Silent Hill

Silent Hill is the most faithful video game to film adaptation I've ever seen. Watching it is just like watching somebody play the game. The makers were so devoutly passionate about the game that they didn't try to spruce up the plot, or impose some kind of logical narrative progression on the action. In other words, as a movie, it's a hilarious failure, albeit a visually impressive one.

The movie is fascinating, however, in that it really makes clear why video games should not be made into movies. Video games don't really have much plot. They don't need to. The narrative is propelled by the player, exploring the video game world, encountering various foes, and attempting to kill them. This may sound like your average book or movie, but in fact, most books or movies depend on some kind of bigger picture to keep the action going. In other words, books/movies involve a plot that is some kind of larger story, and the narrative is driven by its interest in that story. The point isn't to tell you everything that happened to a given set of characters, but rather, everything that happened that is interesting in terms of a particular story. And generally, the action is partly composed of internal changes in the characters - it's mental or emotional. The point is often how the characters respond, or feel about certain events, not the events themselves. Video games just can't convey that kind of internal life in any interesting kind of way - the action has to be totally external. The one exception to this, perhaps, is in the realm of knowledge - the game can turn on the character acquiring some specific information.

Narrative progress in video games works somewhat differently to books or movies. Take one of the scenes in Silent Hill, for example - the main character is in a bathroom (having been lured there by a little girl), and happens upon a rather horrifyingly mutilated corpse in one of the stalls. She stares at it with horror, and then... well, in most movies, she'd get the fuck out of there, as most people would in that situation. In a video game, however, she would examine the corpse carefully looking for weapons, tools, hints, etc, because if you have the capabilities of inspection, you better be inspecting things. That corpse is there for a reason. The movie attempts to go halfway - she apparently notices something in the corpse's mouth and retrieves it. Ok, maybe that's not totally preposterous. But the next step again shows us a clear difference - she finds a hotel key in the corpse's mouth. So she concludes, she has to go to the hotel. In video game world, this makes perfect sense. In movie/book/real world, it's ridiculous. I'm failing to fully articulate the key dinstinction here, I know, and that's because I'm still trying to get clear on it myself.

Finally, of course, there's the key issue, that watching a movie about somebody killing a lot of monsters generally isn't as much fun as killing them yourself. I don't fully understand why it's fun to push buttons in fairly formulaic ways to execute a number of moves, generally similar, that will kill something on screen, but it is. You can happily spend 10 minutes slaughtering people in a video game, even though all you're really doing is pushing the B button repeatedly. It's actually exhilarating. It can even be fun to watch one of your friends try to do it. But it's not much fun to watch it happen in a movie, unless there's some creative choreography involved (see my entry on The Transporter 2, for instance). Part of the problem here is that you know how it will end - you or your friend might not succeed in killing the bad guys, but the film hero certainly will. Actually, the flipside here, which the movie does depict, is that in a video game, if you're roaming around a mansion and happen upon a room full of bad guys, your first move is to slam the door and try to find another way to go. Movies generally (this one is an exception) don't let their protagonists off so easy. This one leaves plenty of creepy crawlies unharmed - in fact, there isn't much fighting at all. Although the main character acquires, and drops, a weapon at one point, she's really not kicking any ass. Some of the supporting cast does though.

In any case, I very much enjoyed watching Silent Hill. I was in hysterics for the last half hour of the film - it was so ridiculous that I was literally crying with laughter. The "mind-blowing" ending was such a fantastic slap in the face to most of the audience that I think I actually cackled with glee. Also amusing was the number of people who walked out of the movie - the best being the couple who fled the theatre immediately after a character declared "The darkness is coming. We must leave". Indeed. I was quite impressed with the gore, too. They didn't pull any punches - the game is brutal, and so is the movie. Faces melt, people are impaled and ultimately torn in half with barbed wire (my boyfriend, incidentally, thought the physics of dismemberment was quite impressive), skin is torn off by the fistful - it's hyper-violent. As my friend joked, "Technology, what can't it do?". If we have the powers to realistically portray a woman's face slowly melting as she's being roasted alive, then by golly we ought to.

Anyhow, yeah, if you liked playing Silent Hill, you might want to go see the movie. It's actually kind of neat to see it on the big screen - the first 20 minutes (well, after the preposterous prologomena meant to explain how the main character got to Silent Hill) are spot on. The cinematography here is incredible - the cuts, the perspectives, even the way people move, are just like the game. Very cool. If you never played the game, you will probably not like the movie. It would do alright on a night you want to rent something stupid and get mega-trashed, but really, you could probably do better.

The Hours

I suppose it's to be expected that one will not like the movie adaptation of a book that one despised. The Hours is a very pretty movie, glossy, well-acted, poignant. Yet, I found it completely uncompelling. I actually fast-forwarded through chunks of it because I couldn't stand all the long takes of the various characters staring into space to the sound of fervent piano music. Mrs. Dalloway is one of my favorite books, so I'm probably not as open to the idea of innovation in this case as I could be, but honestly, the three stories woven together never did a lot for me. I wasn't wild about it in the book, and I liked it even less in the movie, where the rapid cuts from story to story, revelling in the simulataneity of the mostly mundane events of the women's lives was rather irritating. When the whole thing escalated into a sort of collective consciousness, with everyone writing each others' neurosis, it became massively claustrophobia inducing. The accumulation of angst and misery sent my cynicism into overdrive, and rather than sympathizing with anyone, I thought to myself that movies should restrict themselves to one overwrought woman at a time. I suppose the effect should have been a sort of impressive move between general and particular, these three women in such different contexts sharing similar tragedies in unique ways, but instead, it just became a mish-mash of neurosis. Nobody in the movie was genuinely likable by the end - the poor, ineffectual supporting cast struggled to deal with the whirlwind of passive-aggressive outrage nobly, but seemed either exasperated or just broken by the process. I admit, the acting was excellent - Nicole Kidman in particular was very impressive as Virginia Woolf, and Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep were stunning as always. They were gloriously consumed in their misery, teetering at the brink of breakdown, their shining eyes giving a convincing presentation of seething misery just below the surface. The problem is, they were downtrodden all the goddamn time. I don't think any of them ever laugh, or even smile with genuine happiness - even when they're not explicitly miserable, one always has the sense that any good mood is just a front. But because they're so unhappy all the time, you never get an idea of what they'd be like if they were happy - you don't have a sense of what is lost. They seem pathetically doomed to depression, consitutionally incapable of joy. Tragic, yes, but rapidly exhausting.

Love Actually/ The Transporter 2

Everyone needs a guilty pleasure. Love Actually is a guilty pleasure par excellence; The Transporter 2 is (largely) a flop. Though it should be noted that the first Transporter is a guilty pleasure to rival Love Actually - it might even surpass it.

Much like Bridget Jones Diary and Notting Hill, Love Actually is a delightful feel-good romantic comedy that features a power-house cast and a lot of very funny moments. I generally am disappointed with movies that try to cram 5 or 6 narratives running parallel to each other into a larger whole, but this one does a decent job. It doesn't get completely ridiculous about somehow connecting everyone, and it's surprisingly skillful with negotiating so many characters without making them all caricatures. Though some aren't really fleshed out, none are really flat - it's well done. Although it ultimately succumbs to the impulse to load on the sap, it's not overly saccharine - some stories are left unresolved, or rather wistful, and the ones that do receive an über happy ending are balanced with a generous dollop of comedy. It doesn't rush right into the lovey-dovey stuff, either - it starts out somewhat cynical, allowing for a period of adjustment, so that you can get on board and cheer for the happy endings without feeling completely emasculated. And there's enough lewd humor sprinkled throughout that you never feel like you've completely overdosed on mush.

The Transporter 2, unfortunately, is mostly pretty dull, and doesn't even begin to approach the excellence of The Transporter (1). The only thing it has going for it, which actually does make it worth watching, albeit with one finger hovering over fast forward, are the fight scenes. The choreography is incredible - it's really like watching modern dance. There's a lengthy scene involving multiple "bad guys" being subdued with a fire house that is simply stunning. The other perk of the movie would theoretically be Kate Nauta, the vilainess who can't seem to bear the confinement of clothing, and thus runs around blasting everything in sight to bits with two machine guns wearing nothing but skimpy underwear. Why is she only wearing underwear, even when it seems directly detrimental to the task at hand? Who knows, but honestly, I don't mind that much. Or at least, I didn't at first, until I realized that I'd much prefer a woman with a more attractive body to be playing the role - I meean, if you're going to put someone in as eye-candy, make them good looking, eh? She's just too damn skinny. At first it seems hot, until you realize that super model bodies are kind of creepy. She has almost no body fat, but no muscle either. It's weird.

The plot is total rubbish, and has gaping holes in it. Again, this wouldn't really be a problem, if it weren't so damn boring. Action movies don't need to have intricate plots - they just need enough momentum to keep you interested. This one just doesn't, really. Though I was really impressed when they crashed an airplane into the sea while the two main characters were fighting on it - I had just been thinking, man, it's so lame how they always manage to save the plane somehow*. What's really missing though, is personality. The fantastic thing about the first Transporter movie is that it's a throwback to action movies of old, like Commando. Jason Statham is, in fact, my number one candidate for an Arnold Schwarzenegger successor, and let me tell you, that means a lot, because I LOVE Schwarzenegger movies**. Statham is a raging badass - in fact, he's got Arnold beat here, because he's not only a fighting machine, he's also one of the best drivers to grace the screen in years. So rad. But he's also got Arnold's charm. The real secret to an entertaining action movie, after great action, of course, is puns. Great puns. The first Transporter movie had them, but this one really doesn't, so much. In fact, Statham seems incredibly wooden, and not much fun. His "rules", so amusing in the first movie, now seem really more irritating than anything else. Finally, to be honest, the action was awesome, but the suspension of disbelief required was really straining my resources. I mean, I think that it might be fair to set a maximum on the number of times that a stunt can involve a car flying through the air in an incredibly precise fashion - you wanna launch the car, spinning, into a crane such that the crane will snag the bomb attached to the bottom of the car just before it explodes while you land safely across the harbor, fine. But you can't have your cake and eat it too - you've got to cut the scenes where you leap from one parking garage to the other in order to evade the cops. Save it for the third movie, eh?

*Actually, I was wondering something else, namely, what I would have thought of the movie had it ended with the plane on which the two main characters were fighting crashing in the sea. On the one hand, it would be interesting to just end the movie there - that would really throw people for a loop, eh? Slavoj Zizek was recently mentioning how, when he first saw Ben-Hur in Slovenia, it had been censored such that it ended right after the famous chariot race, and he had thought it was one of the most profoundly existential movies he'd ever seen. I don't think an abrupt ending would have made this movie profound, but it would have been kind of cool.
Of course, this would also imply that the good guy failed to save the day, which leads to another interesting alternate ending, namely, showing what happened after the good guy failed to save the day. It would probably be a flop, because really, most movies, and especially action movies, despite the way that they seem to be about some sequence of events, are really about watching someone badass do cool things. Lose the hero, lose the movie.

**The Rock is the other possible candidate, and the one apparently favored by Arnold, if you go off his cameo in The Rundown. The Rundown is an excellent movie, and The Rock is fairly badass, and has a pretty good personality, especially for making wise-cracks and puns, but there's something missing. I mean, as I said, Statham has the added bonus of being a high-tech, incredible driver badass, in addition to knowing several different styles of fighting. So he's got a one up there. But he also does better with the wise-cracks - The Rock has a bit too much of a sensitive side to be fully convincing. He always seems like a really nice guy, even when he's beating people up.
I had high hopes for Vin Diesel, but I was so appalled by XXX that they were immediately shattered. Not at all a badass - his stunts, though impressive, belong in an Xtreme Sports reel, not in an action movie - and the whole romance thing? Are you kidding me?
Matt Damon is just not badass enough. Sorry.
Chuck Norris is amazing, but he's his own category. I'm talking about Arnold successors, not badasses in general.

Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf

This book is a collection of autobiographical fragments written by Virginia Woolf at various times in her life - they rather neatly fall at the beginning, middle, and end of her career as a writer. Thus, they provide an interesting perspective into her development as a writer - all the more so because two of the fragments, one written in 1907, and the other in 1939-40, both describe the same period of her childhood.

Autobiography has two goals, in a sense - to describe the life, and the self. As Woolf complains, so many memoirs fail because "they leave out the person to whom things happened" (65). But I am coming to think that the self can only be apprehended indirectly, it arises as an effect of the writing, in spite of itself. When somebody describes themselves to you, do you really take them at face value, or do you think of them as someone who would describe themselves that way, and then try to imagine what such a person would be like?

Incidentally, this holds true in quotidian life too, not only in autobiography - awhile back, a good friend of mine was going out on a date, and asked for my advice, and the only thing I could think of to tell him was that when on a date, one ought to avoid self-description, and particularly in-depth analysis and psychologizing of yourself - don't tell someone what you're like, show them. Rather than telling them what kind of person you are, tell them about things that you find interesting. You're far more likely to get closer to somebody because s/he is really into discussing movies that you like then somebody who apparently also fears commitment, no?

Anyhow, so self emerges in spite of, rather than because of, it's attempts to apprehend itself on paper. I think that's why I like autobiographies so much. The good ones really make you feel like you've gotten to know somebody, and being able to do that through written words is quite remarkable.

Another side note - at a conference I attended awhile back, somebody presented the idea of literature as a kind of telepathy. It's an attempt on the part of an author to put something from their mind into yours, and it's precisely the stamp of individuality on it that makes it so remarkable. That's the universal - not some absolute, transcendent humanity, but precisely the opposite, the repeated reappearance of the unique individual. I may be channeling some Zizek here. Moving on...

Woolf's text is also interesting because of her ideas of what a self, and a life, really consists of. The title of the collection comes from the piece called "A Sketch of the Past", where she talks about Moments of Being as the only moments that one really lives - most days, she says, are made up of non-being, "a kind of non-descript cotton wool (...) a great part of every day is not lived consciously" (70). But what are these moments of being? They seem to be a kind of shock of transcendence, where the sef is lost entirely and subsumed into something larger, where a pattern is revealed behind the cotton wool: "I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture" (67).

The first piece in the text, "Reminiscences", is just that - a sort of chronological account of her life. It's interesting in a sort of voyeuristic way, perhaps, but doesn't get you any closer to Woolf herself, really. "Sketches of the Past" is fascinating, because it tells the same story in a far more reflexive, and interesting way. It's not just a description, it's an attempt to summon the past, and is somehow far more palpable. The remaining pieces, written for the Memoir Club, are interesting because they seem to hold so much of Woolf in them. I could barely tell you what they were about - they're mostly rather gossipy, particularly the piece called "Am I a Snob?", but her voice is so strong within them that it's really as though she were sitting in your kitchen and telling you the story over coffee and cigarettes. Remarkable.

Ultimately then, the book is wonderful not for its explicit content, but for its voice. I don't much care about the actual events described, and the text is hardly a suspensful page turner, but it does make a wonderful companion.

Casanova, History of My Life, vl. 3

You'd think that Casanova's autobiography would be a one-handed read, but I must say, it's not really the case. Not that there aren't some racy bits, but really, if you're reading it for the sex, you're going to be disappointed. Well, at least with volume 3 - volume 4, as it turns out, is fairly steamy.

Actually, what's really fascinating about the book is Casanova himself; the way a man whose behavior is largely immoral (not in a Puritan, you naughty sexual creature sort of way, but in a Golden Rule sort of way) justifies and repeatedly deludes himself. Claiming, for instance, the he would never want a woman who wasn't willing, he nonetheless has no problems raping several of them. In fact, most of the time, his process of seduction is more like a process of deception, duping various nubile young ladies in trusting that he has purely honest intentions. But it seems that this is just the way that society of his times worked - everyone seems incredibly superficial; the constant references to the theatre and masks are a nice parallel.

The book is a rollicking good time, actually. Despite the fact that Casanova is a bit of a bastard, you find yourself liking him, even if you don't buy into his rather pompous view of himself. Oddly enough, he comes off as incredibly honest, despite his obvious desire to make himself look good. Far more honest, I must say, than his contemporary Rousseau. There's a curious way in which one has a sense of getting to know somebody despite their best efforts.

For some reason, the book very strongly reminded me of Proust, not only because of the length. The language isn't particularly flowery, though it is lively and entertaining, but there's something about the sense of self-importance, perhaps, that recalls dear Marcel.

To be fair, I've only read volume 3 and part of volume 4 - I imagine that it could get old long before you get to volume 12...

A Fistful of Dynamite

This movie is almost 3 hours long. You should know that before you watch it, because otherwise, you might start tapping your toes after awhile wondering when it's going to end, the way I did, and you might not notice what an interesting movie it is, or appreciate the way it slyly unfolds into an epic project.

The movie starts with a quote from Mao ("The Revolution will not be a dinner party...") and then opens onto a scene of class bias, with the poor getting bloody revenge. Juan, the Mexican bandit, dreams of knocking over the National Bank, and tries to befriend dynamite master, former IRA member John to help him. You almost think that this is all the class contemplation you're going to get, when suddenly you find yourself in the middle of Revolution. Very interesting.

Like other movies by Sergio Leone, the pacing is very curious - you'll get a 10 minute scene where nothing really happens, and then fly through a scene that's a focal point for action, and seems totally rushed and underdone. There are lots of super close-up shots of people's faces, which are really interesting, and highly expressive. The music, by Ennio Morriconne, is great as always.

The main oddness of the film is that there are occasional fantasy cuts to IRA John's past that seem completely ridiculous, and don't make much sense. The idea of bringing his experiences in Ireland into play is a good one, and thought provoking, but it's done in such a cheesy, bizarre fashion that it ultimately undermines the effect.

Oh, but the best part - the explosion are fucking awesome. Trains, bridges, churches - this is a big budget kaboom, and it's totally sweet.

The Unforgiven

This movie was a lot more interesting than I expected it to be. Made in 1960, it's a Western that tackles issues of race, ie, Indian-White relations*. It also happens to be Audrey Hepburn's only Western.

The plot centers around a family, the Zacharys, one of whom is Rachel (played by Audrey Hepburn). Everything seems fine and dandy until a strange man appears and spreads the rumor that Rachel is actually an Indian - stolen from the Kiowa tribe. Meanwhile, the relationship of the whites to the Kiowas is tricky anyhow, but having caught wind of this rumor, the Indians come to take their lost sister back, thus kicking off a whole new round of antagonisms. At the same time, the settlers start to turn against the Zachary family, and there's an increasingly tense questioning of whether the rumor is true.

The movie is kind of strange - particularly the ending - and refuses to take a clear stance on the race relations issue. There is, incidentally, also an assimilated Indian character, just to provide some further food for thought. I thought it was nuanced, complex, and fascinating. Of course, one could claim that the portrayals of Indians are essentializing and fucked up, but actually, they weren't as bad as I expected them to be - a cut above the usual, I'd say. Audrey Hepburn is indeed a rather bizarre choice for a girl who may or may not be an Indian princess - she's really a bizarre choice for a Western at all - but she manages to be charming and likeable as always, so you don't care as much that her accent is completely bizarre.

Another interesting trait of the film is the way it depicts masculinity - I don't know if it's a conscious interest or just something I've been paying more attention to in movies lately, but again one has the hot blooded men who ultimately seem to be less "manly" than the quiet, reflective guy who was originally seen as weak. Though this is somewhat undermined by the willingness of the quiet guy to slaughter ruthlessly when it was deemed necessary, so perhaps, rather than challenging gender roles, the movie is really just advocating a cool head in conflict, which could be a mild critique, and a call for a revision of the notion of masculinity, but not a revolutionary change.

There's also a strange incest theme going on that really quite detracts from the movie. It's somewhat bizarre, and rather unnecessary. The Zachary brother most willing to defend his sister's honor proves to be madly in love with her, which opens the possibility that his championing of Indian rights throughout the film is motivated by fetish more than a belief in justice. Hmmm.

The film does have some great characters though. The mysterious stranger in particular is phenomenal - dressed in a civil war uniform, rattling his sabre and squinting through his one good eye, he haunts the desert, a disturbing and malicious ghost from the past. His lines are great - he speaks in the parlance of Biblical prophecy, and the effect is quite chilling.

Another great strength of the movie was the landscape - gorgeous shots of the desert, the cacti, the sky. I love the desert, and the movie really made me miss the west coast. Seeing all that untouched open land was glorious.

Anyhow, yeah, great movie. I actually watched it almost two weeks ago - I've been too busy to update regularly, and I haven't been watching as many movies and reading as many books lately - most of my reading assignments are exerpts of Marx, and for cinematic fun, I've been working my way through Twin Peaks - so there's not a lot of grist for the mill. The point being that as time goes on, I find myself thinking about the movie from time to time, which is generally a good sign. Worth watching.

*Before you dog on me for saying Indian, allow me to explain - a professor of mine recently related the complaint of his Indian friend (though I also seem to recall reading a similar argument somewhere) that to say Native American is actually quite offensive. It attempts to enfold these people into a notion of American-ness, when the goddamn country was founded upon wiping them out and erecting America on their bones, which thus makes a move to posthumously sort of apologize and include them now that they're safely dead and gone, creating a spectral authentic "natural" America that is an impossible fantasy. Furthermore, it tries to correct a mistake, partly to make whites look better. As this man apparently said, "I'd rather keep the name Indian, as a monument to white stupidity. It's the least they could do, is admit that although they had the ability to wipe us out, they also thought they were in India when they first arrived." I've decided I like it, and am going to say Indian from now on, unless I can specify tribal identity - it's not like all them Injuns are the same, you know.