construct his own ‘Rockwellian’ view of regional America through his prose.

SPQR by Mary Beard

Every couple of months, I go a bit soft in the head and become obsessed with learning about classical antiquity (this is when I am at my most undateable). As such, I ended up blitzing through Mary Beard’s 600-page speedrun of ancient Roman history, all the way from its founding myth through to the Emperor Caracalla, in under a week. Much of the narrative is, to my mild surprise, held together by the life and writings of Cicero, with the city of Rome itself playing a focal role rather than the notion of the empire as a whole.

It’s good, obviously. I don’t normally read much non-fiction (I’m living non-fiction already…) but I’m glad I got around to this book. The best parts of the book deal with the forgotten side of ancient Roman history — e.g. the lives of women, slaves, and the poor, and the way Rome dealt with personal matters such as childhood and divorce. Her goal largely appears to be focussed on settling down more sensationalist accounts of the Roman Republic and Empire and, in doing so, seeking to reorientate the minds of readers like myself who are drawn to its more lurid and dramatic parts.

For example, she races through the Punic Wars (I’m unapologetically pro-Carthage, over two thousand years after the fact) and calls the “almost mythical modern admiration for Hannibal’s battle plans at Cannae” as “little more than a clever version of going round the back of the enemy.” Much of Rome’s military history, tactics, and weapons — which fascinate so many history aficionados — are downplayed in this book. As are the popular sword and sandals stuff like the gladiatorial games and the eccentricities and reputed transgressions of later Roman Emperors.

Instead, she’s more focussed on topics such as what Romans thought of themselves and their place in the world, and their views on such matters as citizenship, laws, and political structures. No wonder then that — whereas other writers would take the story all the way up to the fall of the Roman Empire, however that is defined — she decides to finish SPQR with the Edict of Caracalla which gave all free people in the Roman Empire citizenship, thus finishing (in her view) the grand project of turning people around the world into Romans.

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

It was all right. I dug it. A smooth, straightforward moral tale about Buddhist thinking and the long, winding journey to spiritual awareness and enlightenment. I will have to sheepishly admit that I was a bit confused when the main character Siddhartha turned out not to be the original Siddhartha Gautama that became the founder of Buddhism. Instead, Gautama shows up later as a side character. Talk about confusing. It’s a bit like having a book about a guy called Jesus who is actually seeking out the original, ‘old school’ Jesus.

But it was good, if not as great as some Hermann Hesse fans make it out to be. Guess I haven’t found my footing with Hesse just yet. It’s an excellent crack at Buddhist doctrine and I like how it hammers home the idea that meditation is just a tool, not the sole key, to enlightenment. Instead it comes from experience — from living among the ordinary world in a state of mindfulness and observational insight.

Old School by Tobias Wolff

Again, it was all right. I dug it. A fun, breezy bildungsroman about a boy studying at an elite American prep school that is obsessed with literature and creative writing. A colourful parade of literary figures show up (e.g. Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway) and help teach the main character about life and shit. There’s also an intriguing final act that’s all about the hidden life of teachers. In an unexpected, nostalgic way, it brought me back to my joyous time in high school learning English literature. Simpler times, my friends.

What else to say? There’s an entire chapter with a cameo by Ayn Rand that is fucking hilarious. Her character comes across as one would expect. A fun book that can be knocked off over the weekend. Sometimes I like to have fun with what I read and not think too much, okay?

Six Chapters from My Life “Downunder” by Yang Jiang

A short memoir about the grim realities of the Cultural Revolution, as recounted by a famous Chinese scholar and author when she and her husband were sent “Down to the Countryside”: an infamous Maoist policy in the late 1960s to early 1970s which forcibly resettled those considered at-risk to bourgeois sympathies (e.g. intellectuals and city dwellers) in impoverished peasant villages as a means to ‘re-educate them’. The term “Downunder” in the title, of course, refers to their experience of being exiled to the impoverished countryside.

Members of my own family — due to their urban, educated backgrounds — experienced this policy firsthand. And both my parents can recall their childhoods living in dreary rural conditions. It’s also worth noting that the Cultural Revolution is one of the few historically sensitive subjects that can be (somewhat) openly explored in art and media under the current Chinese regime. Cue lots of films and television about the Cultural Revolution that is actually critiquing current Chinese policies…

The book itself is an exercise in grim understatement. Key episodes of her life, such as her son-in-law’s suicide (a victim of public humiliation and torture sessions under Maoist China known as “struggle sessions”) are completely brushed over in a deliberate matter-of-fact style. The drudgery and poverty of life in the countryside, the stark waste of human talent from the resettlement, and the ugly hostility of the peasants they were supposed to be learning from are all told by Yang Jiang in a measured, austere style.

The book also has one of the most nauseating lines I’ve ever read, regarding the role of dogs in poor rural households:

Shortly after my daughter had arrived in the countryside, a baby who slept on the same earthen kang had had a bowel movement right on the bed mat, which my flustered daughter tried to clean up with a handful of toilet paper. One of the village women ran up and rebuked her over wasting not only the toilet paper but the excrement as well. Then she called out, “Wu — lu lu lu lu,” after which a dog came rushing in, jumped up onto the kang, and began licking at the mess, licking it all clean, including the baby’s buttocks. There was no need to wash it off or wipe it clean. So every morning when I heard my neighbors calling their dogs with shouts of “Wu — lu, lu, lu, lu,” I knew that their babies were feeding the family dogs.

The book makes it very, very, very clear that the policy of resettlement to the countryside was a resounding failure. In one of the final passages, she writes:

I now understood something more clearly than ever: after undergoing more than ten years of reform, plus two years at the cadre school, not only had I not reached the plateau of progressive thinking that everyone sought, I was nearly as selfish now as I had been in the beginning. I was still the same old me.

The entire exercise in ideological education, as extreme as it was, only served to reaffirm the resilience of the author’s worldview.

29 June 2019 — Second quarter 2019: some film and TV reviews

Black Mirror, season five

They’re not great, but none of these episodes are as bad as reviews make them out to be. Black Mirror, aside from a handful of episodes, was never a revolutionary, mind-bending show about technology. It examines some ideas better than other works, but tackles others very clumsily. Every single episode can effectively be summed up as: ‘life sucks, but what if smartphones makes it worse?’ If Charlie Brooker’s writing is the best commentary we have about these themes, then we’re doomed by default. We should just give up.

The first episode, “Striking Vipers”, is a great example of how people take this show too damn seriously. Is it a brave exploration of the relationship between sexuality and technology? Or is it, as some people say, a disappointing, heteronormative mess of an episode? I don’t care. It’s mainly a bit boring. I wished it had something more interesting to say about the relationship between the perception of self and virtual reality. If I recall correctly, digital philosopher Jaron Lanier has talked about how virtual reality (even in very early iterations of the technology) had body-bending properties — going as far as to claim it could have authentically dissociative effects.

“Smithereens” is the only good episode of the bunch. Why? Because I’m emotionally dead inside and this episode, with its flailing histrionics, was the only one that made me vaguely feel something. Plus, all that stuff about Silicon Valley elites doing tech detoxes and companies having engagement/dopamine targets are all very real. We’re seeing, for instance, a growing phenomenon of Silicon Valley families (e.g. tech company employees) deliberately raising their children in tech-free environments. There are all kinds of implications to read into that. But anyway, I digress.

“Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too” was dumb fun. Forget that the acting’s not great, that you can see every plot device from ten miles off, or that the villainous plot is laughably absurd. Miley Cyrus singing Trent Reznor covers was pretty funny. It’s stupid and you’re stupid and I’m stupid, so it all balances out in the end.

And just to round out my thoughts — “The National Anthem” remains the only truly great Black Mirror episode. It’s miserable, disgustingly nihilistic, and transgressive. I’m very happy it exists. “White Christmas” and “Be Right Back” are overrated. “The Waldo Moment” is not as politically insightful as people make it out to be. “White Bear” is underrated: the ending is brutal and brilliant. Bandersnatch is better than you think it is.

Chernobyl (miniseries)

Best miniseries I’ve seen in a long time. I love disconsolate Soviet incompetence. Nuclear reactors are genuinely cool, even when they cause international catastrophes. Stellan Skarsgård spends the whole show looking like he’s about to burst into tears. Is that even his real hair?

Every episode is great and almost every story beat sticks its landing. If I had to nitpick, I’d say the ‘composite’ character they introduced didn’t always work since it led to a couple of plot holes later in the narrative. Also, much of the show’s more pontificating dialogue is very clearly meant for its audience: a senior scientist in a high-ranking position at a prestigious Soviet institution would, by virtue of their station, be fully versed in the state’s political machinery and not come across as so deliberately naive in their worldview.

The best thing about the show is that I’m now a fully qualified RBMK engineer. Don’t get your reactors in a xenon pit, comrades. Don’t put graphite on the tips of your core rods. Find yourself a good dosimeter. A sickening and depressing recommendation from me.

Suspiria, dir. Luca Guadagnino

So the director of Call Me by Your Name decides to follow it up with a gory horror film remake about a coven of witches in West Berlin during the German Autumn. The Baader-Meinhof Group is running around, while nefarious supernatural women in a modern dance academy (located right next to the Berlin Wall itself no less!) are performing violent hexes and committing gruesome human sacrifices using interpretive dance numbers.

Whaaaat?

This film is awesome. In terms of its visuals (shot in classic 35mm film stock), it is part period drama and part hallucinatory fever dream. Thom Yorke does the film’s haunting and bizarre soundtrack. It’s a film that covers post-war German guilt and uses black magic and witchcraft as a metaphor for dominance and historical injustice. People’s heads explode and there’s some Jungian psychotherapy stuff I’m too lazy to understand. Regardless of how much you get out of it, Suspiria is worth a watch just for the wild, disorientating ride it takes you on.

Every Yorgos Lanthimos English language film so far

I simply wasn’t that enamoured with The Lobster. Shocking, I know. I mean, it’s above average. But it’s certainly not some outrageous and fiendishly intelligent absurdist film that has never been done before. You figure out the allegory very quickly. And then you realise that what it’s trying to say about modern relationships isn’t actually that clever or insightful. And EVERYTHING. IS. SO. VERY. SHOUTY. I’m frustrated with it because it feels like something I’m supposed to enjoy yet don’t. It’s the kind of film that will most likely appeal to a gang of smug, self-satisfied drama boys at a private high school — an angle I thoroughly disapprove of. Nah, I didn’t feel much for it.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a much better film than The Lobster. The premise is simple: A surgeon has been effectively cursed by the Gods for allowing one of his patients to die, and must helplessly watch his entire family gradually succumb from a mysterious, terminal illness unless he kills one of them. It’s a messed up, slow burn film that’s fantastically awful to watch. That said, there’s a distant, almost academic quality to it that doesn’t easily lend itself to a rewatch. It’s more something to watch only once and then digest for a long time after.

Of course, his best film by far is The Favourite. Brilliant and very rewatchable. I was completely thrilled by everything about it. This would have been my film of 2017 if I had seen it last year. Now, this will sound like a rather abnormal thing for me to say, but this is also an example of a film that, through perceptive and context specific writing, can make direct references to taboo subject matters (e.g. sexual violence) genuinely work in a comedic setting. Of course, there’s so much more to discuss regarding this film. Long undergraduate screeds, I’m sure, have been (or are still being) written around this film’s depiction of ruthless power and influence through a female lens, its rampant speculation on the sexuality of major historical figures, and its commentary on class and politics, just to name a few. Point is, it’s great. Just watch it.

The Chinese Mayor, dir. Zhou Hao

A 2015 Chinese documentary that follows around mayor Geng Yanbo, a Communist Party apparatchik who is seeking to turn the city of Datong from a horribly polluted urban mess into a cultural tourism attraction by displacing half a million people and demolishing 200,000 homes in order to reconstruct the ancient Ming Dynasty walls of the city. It’s about as absurd as it sounds.

But what makes this documentary stunning is its unfettered access to the messy, grinding gears of Chinese bureaucracy. Given the country’s restrictive reputation, it’s quite an achievement that the camera got into the situations that it did. You watch the mayor get openly petitioned on the street by angry, dispossessed residents and then attempt to pacify and bribe them with promises of new accommodation perks. You see his wife angrily storm into meetings, sobbing and accusing him of being a workaholic who is never at home. And you witness distressed residents as they do their feeble best to protest the demolition of their homes.

Half the fun of the documentary is trying to figure out who this Geng Yanbo guy really is and what makes him tick. Is he just another power hungry politician in command of his own little fiefdom? At times, he bemoans all the procedures and requirements of government administration he has to follow and, at other times, he waxes lyrically about the transcendent importance of culture and seems to be genuinely committed to his mission. And is he actually as powerful as his official title suggests? He is constantly howling at people for their incompetence. He is harrowingly sleep deprived. Private contractors seem to openly lie to his face. He is followed by a sizeable entourage of hangers-on who seem to serve no useful purpose. And even he, despite being a high ranking bureaucrat, is at the whims of an opaque political system that no one can fully decipher.

As you can tell, there’s a lot to get out of The Chinese Mayor, especially if you’re even mildly interested in how China works (or doesn’t work) at a political level. It resonated on a personal level too. I was amused by how shabbily dressed the rich and powerful local elites were in this documentary — something I’ve seen on my own visits to China and always found perplexing. I’ve also visited heavily polluted, unremarkable “medium sized” cities of 3-4 million(!) people like Datong, and I’ve been to monstrous and thoroughly inauthentic reconstructions of ancient structures similar to the city walls depicted in this documentary. They’re positively ghastly.

Us, dir. Jordan Peele

I liked it a lot but Get Out is without a doubt his superior film (and was my favourite film of 2017). Yes, I get it: Us is all about class and privilege and the pernicious, arbitrary nature of social mobility in the modern economy. Regardless of its thematic strengths, the film’s high concept premise is goddamn fucking ridiculous.

I loathe the ‘turn your brain off and don’t think about the logistics’ mentality when it comes to watching and enjoying a film, but in this instance you are absolutely forced to ‘not think about it too much’ in order to get the most out of this film. The imagery is thoroughly creepy throughout, and there are some simply amazing shots and sequences. Sometimes the symbolism is a bit too much though — as the narrative progresses, it becomes somewhat overly crafted to the point that it feels like a cerebral film student exercise. Likewise, the humour was occasionally a tad out of place and quippy compared to its more naturalistic inclusion in Get Out.

It’s still better and smarter than any other horror film out at the moment. Turn your brain on for its symbolism and thematic depth, turn your brain off for its batshit nonsensical premise. A solid recommendation from me.

4 October 2019 — Third quarter 2019 book reviews: Mitteleuropa edition

I read too many fucking books. Alright, let’s do this. Mild spoilers throughout.

The Testaments (2019) by Margaret Atwood

What can I say? A novel by a true maestra. A worthy sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Whereas the original was mournful and hopeless, The Testaments is exasperated and vindictive. The Handmaids of Gilead take a backseat in this one, with the story told through three female narrators from different social classes, both from within and outside of Gilead. Whereas the original asks how close we are from once again stripping away the liberties of women, the new one explores how fragile oppression can actually be. The Testaments is, more than anything, a tale of resistance from within.

And like many readers, I was surprised to discover that a major villain in the original book and television series is effectively redeemed in this story. Atwood’s characterisation of this character is brilliant. The character is entertainingly dark, tragic, and scheming and is undoubtedly the strongest element of the book.

The Testaments can also be genuinely funny at times despite the depressing material. Consider this passage where two of the Aunts (the fanatical female leadership caste of the Republic) dryly converse with each other over whether or not their fiery sermons to young girls about the dangers of lustful men is backfiring and making them unsuitable for marriage:

She paused, flushed, cleared her throat. “Well. It’s the penises. It’s like a phobia.”

“Penises,” I said thoughtfully. “Them again.” In attempted suicides of young girls, this is often the case. Perhaps we need to change our educational curriculum, I thought: less fear-mongering, fewer centaur-like ravishers and male genitalia bursting into flame. But if we were to put too much emphasis on the theoretical delights of sex, the results would almost certainly be curiosity and experimentation, followed by moral degeneracy and public stonings.

An additional musing: this is a book that presents the case for a kind of “feminine time”. Whereas the rise of Gilead rapidly occurred under the violent machinations of men (with declarations of emergency and martial law and the like), The Testaments posits that this oppressive society can be undone through the patient and methodical behind-the-scenes actions of women. The meek don’t inherit the kingdom, but the she-wolves who can bide their time and pretend to be meek can certainly help destroy it. To quote the book itself: ‘All things come to she who waits. Time wounds all heels. Patience is a virtue. Vengeance will be mine.’

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) by Italo Calvino

The premise is famous: “you”, both the actual reader and character of the book, are reading a book called If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. Sadly, it turns out that the book has a printing error and you seek a corrected copy. But as you start the replacement, you soon find yourself reading an entirely different story. This pattern continually repeats itself as you find yourself on an adventure of literary intrigue, all while reading the first chapters of books you never complete…

Whereas the first half of this novel is too rigorously composed (akin to Invisible Cities) with a rigid “first chapter, interlude, first chapter, interlude” structure, the latter half is far more enjoyable as the architecture of the book becomes increasingly experimental and frenetic. Moreover, the novel’s conclusion is wonderfully satisfying.

I’ll say this though — if your eyes roll at prose like the following: ‘Lover’s reading of each other’s bodies… differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeats itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost’ then you’re not going to get very far into this book. It is a book about the sacred and/or profane act of reading, the inconstant relationship between the reader and the text, and what a passion for reading ultimately signifies, if anything.

I have a theory: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is secretly a dirty male joke. With regards to the act of reading, Calvino is actually referring to sex and is comparing the experience of having one’s book interrupted to being sexually frustrated. Indeed, with each successive interruption, the main character becomes increasingly more sexually aggressive in his antics and the hypothetical first chapters sprinkled throughout the novel become increasingly sexual in nature. So is my theory plausible? Well, I can certainly tell you that when I told my theory to a colleague who adores this book, she was not at all impressed.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by Milan Kundera

I made a joke a while back that ‘as far as I can tell, the whole point of the novel is that the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was great since it gave the intelligentsia of Prague lots of time to have sex with each other.’ I don’t think I was too far off the mark to be honest. Everyone is sleeping with everyone while classical music plays wistfully in the background.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a bearable book. It is thoroughly readable and above-average. At worst, the novel comes across as something a book club composed of intelligent, but slightly bored housewives would feel compelled to discuss. The oft-praised continental philosophy in this book is at Alain de Botton levels of tofu soft humanism and lyrical waxing. (Ouch! How’s that for a stinger?) Moreover, its descriptions of female psychosexual terror and polyamory aren’t as impactful these days as they were back in the 1980s. Nor has the book’s shaky and loose definition of the aesthetics of kitsch aged well in this era of hyper-charged memetic irony.

So should you give this book a go? Consider this rather lovely assertion in the book: ‘Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man’s crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.’ If you find that astoundingly deep and meaningful, then this will be your next favourite novel. Cool story, Kundera.

Travels with Herodotus (2004) by Ryszard Kapuściński

A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our doorstep once again… Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.

Truth be told, Kapuściński probably wasn’t the most aboveboard journalist (putting words in the mouths of his subjects, for instance, in his masterpiece The Emperor) and his critics have accused him of relying on racist-ish tropes (say, in The Shadow of the Sun). One scandalous accusation levelled against him is that he engaged in espionage on behalf of the Polish communist government while travelling abroad! But I don’t love him in spite of these criticisms. I love him because of them. Who will leave the more impactful legacy? The stolid, by-the-books archivist or the problematic but lyrical artist? I believe the latter. Kapuściński certainly didn’t let the finicky details of reality get in the way of an evocative narrative.

Which pains me to say that Travels with Herodotus — despite being his last great English translated work — just isn’t as strong as it could be. The book summarises his globe-trotting career as a journalist and interweaves it with his love of Herodotus. There are some warm passages where you get the sense he was a genuine humanist, but other parts left me wanting. He has surprisingly little to say about India or China (with Africa being his true love) and entire sections are just quotations and unadorned primer notes on Herodotus’s Histories! As someone who is already familiar with the Histories, I found this disappointing.

I’d say Travels with Herodotus is still a must-read for Kapuściński fans. Though, oddly enough, it mainly works best as a crib sheet for people who need a recap of the Histories.

Another Day of Life (1976) by Ryszard Kapuściński

A book about the confusing slog that was the Angolan Civil War. Kapuściński captures a country being torn apart in stark details. But unlike other war journalists, Kapuściński is not rushing to describe the guns and the explosions and the dead bodies. His perspective is that of a hapless Pole stuck in his hotel room in the capital of Luanda, away from the disorganised and unprofessional frontlines, watching the city slowly drain into a dejected malaise.

Where does honest journalism end and fanciful storytelling begin in this book? It is hard to say. Kapuściński is constantly elevating the grit of armed conflict into something darkly magical. He turns a Cold War proxy conflict into something strange and surreal. At one point, he describes sitting in a military supply truck that is racing to the frontlines. Every other truck that has gone down the road has been destroyed. He could die at any moment. But he survives because the truck is travelling in the sweltering midday heat which, according to his driver, is so sapping for the enemy combatants that setting up an ambush is all but impossible. It is written with such sincerity that you briefly forget the absurdity of the claim.

There are many artful moments. In one of the book’s best passages, Kapuściński asserts that international military strategists, with their sophisticated battle maps and logistical plans, are unaware that the fate of the entire war hinges on two people. One of them is an engineer named Alberto at the northern front, near the capital. ‘On the banks of this river stands the pumping station that supplies water to Luanda. If the station is out of action, there is no water in the city’. Alberto is apparently the only person who knows how to repair the water pumps and if he were to be killed ‘in an automobile accident on the way to the station or hit by a shell, Luanda would have to surrender after a few days.’

The second is Ruiz, ‘a congenial and lively Portuguese, the pilot of an old two-engine DC-3, the only plane that the MPLA has in Luanda. The machine was built in 1943; the motors spit gobs of soot, the wings are patched, the tyres are bald, the fuselage is full of holes.’ He claims that Ruiz is flying day and night across Angola by memory (there are no air traffic controllers), dropping off military supplies and airlifting wounded soldiers around the clock. Without Ruiz, the front would collapse since he is the only one who knows for sure where the front is! Because communication is so bad, Ruiz is often uncertain whether an airfield he’s flying into has been taken over by the enemy, so he circles a few times and if he’s fired upon he turns back to deliver the bad news to high command.

Either Kapuściński is casually uncovering insights that any journalist would kill for, or he is making shit up. Either way, he makes his observations with such earnestness that it is hard not to be swept up in it all. Case in point, Kapuściński frequently paints the Soviet-backed MPLA as the scrappy, amiable underdogs in the conflict. Of course, it is easy to forget that Kapuściński had his own biases, being from a news agency serving the Polish People’s Republic.

Shah of Shahs (1982) by Ryszard Kapuściński

I intend to visit Iran before America blows it up, mark my words. It is, from everyone I’ve met who has been there, an extraordinary country. Kapuściński’s Shah of Shahs recounts the story of the 1979 Iranian Revolution in grand, sweeping terms. Unlike many narratives of the revolution, which linger on the shock of western observers and the menace of fanatical Islam, his retelling is focussed on the relationship between the king and his subjects. Pahlavi is painted as a cruel and doomed figure. The decadent corruption of the Iranian ruling elite is laid bare in all its stupidity and wastefulness. With this book’s narrative, you become convinced the revolution had to happen. That there had to be an ayatollah to rally behind. That there had to be a corrective force to burn away the old power structures. The Shah had to fall.

As I’ve mentioned already, Kapuściński is a ridiculous over-simplifier. I love how he describes the followers of Shia Islam in blunt historical terms as lost, embittered souls who transformed Persia into ‘a medieval mecca of malcontents, rebels, strange varieties of hermits, prophets, ecstatics, shady heretics, stigmatics, mystics, and fortunetellers’. Iran, in his view, is a country that fundamentally mistrusts earthly authority. There was no way a monarchical figure could survive the Persian environment indefinitely.

More intriguing is Kapuściński’s amateur sociology. He argues that a revolution begins with a simple altercation between a policeman and a common citizen: that is, when ‘the man has stopped being afraid — and this is precisely the beginning of the revolution. Here it starts.’ And how vividly he describes the swell of popular uprising! ‘At that moment they are living in a monothematic world limited to one thought: to attain the goal they are fighting for. Everything will be subjugated to that goal; every inconvenience becomes bearable; no sacrifice is too great.’

But Kapuściński then, of course, goes on to describe how the Iranian Revolution ended like a bad hangover and reality came crashing down around them.

Do you want a scholarly account of the Iranian Revolution? Go read the Wikipedia page. But if you would rather read the honest insights of a poetic man who witnessed these wild events on the ground then read this book instead.

Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

A readable enough book about development economics and the global poor who live on a couple of dollars, or much less, per day. So readable in fact that I can save a few hours of your life by summarising the entire book right here:

Congratulations if you read to the end of this list! Now walk through that door and snag that fancy World Bank job.

Talking to Strangers (2019) by Malcolm Gladwell

A wild ride. A chapter on the Brock Turner rape case is followed by an exploration of the drinking culture of poor labourers in the Bolivian interior. A chapter about Sylvia Plath’s suicide goes into a detailed discussion about the history of town gas in British society. Hitler and Neville Chamberlain show up at one point. The Amanda Knox case makes an appearance as does the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal. Fidel Castro graces the page a couple of times. Reading Talking to Strangers, you get the sense that Gladwell loves four things above all else: espionage stories, courtroom transcripts, psychology experiments, and wacky anthropology findings.

The questions at the heart of the book are simple. Why do we suck at interacting with strangers? Why do we so easily get fooled by them? Why do we get into altercations with them? And the answer he has for all of them is depressingly simple: because our biological and cultural upbringing has fundamentally set us up to fail.

There is a deep, unspoken fatalism to the entire book. For instance, Gladwell delves into the issue of why sex abuse victims are frequently not believed and why it takes so long to catch their abusers. And he does so without uttering the phrase “Me Too”. In his view, the problem isn’t merely that we need to shift the cultural dial to believe accusers more often, it is that we are elementally hardwired to a “truth default” mode that makes it difficult for us to suspect perpetrators until it is too late.

And he depicts those who are constantly wary of people in positions of power (e.g. those who suspected Bernie Madoff of being a crook from the beginning) as deeply damaged individuals. It is costly to live life always assuming strangers are untrustworthy, which is why so few of us opt to do so. It is a dilemma without a genuine solution.

The Sympathizer (2015) by Viet Thanh Nguyen

I liked it but it had plenty of points where it didn’t need to be so long. In fact, it felt like a novel that got padded out just so it would be of a respectable length to win a Pulitzer Prize. Which it did. You might think I’m kidding, but I’m not entirely sure I am. Even Man Booker judges have recently complained that the books they receive are getting way too long.

I enjoyed the premise: a North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army joins the diaspora in America to continue spying on them after the fall of Saigon. Through his unique position, the mole uncovers the complex relationship America has with the Vietnam War, as well as the ambiguities of Asian American identity. The issue is that the main character needed a bit more of an arc. He’s such a nuanced, pandering guy that what is meant to come across as sympathetic (as the title suggests) occasionally transforms into garrulous and weak narration. I wanted a more fanatical character at the beginning, a more ‘fish out of water’ individual to explore the aftermath of the Vietnam War through a sharp, alien lens.

It is also a “greedy” book. The novel wanted to touch on so many things. It explored the Vietnam War in cinema, the role of the CIA in the war, the experience of the Vietnamese diaspora, both South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese atrocities during the war, and so on. But at times, its epic scope led to moments of shallowness (e.g. when the Vietnamese boat people made a passing cameo appearance near the end). A decent novel but one in need of stricter focus.

8 October 2019 — Third quarter 2019 film reviews: Asian cinema edition

Foreign cinema is the best. If you can’t handle subtitles, I have no respect for you. Spoilers throughout!

Parasite (2019), dir. by Bong Joon-ho

This film is great and I demand you watch it. Bong Joon-ho is hotter than kimchi fried rice. Hot damn, that was an inappropriate thing to say. Time for some homework questions:

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), dir. by Quentin Tarantino

Liked it, didn’t love it. The whole Bruce Lee controversy didn’t bother me. He was a typical Hollywood ego-man except with an impressive training regimen, not a Buddhist saint. During the filming of his magnum opus Enter the Dragon, for instance, he was frequently high on set and had constant arguments with the producer.

Similarly, the film’s violent ending didn’t bother me either. I find our current fascination with real-life serial killers — namely, white and physically attractive ones — via the media we consume (serial killer podcasts and Netflix shows, etc.) irksome. So to have Once Upon a Time in Hollywood turn the Tate murderers into punching bags was refreshing. It took power away from their legacy and seemed to be mocking the cottage entertainment industry that has developed around the Manson Family and its murders.

One interesting reading of the film is the idea that fiction (i.e. the film itself) is capable of providing a catharsis that retributive justice delivered ex post cannot. It provides a kind of divine and farcical preventative justice. Another interesting, and far less acceptable, reading of the film is that Tarantino’s rewriting of history seeks to “redeem” Hollywood’s moral trajectory. If Sharon Tate had never been murdered, would the Roman Polanski sex abuse case — perhaps the most notorious and ongoing example of the industry’s transgressions — have ever taken place? This unspoken (and possibly accidental!) implication of the film was more bothersome for me than any of its actual onscreen content.

Shin Godzilla (2016), dir. by Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi

A Godzilla movie by the man behind Neon Genesis Evangelion! But instead of being about isolation, depression, childhood trauma, and Freudian Judeo-Christian claptrap like NGE, this is a film that points an incendiary finger at the ineptitude of Japanese government.

It’s telling that a Japanese film is lamenting the health of Japanese institutions. This is not the Japan of casual western imagination, full of urban efficiencies and technological marvels. You get the sense from this film that modern Japan has stagnated and is in a state of crisis. Shin Godzilla pretty much starts with, and I kid you not, fifteen minutes of government department staff stiffly moving from meeting room to meeting room, mired in bureaucratic procedures and unable to respond effectively to Godzilla. The characters repeatedly bemoan how Japan has lost its dynamism and agency on the world stage.

In this latest iteration, Godzilla is a ridiculous googly-eyed monster that still manages to be menacing. This is also yet another high budget Asian film where all the written English shown onscreen is riddled with typos and characters that are supposedly native to Anglophone countries (in this case, a Japanese-American character played by a native Japanese actress) awkwardly recite their English dialogue phonetically. Good work everyone.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), dir. by Park Chan-wook

Did you know that the cult classic Oldboy is part of a loosely connected “Vengeance Trilogy”? Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is the first entry in the trilogy and, while not as strong as Oldboy, is perhaps just as punishing and twisted. The premise: A deaf man decides to kidnap the daughter of a wealthy businessman to earn money for his sister’s life-saving kidney transplant. Very quickly, his plan falls apart in the cruellest of ways.

This is a film about vengeance as a poison that destroys everything it touches. There are certainly funny scenes, sometimes occurring directly after moments of raw horror, but this is an icy, mean film for the most part and sees humanity in a less forgiving light than Oldboy — which is saying something!

Its imagery is hard to shake. At times, the film comes across as almost necrophilic in its depiction of death. This was, no doubt, an intentional strategy by Park Chan-wook to unnerve the audiences. A tough, heartless film.

Lady Vengeance (2005), dir. by Park Chan-wook

Lady Vengeance is the final entry in Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy. While it was the weakest of the three, its imagery remains just as brutal. It’s Oldboy but with a femme fatale twist! A wrongly incarcerated woman is released and begins taking revenge on her enemies. Many Park Chan-wook staples are present: horrible torture, uncomfortable sex scenes, and pitch-black comedy. The film also explores the oddities of Korean prison culture. Turns out being locked up in Korea is just as awful as over here.

In my opinion, Lady Vengeance is over stylised to a fault. There’s too much focus on the film’s slick aesthetics and not enough on fully fleshing out the characters and balancing the story structure. It culminates in an extended sequence where the villain is tortured to death and while this is meant to be comedic, the sequence is too cold and strange to fully realise its intent. Thankfully, I saw the “Fade to Black and White” version of the film which meant that as the violence progressed, the gore was slowly decolourised into a black goo, making the film intriguing to watch in an almost arthouse sort of way.

Joint Security Area (2000), dir. by Park Chan-wook

The film that kickstarted Park Chan-wook’s career. Joint Security Area comes across at first as a military procedural drama about a series of deaths within the Korean Demilitarized Zone and quickly evolves into something entirely different. It is grisly, melodramatic, goofy, intelligent, and genuinely tragic.

Both North and South Korea are depicted in equally morally ambiguous terms. I’d argue that the North Korean characters in this film are much more sympathetic than their South Korean counterparts. A film which challenges the generalisation that Korean soldiers on opposite sides of the border hate each other. They are merely pawns in a regrettable game of geopolitics.

The Lives of Others (2006), dir. by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

A Stasi officer begins spying on a playwright and inadvertently becomes drawn into his life. I was thoroughly enthralled by the film. The acting, the atmosphere, the music — it’s all incredibly well done. But it’s also nonsense, of course. Stasi officers spied on each other (watching the watchmen, so to speak), so much of the action in the story could not have happened in real-life. Still, that doesn’t take away from the film’s emotional power.

The Gestapo had nothing on the Stasi. At its height, the Stasi supposedly had one officer for every 166 East German citizens — an incredibly small ratio even for many police states throughout history. And once you include the huge numbers of East Germans who were at one point acting as informers, this ratio drops to one in seven by some estimates. My guess as to why a number of prominent films about East Germany (e.g. Good Bye, Lenin!) have opted for a comedic, kitschy tone is that the truth was too painful. The GDR was a classic example of Arendt’s lonely totalitarian society, a country hollowed out by mistrust, isolation, and constant betrayal.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978), dir. by Lau Kar-leung

Hong Kong martial arts nonsense at its finest. This film is perhaps most known for inspiring the title of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), the Wu-Tang Clan’s sensational debut studio album. So does this film bring da motherfuckin’ ruckus? Maybe.

The plot is stupidly simple. A plucky young man decides to join the Shaolin temple to master the kung fu necessary to defeat the corrupt Manchurian rulers oppressing his community. The majority of the film depicts him overcoming a series of challenges in the 35 chambers of the Shaolin temple as part of his training. You see a lot of topless, ripped Asian dudes running around completing feats of strength. That seems to be the film’s main selling point.

The actual climax of the story, where our protagonist leaves the temple with newfound powers to lead a resistance against the Manchus, is a largely forgettable series of action sequences with characters you don’t care about. Then it just sort of ends. This is the kind of film best watched on a lazy Sunday afternoon while nursing a hangover.

A City of Sadness (1989), dir. by Hou Hsiao-hsien

In the Meiji Era a woman killed herself by flinging herself into a waterfall. She wasn’t tired of life. She hadn’t lost the will to live. She just couldn’t face the loss of her youth. Once lost, nothing means anything. Why not imitate the cherry blossom and fall when in the fullness of our beauty? Carried by the wind.

A historical drama considered one of the most important Taiwanese films ever made. A City of Sadness covers a delicate period in the island’s history: from its liberation at the end of the Second World War through to the imposition of martial law (which lasted for nearly four decades) under the Kuomintang-led government dictatorship and the White Terror that followed.

This history is obliquely told through the lives of three brothers living in a small town in Taiwan. We see the unique blend that is Taiwanese society, with most of the dialogue in the film being a mix of Japanese and Taiwanese dialect. The framing of each shot is ruthlessly meticulous. Almost all the action is seen through doorways and other openings. It is hypnotic too, with many of the scenes lasting upwards of three minutes and filmed from a solidly fixed camera position. Numerous predefined camera locations are repeatedly revisited throughout the story, giving A City of Sadness a striking sense of space.

It was great to see places like Shifen and Jiufen, which I have visited in real-life, used as evocative filming locations. Towns like Jiufen (often erroneously called the place that inspired Miyazaki’s setting for Spirited Away) are rendered with utter melancholy. Much of the film looks like it was shot during the most morose and overcast day in Taiwanese history.

The Assassin (2015), dir. by Hou Hsiao-hsien

A dreamy and largely plotless Chinese fantasy martial arts (wuxia) film about a female assassin in the Tang dynasty. I can’t say I enjoyed it very much. The scenery was dazzling, as were the costumes and set design, but there was no coherent storyline as far as I could tell. There is little characterisation and the editing seems to suggest that whole sequences were omitted to make the film deliberately cryptic. To add to its unorthodox style, the film is shot in a narrow 1.37:1 aspect ratio. And how does an arthouse film set in ancient China end? With bagpipe music playing over the end credits of course. Very weird.

Big Trouble in Little China (1986), dir. by John Carpenter

An actually good Hollywood film with a majority Asian cast. Also, it has Kurt Russell, but that’s beside the point. There’s a demonic sorcerer, giant cave monsters, and oriental black magic in San Francisco’s Chinatown and it is all 100% accurate and academically researched. This is exactly what goes down in Chinese ethnic enclaves.

I’m glad I saw this dumb movie. Nothing is serious. Everything is played for laughs. The core joke of the film is that Kurt Russell thinks he’s the lead in a macho action movie when in actuality he’s a comic relief character in a completely different story. My one complaint is that it’s often too frenetic. The movie clips along so quickly that it’s hard to keep up with the various factions and rituals and conspiracies. Then you realise that there is no point in keeping up and just give up.

  1. Note the sarcasm. ↩