The horror... The horror...

I wrote something long. Actually, it was much longer, but lest I waste your precious time, I deleted it and have presented here its condensed version. Basically, in a nutshell, I think horror films being made these days are not scary and suck donkey balls. Having sudden, loud, unceremonious BANG!s come out of nowhere when you least expect it is not scary. And sadly, that's what constitutes the bulk of modern horror genre.

While I'm the last person to impose "rules" onto the making of a film, there are certain common elements that emerge when you examine the classics of this genre, elements that run mostly in the subtext and hence work on the subconscious mind. Working on the subconscious is essential to evoking an emotion that has evolved over millions of years and has been buried deep inside the psyche: fear. Once you take care of the subconscious, you can spread you creative wings to work on the conscious.

So, the common elements of horror classics:

1. Always, always set the scene of your story in an isolated place, not surrounded by any physical human interaction for many miles in all directions. The reason this is of paramount importance in evoking fear is because it evokes another emotion that in turn evokes fear: helplessness. If shit goes down, there's no one around to help. Humans have evolved in groups, always living and hunting and protecting in groups. The very presence of another human being in a lonely place, even if he's an unlikable character, can create a sense of comfort. That's the last thing you want in your film - comfort. Remember that while watching the film, every member of your audience places him/herself in the place of the protagonist, mentally detaching themselves from the asshole in the next seat. By placing your protagonist and/or his family in an isolated location, preferably geographically detached from civilization, you are also psychologically detaching your audience from everyone else. That sets in helplessness, the most delicious item in your recipe. Think of this as the no-escape rule. It's so powerful that even if you are cognizant of this plot tool, it STILL works on you. Additionally, it also serves an another purpose: at the climax of the film should you choose to return your protagonist back to civilization and restore normalcy, the sudden burst of relief you would aim to achieve in act III, the conclusion, would be amplified manifold.

Examples: The Shining - set in a hotel in an extremely isolated place that is literally cut off from civilization during winters. In fact, to establish the extent to which it is isolated, Kubrick opens the film, as the credits roll, with a bird's-eye view of a car driving to this hotel through long stretches of uninhabited mountains. Evil Dead - a cold, lonely place in the woods, connected to only by a bridge that our Evil Force rips apart early in the film. Psycho - a gigantic single house and motel set in the middle of nowhere, with no one to reach out to if nigga comes attackin'. Setting your film in such a lonely place does half the job of creating tension and terror. The audience may not consciously think about all of this, but it's ALWAYS there in the back of their minds that there is no one out there to help, that the VIEWER, not the protagonist mind you, is in a state of helplessness. That activates every fear and anxiety center in their brains. It doesn't matter if it is supernatural horror or natural horror, it works.

A bad example of this would be The Woman in Black. They do set the story in an isolated village, and the house of interest IS away from the village, but the very fact that there are PEOPLE in the village accessible at anytime to the protagonist takes away all of the anxiety and fear characteristics of the story.

2. Never show the ghost till the very climax of the film, at least not completely anyway. This one applies only to supernatural horror. What is not visible is always scarier than what is. There's a reason why we were afraid of something being under the bed in our childhood. We can't see it. We imagine it. As a filmmaker, your most potent tool is not any of your overpriced editing gadgets but the imaginative power of the mind of your audience. Don't work ON it, work WITH it. Show them glimpses, occasionally, if you must, but never the whole thing. However, keeping them completely ignorant about the ghost can work against you. There's point after which the audience tires out of imagining all by themselves without receiving any catalysts and cues. Reveal the whole thing only at the climactic end, and when you do reveal, make sure it rewards their feared expectations. Don't build so much tension during the course of the film and in the end "reward" them with a ghost that looks like a constipated cat. They'll hate you for it. But to some extent, this can be applied even to natural horror films. In Psycho, the mother (or what's left of her) is not shown till the very end of the film; but as a general, it's more applicable to supernatural horror since supernatural ghosts ignite the audience's imaginative creativity more than a familiar human figure.

3. Set MOST, not all, of the events in the film in the dark. The dark, as Kirk Douglas nailed it in The Bad and the Beautiful, has a life of its own. "In the dark," he continues, "all sorts of things come alive." There are again evolutionary bases for why dark in itself is pants-shitting scary. Having a fear of the dark because of there being some sort of evil ghost out there kept our human ancestors from venturing into the dark at night, thereby protecting them from predators in the jungle. Fear of ghosts, as modern science suggests, was instrumental in our species' evolution - not because ghosts exist but very the fear of it protected them more earthly predators and kept them from extinction. A mere fear of predators wasn't enough to protect them at night because dark essentially made them blind and gave the more evolved predators an evolutionary advantage. A fear of something more sinister, however, worked to their advantage. This fear was only necessary at nighttime, since if they stayed locked in their caves day and night out of fear of ghosts, they'd starve to death. Daylight gave them all the advantage they needed to hunt, and their fear gave them all the protection they needed at night. Fear of the dark is ingrained into our very DNA. Combine this with point #1 and you are almost done with the subconscious architecture of your film.

4. For fuck's sake, don't include gay people in your movie. You are making a horror film, not a Prada commercial. We unfortunately live in a time of political correctness gone mad. Don't have black people in a positive role? Get accused of racism by black organizations. Don't have women in intelligent roles? You such a sexist pig! Mildly pat a dog? Get sued by PETA. And lastly, don't have two men making out with their tongues in each other's mouths and in YOUR face? Homophobic! What happened to all the good old days when you could just make an honest film without being counterproductive to the film's emotions? Even gay people find gay people in horror films un-horrifying. Stick them to the chick flicks.

5. Stay away from loud noises. This is a direct result of advances in sound engineering. A silent scene, the protagonist looks around the room, the lo! The ghost pops out of nowhere and the speakers tear their anuses apart and bang your eardrums out. Almost every horror film being made these days abuses sound technology this way. But you don't. Instead, use atmosphere and mood to create fear. Create a consistent tone with creative use of lighting, camera angles and movements, solid performances, believable character reactions and their motivations. NOT through bullfucking aural rapefests at every turn you take. Watch old films of this genre, classics or not, because they could scare you without using cheap-ass sound effects.

This newly invented lost-and-found-footage genre horror has actually taken care of this problem. They obviously can't use sound effects since there's no score. [REC], the Spanish original, is a perfect example of a very well made modern horror film that scares through atmosphere and intelligent storytelling without the use of nuclear bombs for sound. Both sequels sucked, the American remake sucked harder, but the original still retains its shine.

6. Lastly but equally importantly, the film should be a progression, not stagnation or decline. Start the film with some tense event, if you so choose, since it's important to grab the audience's attention from the start. But from the next scene on, bring it down to almost no drama, no action, no excitement, and slowly build your way upward, clue by clue, event by event, until the climax where everything, or most of it, is revealed and dealt with. Paranormal Activity, for example, doesn't reveal too much the very first night he places the camera. Only the wind blows. The second night, well I don't remember exactly but something slightly more noticeable happens, and it builds on and on. This is the only way you can do it because giving away too much at the very beginning creates two hurdles: 1. The audience won't be able to take in too much info in too little time. You have to gradually slide it in, like a frog in a glass of water that is being slowly boiled without its being aware of it. 2. The audience will be disappointed when what follows isn't more exciting than what came so far. It creates stagnation and saturation and elicits that very familiar response: boring. [REC] actually does this building up of tension in such a clever way that starting at the ground floor of the building, the tension and excitement builds with each floor they go up, revealing more and adding more conflict, until they reach the penthouse where all hell breaks loose.

That's it. I could still add in a few more generic themes, but I've already bored you enough. Goodnight amigo, and stay straight!

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No donut for dear Miss Angela Fine :(

It's been a while since I posted anything and I am still drafting a post, in which I've already lost interest and hence have shelved it forever, but I thought I'd post an excerpt from a hilariously titled, hilarious book, Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere, which was pretty amusing to read:

The second tear was for Angela Fine, because she is beautiful and pure and nice, and staples pictures of kittens to the pay envelopes of the entire IT department every Friday because she believes that little things count. If I were her lover I would be the most dedicated, kind, brave, understanding, sensitive lover any woman ever had. I would give her cunnilingus every morning, and fix her car, and rub her back and change all of the light bulbs in her house on a regular schedule before any of them ever actually burned out, and I would defend her home from thieves and her heart from loneliness and her body from violence and her laptop from viruses and unstable Microsoft updates. Because that is what a beautiful, perfect creature of Angela Fine’s caliber—a caliber of one, a class unto herself—deserves.

But Angela Fine does not get what she deserves. Instead, Angela gets:

1. A new pair of wide-rimmed glasses, slightly tinted—not nearly as flattering or sexy as the small, black-rimmed librarian glasses she used to wear, yet still gorgeous in context and incredibly lucky to be on her face—with which, aided by mascara, she disguises a swollen black eye; and

2. A small, perfectly round scab just beneath and behind her right ear, approximately 8 millimeters in diameter; a kind of scab the Old Me knows well from his awful childhood; the kind of scab you get when your sadistic, abusive boyfriend or stepfather stabs you with a cigarette, as punishment.

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Best films of 2011, in that order

My take, for my sake:

1.       1.  The Tree of Life

I have a feeling that in 20 to 30 years’ time, this film will be regarded with the same veneration that 2001: A Space Odyssey is today. 9/10

2.       2.  The Artist

That magic, sheer magic of silent cinema resurrected. Being a Griffith and Buster Keats admirer and all, this struck an unforgettable chord with me. The Heartist. 9/10

3.       3.  The Ides of March

I’m not much of a Clooney-as-an-actor fanboy. In fact, I’m not much of a fanboy of any actor, except maybe Jimmy Stewart, Ed Norton, and Samuel Jackson, and for reasons not necessarily related to their acting. But Clooney-as-a-director, specifically Clooney-as-a-director-of-political-dramas, I don’t really think it can get better than him. I’m placing this at a higher position than The Descendants, a classy gemstone of a film made by one of my most favorite filmmakers, Alex Payne, so it can say how much I loved it. 8/10

4.       4.  The Descendants

There is something about the subtleties of Payne’s wrting/directing, something inexplicable, that makes me watch it over and over and over again like you listen to your favorite song in repetitions. The Descendants just goes on to reinforce what I already believed after watching Sideways several times. 8/10

5.       5.  Our Idiot Brother

One of the sweetest, dumbest, warmest flicks of the year. And the only film this year I watched twice back to back. 8/10

6.       6.  A Separation

Despite my skepticism of how good and how overrated the film might be before actually watching it, I was thoroughly, and pleasantly, surprised to be proven wrong. One seriously awesome movie! 8.5/10

7.       7.  The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Fincher has finally found his voice, his style. I thought he wouldn’t be able to pull off another high-wire film like The Social Network again, but he did, very visibly so. To have two of films two years in a row win the Best Editor Oscar actually says quite a lot about his newfound style. 8/10

8.       8.  50/50

A moving drama peppered with comedy in small doses and a powerful performance from its lead, it so didn’t turn out like another one of Seth Rogen’s cut-and-dried attempts at light comedy of retards. 7/10

9.       9.  Hugo

Scorsese’s first  (in hopefully a line of) big bugdet film about how loss is defined in childhood, about how cinema can offer at least a semblance of comfort in its escapism, and most importantly, about a legendary filmmaker whose name was lost in the pages of film history. No one, NO ONE, is more qualified to make a film about origins and history of cinema than Scorsese. 8/10

1     10.  Carnage

Though not exactly an admirer of Polanski (LOVED the Pianist), he certainly pulled this (small) film like only he could. Strangely, despite being set only inside a house, the film cost $25 million to make, taking into account the actors’ and director’ sallaries and about 400 special effect features including the views from the windows. Strange. 8/10

1    11.  We Need to Talk About Kevin

Tilda Swinton’s best performance of her career which she might never be able to outperform herself. 7/10

12.  Contagion
One of Soderbergh's best, and unlike most films of this genre, rooted very strongly in real science. No heroism, no buffoonery. No star is given an ego massage of extra screen time. It captures an epidemic on a large-scale perspective. 8/10

Anywho, I still have yet to watch many, many more films from last year, all waiting on my IMDb watchlist with over 700 films, documentaries, TV series, short films, etc. on it. But I’m saving those for later times, for my old age, so this is good enough for now.

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Response to a response to my Bicycle Thieves review

So hello again, Alexander. At the outset, sorry for the delay. I'd been going through a rough patch for the past two months (you know, breakup and everything), but I'm done with the grieving stage and am back to form now. Except for a broken right hand middle finger that I broke today morning by stubbing it onto the door, but it shouldn't cause much discomfort in typing this out. I'll try and maintain brevity in this reply.

(For the uninitiated, the quoted parts are Alexander's reply to my previous post.)

Hi there, buddy! Remember me? I actually still check on your rants from time to time. I find it interesting that you write that many considered classics supposed contain: "symptoms of pretentiousness". So, am I right to assume that you dislike much of what is considered 'classic' pre-Kubrick era, because you find many of those films to contain "symptoms of pretentiousness" which takes away story? Or, do you simply mean, that it's just hard to find representative elements in just one film from one particular era, because of mentioned symptoms, which in terms makes it harder to get into, and therefore just not worth the effort?

I think I'm more inclined towards the latter. Cinema evolved over 100 years. Today's directors have a much larger database of "Do's and Don't's" that has in essence accumulated over those 100 years from hundreds of thousands of films, and that gives them an edge over the first half century's directors as to what works and what doesn't. Kubrick had a very significant influence on the following generation of filmmakers, and in my opinion, more so than any other director of the second half of 20th century. Following in Kubrick's footsteps, many filmmakers have mastered the art and craft of filmmaking, most famously including Steven Spielberg who admits it himself. But in my experience of watching films, I hardly come across many films in the pre-Kubrick era that can, in totality, stand up to the post-Kubrick era where such films began to rise in number. That said, however, I will be quick to admit that even with the apparent lack of totality of filmmaking craftmanship, without the pre-Kubrick films there wouldn't have been any influence and ground rules for Kubrick himself to make films and there is no way in hell he could've started everything from scratch all by himself.

I am mostly asking because of this line: "but it’s hard to find much of what is good about cinema in a single film in many films before the 1960s." So, let's get right to the 1960's and forward. Because, I'd say Kubrick's produced some pretentious works, by your logic, if I am to understand you correctly. '2001: A Space Odyssey', is to me, the very same thing I'd interpret you to describe as "pseudoartistic babble". Same goes for, 'Eyes Wide Shut', and 'The Shinning'. Movies that tells a story that really doesn't seem to make sense to me in a conventional way.

The Shining was not meant to be an artistic film. Because of Barry Lyndon's commercial failure (even though artistically it was highly acclaimed and still is one of the "basic references" for period filmmaking), Kubrick's disappointment led him to want to make a film for a larger audience with more entertainment value than artistic, and still having his own creative identity as an experimental filmmaker, at the same time avoiding the conventional way of telling a horror story. Eyes Wide Shut succeeds on many levels for me while failing at many as well. Kubrick tried to capture the tone of A Clockwork Orange into this film with long pauses within and between dialogues, but it just didn't work like it did for ACO. The dream-like tone he intended for the film did not come across as very dream-like but just laborious to watch. It did, however, succeed on its occult imagery - the kind of impeccable craft that makes Kubrick films what they are.

Or perhaps you don't like all Kubrick films? Please correct me if I'm assuming too much.

I don't, mate. In fact, I don't even like to the same degree all the Kubrick films that I do like, and even in the ones I like, with the exception of 2001 which in my opinion is pitch perfect, there are parts I think were not directed to his true potential, especially in his last two films. And Lolita is my least favorite of his work, so much so that I refuse to believe he even directed the film. Assuming they hired some ghost director and used Kubrick's name for branding purposes gives me solace :D

Don't get me wrong, I love those movies. But isn't '2001: A Space Odyssey', something you'd imagine Fellini could've done? Initially, I got that '2001...' is all about telling a story through pictures. But, there is no initial plot, and no depth to any of the characters. There is really nothing at stake. It's highly original for its time, because it breaks away from conventional storytelling. The point of '2001...' to me was the beginning and end of life, and the infinity of the universe. Humans played a smaller part, because the movie's main point to me is how insignificant we really are in the whole of the universe. '2001...' isn't supposed to have an epic assemble of characters with a quest, because the bigger whole is the journey.

To answer your first question, no, I don't think Fellini or any other director could've done 2001, just as I don't think Kubrick could've done 8-1/2. Every director has his own directorial signatures, some which are perhaps unknown even to him, and it is usually that which gives a film the feel that it has. Replacing directors and expecting to get the same feel out of a film would be ridiculous.

I can go on and on about the depth of 2001, but I'll limit it to the points you raise. Even to this day, a large majority of those who have seen 2001 over the span of 40 years think the only commendable thing about the film was its groundbreaking use of visual effects. While that is true, it is only the cult following that the film has generated over 40 years that can truly appreciate the depth of its scope and meaning and how well it incorporates Friedrich Nietzsche's ubermensch philosophy into an unconventional story without losing the essence of the philosophy and maintaining the artistic as well as dramatic merit of the film's own story. It's funny you should say that humans play a small part in the film, because the entire film is about nothing other than humans, the evolution of humans from apes to the quintessential ubermensch (which is referred to in the film as Star Man - the giant black monolith), and the relationship between humans and the universe. There is not a moment - not one tiny fraction of a second - in the film in which humans are not discussed, although not through words but through the subtlety of non-verbal storytelling. HAL is shown to have more human characteristics than Dave Bowman, and Dave is shown to have more mechanical characteristics than HAL - a reference to the futuristic transformation of man into ubermensch.

There are clues all over the film about the meaning of the film, and with each clue discovered, a new layer is uncovered, opening the flood gates to a whole range of possible interpretations. For example, the symphony that is used in the beginning, the end, and when the ape discovers the use of the tool, is Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is a direct reference to Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra - the foundation of the ubermensch philosophy on which the film is based. (You really need to be familiar at least with the gist of that philosophy to get a grasp over the meaning of the film). Or, in the very title of the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the clue to Homer's Odyssey is referenced, which has a great many similarities in major plot points of the story, the most obvious one being Dave Bowman killing HAL with just a screw driver, as the protagonist of Odyssey kills the antagonist with just a bow. The film has as many interpretations as there are people who watch it, which adequately accomplishes Kubrick's aim who, on finishing the film and before its release, said:

"It's not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to "explain" a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film -- and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level -- but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man's destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one's being."

It is the last sentence, "experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one's being," that truly rings with me and millions of others who can go beyond the superficial visual effects supremacy in their appreciation of the film.

But as far as technique goes, I'd apply that to any Fellini movie, as well.

Fellini's 8-1/2 does this really well, if you ask me. The intro scene in 8-1/2, tells me that the main character is kind of... well... fucked up. Kind of stressed out, as well. His celebrity status is giving him no room to breathe. His stressful everyday life is taking its toll, and he is getting middle-age burn out. Beneath this charming older gentleman, lies a hidden sorrow, which I believe is portrayed pretty well using flashbacks of his childhood, and goofy dreams, etc. And, it is a show. Why not make it a show?

8-1/2 does, perhaps, leave more to our own interpretation than '2001...', but I think it's unfair to label it "pseudoartistic babble". Point is: I think the way 8-1/2 was made is important to tell the story of this character, even if it does skip and trip.

And, I'm only bringing 8-1/2 up because you used it as an example. I like Fellini, but I am way more into Pier Paolo Pasolini & Bernardo Bertolucci movies. I also like all the goofy Giallo flicks directed by Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci.

But hey... that's me.

I know this is your blog, and you are free to form simple, to the point, personal opinions about anything. And, that the point of this post is the review of one particular film, and not your reflection on 'cinema' in general. Having said that, I do find it unfair to dismiss a film, or several films from an era, based solely on some of reasons you've stated.

As for Kurosawa movies... I love Kurosawa movies, but my comment is already too long.

Fellini was actually one of the six directors Kubrick cited as his biggest influence on making films (the other five being David Lean, Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica, François Truffaut, and Max Ophüls); and clearly, without 8-1/2, Kubrick wouldn't have had the inspiration and directions to make 2001. So perhaps I was a little too harsh in judging 8-1/2, and I apologize if I hurt your sentiments towards the film. It's just that I saw 8-1/2 during a time when I was very, umm, anti-sophisticated-artistic-talk in literary, stage or film work, and 8-1/2 does that a lot - with frequent talks about different so-called "movements" of cinematic expression, which I found very intellectually as well as artistically pretentious. I did like the surrealism of the opening sequence and I was hoping that what would follow would be along those lines, but I had my hopes up too high and the film went in a different direction altogether. Maybe, after another watch of 8-1/2, I might have a change in perspective, so I will look into it when I can.

By the way, a brief observation I made on 8-1/2 the first time around: Whenever a writer suffers from writer's block, he ends up writing the story about himself, about his own inability to compose the work. Fellini was going through writer's block back then and ended up making 8-1/2 about his mental state at that time (without, I hear, a definitive script). Charlie Kaufman did the same thing with Adaptation. They perhaps wouldn't even know that they are following this pattern, but they end up with a work that is full of themselves. William Gass, a novelist, made this observation very early on in his career and wrote The Tunnel, his magnus opus which took him 27 years to write, in which a Nazi Germany historian, while writing a piece of work called Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, suffers from writer's block and ends up writing it about himself and his own feelings.

Anyway, that's that. Since you mentioned a few directors, I do think Dario Argento, while certainly being one of the first directors to push the limits of gore allowed in cinema, is a highly overrated filmmaker. Maybe it was good when it was released, in that age, but Suspiria bored the daylights out of me. And even though I can appreciate Kurasowa's contributions to film directing, in the end, I find his films extremely tasteless and boring (yet original, I agree).

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The Thieves Who Stole His Bicycle

Having not been impressed by Italian films despite my many attempts at trying to be impressed, I finally decided to give The Bicycle Thief (1948) (or is it in plural, as thieves? I still don’t know!) a try – my final shot at Italian cinema, failing which I would erase Italy off my copy of the world map. At the outset, I was expecting nothing more than a pretentious parade of pseudoartistic babble along the lines of Fellini’s 8-1/2, also considered an Italian classic. But as the minutes went by and the story uncovered layer by layer, I stopped rolling my eyes and began to show a hint of interest and toned down my condescension towards the filmmaker little by little. At the end of the 90 minutes that followed, I was left with an expression that can only be best put in the words of Col. Walter Kurtz (from Apocalypse Now): “My God, the genius of it!”

The genius of it lies in its unnaturally simplistic yet powerful plot lacking any signs or symptoms of pretentiousness that is so dominant in the so-called “classics” of world cinema. I don’t mean any disrespect to the black-and-white era, but with the exception of Orson Welles and to some extent Alfred Hitchcock, I largely avoid most pre-Kubrick films. Granted, there were innumerable contributions from a slew of filmmakers – some, like D. W. Griffith, more than others – over a stretch of several decades, but it’s hard to find much of what is good about cinema in a single film in many films before the 1960s. Even those who made significant contributions to film direction, like Akira Kurasowa, brought out such pathetically painful acting from their actors that it makes it almost impossible to watch the scenes, and I would instead prefer to just read the subtitles and pretend to have seen the film as it were. But the Bicycle Thief, I’m glad to say, was a delicious surprise.

At its heart, the film explores our reaction to desperation – the presence of desperation can be subtly or strongly felt at every step of the movie – and how external material objects such as a bicycle can determine and control the life and livelihood of an entire family. The film follows a father and son’s vain attempt at finding their stolen bicycle which would help them “live again” through his new job – job being a very lucky find in post-Fascism Italy. There is no heavy-handed symbolism or over-readable metaphors at any point (although I suspect some pseudointellectual critics will read too much into it anyway – as they always do. Please watch South Park Season 14 Episode 2 for a clever criticism of reading too much into symbolism; to quote Beckett, "No symbols where none intended"), and for this reason, the film has been rightly hailed as the first great neo-realist film of the century. It is realistic to the extent that the two central characters – the father and the son – were specifically chosen as non-actors. Now, I am of the opinion that if symbolism be used in a story, it be used in such a way and form that it is instantly transmitted to the audience via an emotional channel, not via intellectual dissection of “what could this represent” ideas to reach the meaning. That is the difference between real art and pseudoart, and that is what art is about – an emotional transference of ideas and opinions, not an intellectual social theory or puzzle. The most glaring example of this aspect of the film is the way it is ended: (although it is used to the point that it is hackneyed in movies today, The Bicycle Thief was the first film to use this technique) the main character walks with the crowd and slowly blends into it and becomes unidentifiable in it, and eventually we see nothing but the crowd – meaning that the story you just saw could be a story of any person from that crowd, and therefore, of anyone including you.

The critics had initially observed that this is a story of a typical man in post-WWII Italy. But really, that is just a very narrow way of looking at it, since the characters, the setting, and the emotions that the plot evokes are so identifiable with and realistic that it is almost universally true, and for all ages of time. 8.5/10.

The frustration in their faces: a rational response to the desperate circumstances they are in

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The monkey who sold his almari

OK, so it’s a Monday night (my free night) and I’m supposed to be watching a movie, but since I already saw True Grit in the morning (whose epic disappointment I will come to shortly) and watched like 7 episodes of In Treatment back to back and read a few pages of The Recognitions, I no longer feel motivated to indulge in the life of fictional characters. I’m bored. So please bear with my ramblings for a bit.

Coming back to True Grit. Colossal failure. Even that’s just putting it mildly. There are so many things wrong with this film, I can only begin to describe how much it has let me down as an anticipated film, much less an anticipated Coen brothers film. The trailer really had me going: I thought this is it, we have the cinematic event of the year right here. The tone, the magical cinematography of Roger Deakins, the utterly awesome Jeff Bridges being directed by the uttttterly awesome Coen brothers – there was no way this could have been anything but pure gold blended with purer gold. But as it turns out, the entire film, set in 19th century America, which in itself can be annoying to watch given all the local colloquialisms that we cannot follow, wallows in cheesy, corny sentimentality layered over used-to-death, cheesier, cornier background score. Half way down, I was just hoping it was the end of the film. It was that friggin’ boring! (I wonder what IMDb users found in it that they've given an 8.5 rating. Maybe they just went with the whole hype that if it's a Coen brothers film, it will be awesome, so expect awesome and pretend to see only awesome, even if it's non-existent.) After three hat-trick awesome films in 2007, 2008 and 2009, the Coen brothers finally have jinxed their momentum with this shite. Thank you for ruining the first movie of 2011 for me, Ethan and Joel Coen!

Now, about In Treatment. Nah, I think I’ll cover it in greater depth in another post, because there’s so much to say about its unparalleled, engaging drama I just can't cover it in a few minutes, in a few words, and in this suicidally-bored state of mind. That’s enough ramblings for now.

2010 was a bad year for me. But I’m glad it’s over. Happy new year!

A joke to begin 2011 with:

An atheist and a Christian Jesus freak are having an exchange.

Jesus Freak: Do you believe in Virgin Birth?
Atheist: No, but I believe in Virgin Death - which you will encounter soon if you keep asking questions like that.

:)

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How Alphabetical Is It?

Answer: Very

Walter Abish, author of the critically acclaimed novel How German Is It, had a challenging idea once: to compose an experimental work of fiction that plays with the English alphabet in a constrained manner. And in 1974, he published Alphabetical Africa, a novella that stood as a monument to his idea, built to completion.

It's a one-off work of literature, bold in its ambition, that has never been attempted by anyone else and probably will never be attempted by anyone again. The book consists of 51 chapters of varying lengths. The first chapter is composed entirely and only of words starting with the letter 'a', the second chapter with letters 'a' and 'b', and with each subsequent chapter he adds a letter from the alphabetical series up until, with the 26th, he composes a chapter made of words starting with the entire English alphabet of 26 letters. In the 27th chapter, he subtracts 'z' from the composition and hence it consists of the first 25 letters, and with each subsequent chapter thereafter, one letter is subtracted from the alphabetical series backwards until, at the 51st chapter, he completes the circle and is back to using only 'a'-lettered words.

That idea might intrigue you or it might perhaps even repel you, as some readers distance themselves from disorientating or alienating works of art. But if you belong to the former, rest assured, this is about the most fun literary treats can get. Again, rest assured, all the sentences and sentence structures used in the book conform to the standard English grammar, though they may not as easily be understood as the normal sentences we find in ordinary usage, especially the chapters made of one or a few letters. But that's where the fun lies. An excerpt from first chapter thus goes...

Ages ago, an archeologist, Albert, alias Arthur, ably attended an archaic African armchair affair at Antibes, attracting attention as an archeologist and an atheist. Ahhh, atheism... Anyhow, Albert advocated assisting African ants. Ants? All are astounded. Ants? Absurd.

...and one from the second chapter goes...

Alex and Allen are both bribing a building attendant after building another apartment backstairs, but both also brood after burying a body, brood about Bantu's better beaches and accommodating Alva.

Sentences vary in length, from short and average ones like these to really long ones, and some are quite hard to understand (I've quoted the easy ones above). It's far from being an easy catch in book stores, but thanks to Flipkart, an imported edition is available there for a slightly higher price (considering it is imported and the fact that it is a novella), but then, when the treat is so great, shedding a few extra bucks wouldn't hurt your wallet. A limited sample can be previewed on Google Books if you are curious.

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When Clevinger became their scapegoat

Catch-22 is perhaps one of the most original novels of the 20th century, that, while being outrageously hilarious, mirrors human nature with a kind of accuracy not often seen in fictional novels. It mocks and satirizes the evil in people, especially when they are subject to conditions where their raw nature can come out unhindered, not bounded by any limitations. Such as in World War II, the background of this story.

The entire novel is as funny as funny can get, but towards the end of the eighth chapter it takes a serious tone for the first time. And the seriousness of it is so powerfully presented, it gave me an episode of depression after reading it. Depression not just regarding the character in action, but over the harsh truth about humans that is so starkly depicted in those few words. I'll quote them for you.

But before I do that, here's a brief summary of the scene that's happened till the quote: Clevinger, a cadet for the US Army, is brought on trial in front of the US military Action Board in his camp - consisting of three men: "a bloated colonel with big fat mustache", Major Metcalf, and Lieutenant Scheisskopf - for conspiring to overthrow the cadet officers appointed by a paranoid Lieutenant Scheisskopf, who is frantic that if nothing is done about it, Clevinger will one day overthrow the world. After a long and very hilarious trial, Clevinger is found guilty, without any evidence or relevant claims, and is sentenced to walk fifty-seven punishment tours. A punishment tour for Clevinger was fifty minutes of a weekend hour spent pacing back and forth before the provost marshal's building with a ton of an unloaded rifle on his shoulder. (And just for reference, Yossarian, whose name is mentioned below, is the unbelievably stupid and funny protagonist of the novel.)

These two paragraphs follow and conclude the chapter:

It was all very confusing to Clevinger. There were many strange things taking place, but the strangest of all, to Clevinger, was the hatred, the brutal, uncloaked, inexorable hatred of the members of the Action Board, glazing their unforgiving expressions with a hard, vindictive surface, glowing in their narrowed eyes malignantly like inextinguishable coals. Clevinger was stunned to discover it. They would have lynched him if they could. They were three grown men and he was a boy, and they hated him and wished him dead. They had hated him before he came, hated him while he was there, hated him after he left, carried their hatred for him away malignantly like some pampered treasure after they separated from each other and went to their solitude.

Yossarian had done his best to warn him the night before.

"You haven't got a chance, kid," he told him glumly. "They hate Jews."
"But I'm not Jewish," answered Clevinger.
"It will make no difference," Yossarian promised, and Yossarian was right. "They're after everybody."

Clevinger recoiled from their hatred as though from a blinding light. These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more.

That quote, right there, SPEAKS to me!

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The Road - A Novel by Cormac McCarthy: Review

Rating: 8/10

On reading the jacket blurb or synopses of the novel, one would get the impression that The Road is a sci-fi novel centered on the survival of a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic world, where everything is dead or dying save a few humans, some animals that were lucky enough to survive, and hardly anything in the plant world. At the outset of the novel and until a few pages into it, the reader feels this is what he is in for - a mere survival tale akin to the hundreds of others in the post-apocalyptic fiction genre. But very soon they realize it's not so much a story about the father-son survival as it is about the father-son relationship itself and the challenges of fatherhood and the sacrifices it demands.

Emotions run high and higher than tension in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in the near future where an unknown catastrophe - either gradual or sudden, it's difficult to say - has destroyed and burned civilization as we know it and has plunged mankind and indeed life itself to the brink of extinction. Everything is grey and ashy, and hopes of returning the planet back to its pre-apocalyptic state are as bleak as the cold wind that freezes the ground at night. The sun is blocked with the dark ashes that fill the sky, and the brightest light of day makes for only the faintest of vision. There is nothing left to eat except the sparse leftover canned food of yesteryears. Dry, rotting corpses are scattered everywhere. Cannibalism is a commonplace amongst the survivors, and humans, now back to their savage state, have become more skilled at hunting other humans than at hunting animals. And amid all this hellish mess, a man struggles to keep his son alive without losing their humanity in a world he believes god has abandoned a long time ago.

The moral dimensions of the novel, as opposed to McCarthy’s previous works such as No Country for Old Men and Blood Meridian, are simple. Everyone is divided into “good guys” or “bad guys,” and actions too are either good or bad. Although some readers cribbed about this being an issue, to me it doesn’t contradict the motivations of characters as the world they are living now is more primitive than the early stone ages had witnessed, and morals in such a world are anything but complex. Throughout the bulk of the novel the author builds for his audience such a subtle and strong bond with the main characters that the readers don’t realize how much they have fallen in love with them till the very end. And let me be quick to admit, and I’m not alone in this, this is the first novel that evoked such an intense emotional response in me that my eyes literally misted up, if not wept, in the final few pages of the novel. The sparkle of love in the backdrop of this gloomy, unforgiving and dismal atmosphere glitters like the last piece of pearl in the abyss of a dead and long abandoned ocean – an ocean which plays a pivotal role in the story.

The road to the coast of the ocean is purported to be a metaphor by many readers – and it may well be if that is what the reader wishes to think of it – but McCarthy in a rare interview said the road is just a road for him, although he wouldn’t deny his readers the freedom of interpretation. His writing style often and intentionally violates many rules of English grammar, such as constructing only sentence fragments instead of complete sentences, omitting apostrophes at many places, avoiding quotation marks entirely, et cetera. But to balance the act, McCarthy is such a master at what he does that his writing gets borderline poetic even in prose (“Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”) and expresses so many thoughts and emotions in so few a words (“I envy the dead; it’s over for them,”) that it’s easy to get lost in the images and the weight of meaning they bear, to the length that we forget it’s words we are looking at. There are a few horrifying scenes, certainly not for the squeamish to read, embedded in the story. Character development is at the core of his creative writing process, and plot too serves as a platform for pushing them to the boundaries of survival and sanity and testing their instincts, especially the man’s paternal instincts. Another oddly interesting thing I noticed was that while I’m a staunch atheist myself, I thoroughly embraced the metaphorical and elegiac use of the concept of “god.” And like in the author’s entire body of work, women play a small role even in this novel, with only two of them appearing and only for a few pages.

All things considered, The Road is a modern literary gem that is as haunting as it is beautiful, and, at 300-odd pages, is not as thick as it is rewarding. Cormac McCarthy has set a benchmark for future authors of this genre and the whole of fiction writing to use as a definitive guide of storytelling and created a world so engulfed in both affection and poignancy that it melts the hearts of even the coldest of readers. This is emotive art the likes of which literature hasn’t seen before, earning McCarthy, among other things, the honor of being one of the great American writers of our age.

Trivia: While I’ve come to dislike comparing books and films, which frankly is like comparing apples with oranges, the film adaptation was lacking one crucial element: the sense of time. The novel has it, and gives the feeling that the story is taking place over a long period of many years, which it is. But the film makes it seem like the story occurs over a two-day period, which is a shame because half the connection between the audience and characters is lost there, with the result being a woefully inept adaptation in terms of sentimentality. I won’t, however, take away from the director the stark imagery he has so skillfully crafted - an important aspect of creating the mood for the action to take place in.

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