Masterclass, Mastercut: A Review of The Master

I wish to make it a ritual to review the best film of the year every year. I reviewed The Tree of Life last year, I’m reviewing The Master now, and hopefully films in 2013 will live up to the ever-higher standards being set by the prodigies so I can keep my ritual alive.

But what makes The Master the best film of the year? To be honest, it’s ridiculous to call one film the best film of the year, or one filmmaker the best filmmaker of all time. It’s equally ridiculous to rank and sort them in any order. I’ve been guilty of both. I’m guilty despite telling myself constantly that the best kind of list you could ever draw is a group of great directors, or a group of great films, as a collective, as all within that group being equal in worth and value. But giving my personal hypocrisy the backseat, since my inclination (and time) to review only one film aligns with the idea of prizing one film as the best of the year, I will use this overlap to my benefit.

Dianetics I thought was peculiar. Now I don't think it's any more peculiar than a lot of the things out there. - Paul Thomas Anderson

This is a film 10 years in the making. Or, in writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s words, the better part of 10 years spent with “a character searching for a story.” He wanted to make a film on a character very loosely based on the cult leader of Dianetics (later rechristened Scientology), L. Ron Hubbard, and another character, an emotionally wounded navy soldier (victim of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, called back in the 50s as “shellshock”) returning from his duties, and this character was heavily based on the government-sactioned-and-later-government-banned documentary*  called Let ThereBe Light that the legendary director John Huston made in 1946 on the real shellshocked navy soldiers returning from WW-II. Anderson only had these two characters to begin with, and imagined a quasi-romance story between them, as he still refers to the film as a romance (in a totally non-gay way).

Lancastar Dodd, the Master played to perfection by Anderson’s long-time acting collaborator Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Freddie Quin, improvised beyond Anderson’s directions by the highly eccentric and equally underrated Joaquin Phoenix, find in each other a magnetic subliminal attraction that is charged with nuances of many kinds of relationships: master-apprentice, father-son, spiritual leader- protégé, sometimes even interrogator-interrogatee. The attraction is so strongly felt that the very first time Dodd meets Quin he reveals to him, “...but above all, I am man, just like you, hopelessly inquisitive” and goes on to write the whole night inspired by him. This attraction is reciprocated by Quin as he becomes aggressively, violently defensive of Dodd, in addition to having his own fits of eruptive rage, against anyone who dares to question Dodd’s authority or doubt his teachings or so much as tries to arrest him for fraud, including against Dodd’s own son. Their dedication to each other intensifies as the film progresses, getting stranger and darker by the minute, and descends into a maddening vortex of misplaced loyalty. The film reaches its darkest season at its climax, and without giving away any spoilers, in Anderson’s words, neither of them transform each other, nothing changes, there's no epiphany, and they both end up exactly where they started. The line I liked the most in this climax, which to me was a highlight of the film, was Dodd to Quinn: “If I meet you in my next life, you will be my sworn enemy.” He means it. He believes it.

The character of Amy Adams, Peggy Dodd, is a lurking presence throughout the film.  In fact, to make that invisible lurking possible through Freddie Quinn, Anderson shot all the scenes involving her and Quinn at the very beginning of the shooting schedule, so that her grip on him would spill into the scenes not involving her.  And Anderson has been very vocal about just how much improvisation Phoenix did on his own, almost to the extent that Heath Ledger did on the Joker in TDK, even vocalizing that he wished he had written as good a character on paper as Phoenix turned him into. From the caveman-like posture** to speaking through the side of his lips, from the intensity of psychotic breakdowns to spontaneous dialogues, Phoenix took creative control of his character in a way most directors don’t allow their actors, but proves worthy of that liberty all the same (this possibly being the reason Anderson has taken him onboard for the lead of his next film, an adaptation of the latest novel by the pioneering architect of postmodern literature, Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice).

I reserve a special note for Phillip Seymour Hoffman, because, while his character was only thematically (and loosely) based on L. Ron Hubbard, according to Hoffman it was physically partly based on Orson Welles – and I did feel that the tonality of the voice, the upright stance, the towering personality and the power of assertion were all familiar but I couldn’t pin down one name until I heard Hoffman mention Welles as (only) one of the characters Dodd sits on. Anybody who knows me knows how freakishly obsessed I am with Welles, so it gives me, in addition to all the other reasons for liking it, another reason to like it.

The cinematography, and the cinematographer, were a first-time experience for Anderson. His career-long cinematographer Robert Elswit was unavailable to shoot this film, so Anderson collaborated with Mihai Malaimare, Francis Coppola’s DP, to experiment on a new look for the film using the long-abandoned 70 mm film reel. The last film to use such extensive usage of the 70 mm format was Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 adaptation of Hamlet. But because the 1970s generation of filmmakers is so romantically attached to film, they refuse to upgrade to digital except during editing. There’s good and bad reasons behind their refusal, but at least when it comes to The Master, I’m glad that the reasons are mostly good. Anderson says “there’s so much more that can be done with 70 mm,” that it hasn’t run its course and can still be experimented with, which is what he tried to do here, along with experimentation with light and color. The resulting imagery is nothing short of a spectacle. Even if one finds the emotions of the film alienating, it would do well to sit through it just to enjoy to striking display of photography. One can also see the experimental nature of the music by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead, who also scored to the most original sound of There Will Be Blood, but if there were just one complaint I had with the film, it was that the music didn’t integrate so well in The Master as it did in TWBB. There was some disconnect that I could feel, a disconnect clearly unintended.

A review of The Master without commenting on Scientology is of course incomplete. I used to wonder, given Tom Cruise’s famed affiliation with Church of Scientology, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s collaboration with him in Magnolia, would this be a falling out between the two? To the contrary Anderson stated in more than one interview that he did screen the film for Tom Cruise after it was complete and that they had a “healthy discussion” about it. My interpretation of ‘healthy discussion’ is that no death threats were issued or exchanged, but regardless, Anderson has made no secret of the fact that the shadow of Church of Scientology was felt throughout the filming process. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Scientology orchestrated the infamous Operation Snow White in the 70s to erase all IRS documents related to Scientology and were prosecuted, part of which inspired the scene in the film in which Dodd is arrested for tax fraud. Nevertheless, Anderson captures decidedly anti-Scientology undercurrents that flow through the film even at its brightest moments as it does in its darkest.

To spare you the overkill pun, The Master is most certainly a masterpiece, forging Paul Thomas Anderson’s name into film history’s hall of fame of genre-defining, style-obsessed filmmakers. It’s a film that not only requires multiple viewings, but gets better each time you watch it. That’s a hallmark of Kubrick, but extending beyond a mere hallmark, this film takes Kubrick’s dream of making a film on the cult and the occult, a dream which he had since the 80s but did not succeed too well with Eyes Wide Shut, and turns it into a reality that Kubrick wished he could have.

I wonder who the real Master in the film is.

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* The backstory to this ban is filled with irony. John Huston was sanctioned by the US government to make a trilogy of documentaries about the soldiers returning from war in an effort to convince the American public that the soldiers were in good health and happy to do it all over again for their country, and also in an effort to recruit more soldiers into the army. The documentaries were meant to glorify the army and possibly war. John Huston made the third film, Let There Be Light, with the intention of showing Americans that even the most emotionally wounded soldiers of the war were perfectly capable of local and industrial employment after their return back home. But Huston’s good intentions flipped when the first reaction of anybody who watched this documentary was that they would NOT employ those soldiers, thereby serving the irony, and it only made the war effort look really bad. The government thus took it upon itself, since it was the producer, to ban it for more than three decades, and it was released sometime in the 80s. Paul Thomas Anderson had a moment of love-at-first-sight when he watched this documentary in the 2000s and instantly knew that’s the character who would lead his story. You can see clear references to this documentary in the early scenes of the film where Freddie Quin is on a lookout for a job on his return from the navy and is surrounded by questions of re-employment.

** Anderson handed over a documentary on apes to Phoenix for "character research," and Phoenix brought in the ape-like body language.

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Less > More: A fresh perspective

There has been a new discovery in psychology, a finding that is dominant enough to affect all our lives and almost all aspects of our lives. About a year ago, psychology researcher Norbert Schwarz and his team conducted a study into the inner workings of the minds of two people during a specific type of a conversation – where one is trying to impress the other and expect something in return, like a job or their money, and the other is listening to everything that is being put on the table and making up a decision whether to give them what they expect. The results of the study surprised even the researchers enough that they categorized its generality as a paradox and called it ‘The Presenter’s Paradox.’

The idea is simply this: Whenever you are on the presenter’s end of submitting a list of your accomplishments, you mention all of your accomplishments, regardless of how big or small they are, instinctively assuming that the person you are presenting them to is adding them all up. The person on the receiver's end, though, hears a completely different story. They don’t add you accomplishments, they instinctively average them out. If you scored a 750 on GMAT (say 10 points for this), organized a college festival in the capacity of a student president (say 10 points again), served as the editor-in-chief of the college magazine (10 points), and then also mention that you came second in a cooking competition (2 points), your hope is that your score adds up to 32 as it has in your head; when in reality, from the perspective of the judge, you only scored an average of 8, as opposed to scoring an average 10 had you not mentioned the cooking competition bit at all (not 10+10+10+2=32, but 32/4=8). In short, quality, not quantity.

This phenomenon of adding-versus-averaging has caused quite a sensation in psychology fields in the past year since its publication. Follow-up studies – a total of seven – have found the same behavior exhibited in a variety of different circles. In one study, customers were asked to price an ipod without any freebies and another identical ipod that came with a free song. On average, they were willing to pay $242 for the one without the free song and $177 for the one with the free song. This seems counterintuitive. Why would anyone pay more for less? (Here's another neat example of this same phenomenon). In a second study with different participants, they reversed the scenario and asked them to guess which one a customer was more likely to buy, and 92% of them said the one with the free song would sell more. Our reasoning dramatically transforms when we are presenters and receivers, and it turns out that this reasoning takes place completely differently in our subconscious mind than our conscious.

I had written a blogpost a year ago about the brain having evolved to conserve every last bit of neuron in order to save brain space, because it only has a limited amount of gray matter to work with for a million of its callings. It only allocates the absolutely-necessary number of neurons to any task and not a neuron more – it’s frugal but it gets the job done like a pro. Averaging is a much better way of conserving brain space than summation. In the above example, 8 is a much simpler number than 32 – not just in terms of the number of digits but also in terms of how it is arrived at. In the case of summation, the brain begins with the first number, adds it to the second, adds this new number to the third...and with each iteration the number gets not only bigger but more importantly much different than the previous summation. However, in the case of average, the brain only has to vaguely average out the first two numbers, and from the third number onwards the average will be much closer to the average of the first two and not vary significantly – and any significant variation in new items added will immediately tell you whether the average has gone up or down with just a glance at the numbers without having to do the math. You instinctively know that the average of three 9s and two 8s is higher than the average of three 9s and two 8s and a 3, without even knowing what that average is. You know, instinctively, that the average of the whole set has gone down with the addition of a number that is significantly less than the average of the first five; and if this newly added number is not significantly less than the average of the first five, you again know instinctively that the average hasn’t changed much – a very simple but effective tool in decision-making that consumes much less brain power than having to individually add up each number and remember the new summation each time. This logic applies whether you are dealing with 4 items or 10, although the study hasn’t been conducted for very large number of items so I don’t wish to speculate there.

The brain has evolved over millions of years to do this kind of averaging without associating concrete numbers to anything. It comes naturally to us – provided we are at the receiver’s end.

This finding has significant impact on how you should conduct yourself, be you an interviewee (presenter) or be you designing a product for sale (presenter), be you gifting many gifts on someone's birthday (presenter) or be you accepting punishment (receiver). Yes, it even applies to how you perceive punishment, which was one of those 7 studies. Participants of the study were asked to choose between two punishments for littering: a) $750 fine, or b) $750 fine plus two hours of community service. Paradoxically, 86% of the participants chose option B because they reasoned that it was less severe than option A – which is ridiculously, obviously not true. Not only that, but they also reasoned that option B was significantly less severe than option A. The Presenter’s Paradox had come into play, (this time being not the presenter but the receiver) and their brains averaged out the overall punishment, because not many perceive community service as a severe form of punishment in comparison with a $750 fine, so the overall perception of the severity of punishment diminished.

As a general rule, in any situation where you are either presenting, or are being presented, multiple items with the expectation of an impeding decision of approval or selection, stop and ask yourself which side of the fence you are on (presenter or receiver) and:

1. Remove items that reduce the overall quality of your presentation if you are the presenter, or
2. Add, don’t average, all the items if you are the receiver.

Now then, since I have the habit of relating everything I read or observe to filmmaking/filmmakers: Stanley Kubrick had noticed, or at least had an inkling of, this phenomenon back in the 70s, as is visible in this quote:

“It is not so important to make a good film as it is to not make a bad one.” - Kubrick

He knew that if he made a bad film, his good films will not come for his rescue and his overall reputation would suffer. He ended up making only 11 feature films in his entire career. Had Sydney Lumet made only 11 good ones, instead of the 50 eclectic feature films he did make, he too would’ve been revered alongside Kubrick, not an inch lower. The saying “less is more” isn’t all bullshit.

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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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What makes No Country For Old Men a great film?

There’s been much talk and debate ever since this film was released and won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, about its artistic and narrative merit.  Comments from naysayers vary from “It’s a pointless, plotless affair in pretentious filmmaking” to “dafuq did I just watch?”, while accolades from yay-sayers range between carried-away OMFGs and “the Coen brothers have weaved pure cinematic gold...instant classic.” I, under the pretense of having something new to add, will make a vain attempt here to justify why No Country For Old Men is the rightful recepient of the title of not only the best film of the year 2007 but also the best film of the decade 2000s and, at the end of the century, the heir to the title The Godfather held in the 20^th century: the best film of the century.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I usually am not one to analyze and dissect films or other forms of stories, and in fact that is the least of my intentions here. After all, movies I firmly believe should be open to subjective interpretation, not to objective analysis, and each person should be entitled to conceive it in any way they choose. But there is a good deal of backstory and context within which the film makes sense and sheds more light on the characters, their beliefs and motivations, and all the underlying richness of the film. This context is what I wish to explore, not just partially as I will do here but in greater depth in future through other novels of Cormac McCarthy (especially The Sunset Limited, which I need to re-watch).

So, first things first: the protagonist of the film. Most people believe that since the antagonist is Anton Chigurh, the protagonist must be the guy he is chasing, the hunter Llewelyn Moss. He’s not. As uncoventional as it may seem, the protagonist is actually the sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the narrator of the film. Despite him not being physically present in most of the events, the entire film is actually told from his perspective. There is no rule written anywhere that the lead character of a story must be present for a precise number of onscreen minutes, nor that the story must physically revolve around him. What determines whether he is the lead or not, however, is the perspective: is the moral compass of the movie, for the most part anyway, inclined relative to the character in question? It could be very subtle, but perspectives, like assholes, are always present. That’s what makes a film work, even if you can’t verbalize or analyze it.

Secondly, the era. The film is not set in modern-day Texas but in 1980. This is easily deductible through the general setting of the film, including cars, and through Chigurh’s words exchanged with a shop owner he intends to kill:  “You know what date is on this coin? 1958. It's been traveling 22 years to get here. And now it’s here.” 1958 + 22 = 1980. The reason I mention this is because era is one of the most important aspects of the context of this film, the hint to which is in the very title of the movie. As a matter of fact, era is important to the context of any film, even if its moralities are timeless and omnipresent, but I must resist digressing towards unnecessary generalities.

Now, the key to understanding this film lies in the opening monologue by the narrator, Sheriff Bell. I’ll reproduce it here only in its relevance:

I was sheriff of this county when I was 25 years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman. Father too. Me and him was sheriffs at the same time, him up in Plano and me out here. ... Some of the old-time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lot of folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough never carried one. ... Gaston Boykins wouldn’t wear one up in Comanche County. I always liked to hear about the old-timers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can’t help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Can’t help but wonder how they’d have operated these times. There’s this boy I sent to the electric chair at Huntsville here a while back. ... He killed a 14-year-old girl. Paper said it was a crime of passion, but he told me there wasn’t any passion to it. Told me he’d been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said if they turned him out, he’d do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. Be there in about 15 minutes. I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t. The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."

(Ah, the calm, comforting resignation with which Tommy Lee Jones utters these words is just priceless!)

As I mentioned above, it’s 1980. Richard Nixon had declared War on Drugs in 1971, and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was established in 1973 for this purpose. DEA took its job seriously, as it does to this day, and busted pretty much every single “lab” (the jargon for places, including shady basements, where drugs like cocaine, heroine, etc. are manufactured or “cooked”) and incarcerated most drug dealers, distributors, and users. DEA was only getting stronger and more well-established, and the future for those who depended on home-grown illegal drugs didn’t look very promising. By 1980, the organization had become strong enough that if you cooked within the US, DEA would hunt you down. That was the trend. In such difficult times, the demand for imported illegal drugs rose exponentially. Afterall, DEA couldn’t bust labs situated in countries outside their jurisdiction. Their neighboring country, Mexico, where drug laws hardly existed and crime was a way of life, was the perfect haven to cook and import drugs from. And since Mexico shares her border with Texas, Texas acted as the gateway for illegal drugs into the US, importing not only drugs but also the perils and heinous crimes that go with it – thus breeding the infamous “Mexican drug cartel.” A new wave of crime was beginning to spread through the country – mindless, passionless, cold, brutal, unmotivated, unforgiving – in other words, the embodiment that is Anton Chigurh.

Chigurh is the physical manifestation of a characteristic drug trafficking trade gone wrong and its ensuing chaos – beginning with a killing spree at the location of the exchange and followed by money missing and the pursuit of it involving a range of insensible, incomprehensible murders. The events leading up to the initial massacre are kept as vague as possible to give it the look and feel of generality; to imply that it’s not important specifically what caused the massacre because although causative reasons might vary with each such massacre, the factor they all have in common is deception and betrayal centered around money. That’s how it begins – without a specific beginning. And if you watch the film closely enough, when Moss is killed at the end of the hunt, you are shown neither the act of killing itself, nor the killers and nor the bodies clearly enough, just the sheriff’s perspective from his car as he witnesses things from a distance and approaches the scene of crime to find two floating bodies in the pool. The end of the hunt is also kept as vague as possible, to give it the same feel of generality as the ordeal’s beginning. It’s a film without a beginning or an end.

As the end approaches, it becomes increasingly clear that Chigurh isn’t even pursuing Moss for the money. It appears so initially when he tracks Moss through a tracker hidden inside the case, but even after Moss gets rid of the money, Chigurh continues pursuing him anyway. He was never after the money, only the sadistic thrill of the kill. (In fact, Chigurh kills Moss' wife because "I gave him my word.") The Cartel doesn’t kill Moss for the money either, only to send out the message not to fuck with them, to not put your nose where it doesn’t belong even by chance. And when the sheriff comes face-to-face with the aftermath of all these atrocities he is struggling to comprehend, he is all but nostalgic about a time gone by when crime used to be much simpler to understand, when murder came with motive, when no one killed without reason, when criminals were easier to deal with – the tone with which he utters the opening monologue which if you go back up and read will tell you why he believes he is no longer lives in a country for old men like him but is instead trying to find his place in such a world. His nostalgia isn’t reflected just in the opening voice-over monologue alone but also in the ending monologue where he tells his wife the dream he had the other night about his father.

But the most pivotal and perhaps the best part of the film is the penultimate scene where the sheriff visits his elder wheelchair-bound brother who tell hims the story of how their uncle was killed in 1909, trying to convince him that he isn’t dealing with anything new, that this country has always been hard on people, and that he “can’t stop what’s comin’.”

No Country For Old Men is a film where everything came together to make the perfect symphony.
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Favorite dialogue from the movie:
Moss: "Is he dangerous?"
Carson Wells: "Compared to what? The Bubonic plague?"

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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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Evolution, death, living, and the 5 most important drugs

I’ve been procrastinating on writing this article for many a month, and the longer I sit on it (or it sits on my mind), the more lethargic I feel, lethargy that spills into everything else. So anyway, evolution is one of my most obsessive topics in science, and I spend more time thinking/reading about it than any other thought seed. Recently, after watching a TED talk about the future of evolution (people who are too sensitive to the whole eugenics business and feel their heart stabbed with even the hint of “controlling” evolution can conveniently stop reading at this point and return to their routine without bothering with the above-linked video), there was something mentioned in it that irrelevantly ignited my interest in pharmacology. In essence, after much thought, the idea boils down to this: you don’t need to meddle with genes in order to have a conscious influence on our species’ evolution; we are already doing it – in the form of medical interventions of all kinds, especially those that delay fatality.

Up until a few hundred or a few thousand years ago, man was completely subject to the will of nature, physiologically speaking. Any harmful genes and genes that would decrease the probability of survival of an individual – example, diseases acquired through hereditary, genes influencing moronic behaviors that lead to death, etc. – were all eliminated from the human gene pool through the death of the individual if the death occurred before breeding. What we define as harmful in this context need not necessarily be something extreme like cancer or plague but even a mild infection that could lead to gangrene and eventually death, or an infection during a simple fever (which is a time when the immune system is fighting to normalize body temperature and any secondary sources of malice, even something as inconsequential as a dog bite or bruised infection, would not be sufficiently dealt with by the busy immune system and thus increase chances of death). So there need not necessarily be something wrong directly with the genes themselves; the body’s immune system, which is a manifestation of those genes, can instead be easily influenced by external agents, and thus also the chances of carrying on of those genes into the next generation; or, death could not even have been from a physiologic dysfunction but rather from being eaten by a predator or death by stupidity, all of which are again manifestations of survival instincts influenced by genes. Evolution has its fingers in every pie. In as many cases as not, death used to occur well before breeding, and therefore, those genes were eliminated from the gene pool through evolutionary natural selection – a phenomenon powered by the thin line that separates death and survival.**

However, with the institution of medical science that has been gradually increasing in depth over the past couple of millennia, we have been actively delaying death and getting better at it, thereby being able to reproduce before death (not that there’s something called ‘reproduce after death,’ but you get the point) and pass on every kind of gene, good or bad, to the offsprings, and they to theirs. The larger-perspective consequence of this medical intervention simply means that we are keeping natural selection from acting on those undesirable genes and ensuring that they are kept active/present in the human gene pool. As a quick illustration of this effect, two graphs demonstrate the average life expectancy of an individual over the past few centuries and the infant mortality rate for the 20th century, both of which show that medical intervention has increased the chances of gene survival in the gene pool:

(Remember, though, that death can occur even after infancy but before reproduction - the so called "virgin deaths," for lack of a better term - so the graphs are valid yet unavailable for that demographic as well)

The conclusion here is that we are not at the mercy of nature anymore to survive, and even without actually manipulating the genes directly, we are still consciously influencing their presence in our species. Since genes are what determine the course of evolution, we humans have already begun to control the future of our species on an evolutionary scale (you could also argue that veterinary science has done the same for animals, although to a lesser degree). And in addition to delaying death and ensuring reproduction, medical intervention also treats or cures inherited/congenital and other diseases arising from those genes or from external agents, which, as I said earlier, are again manifestations of genes.

The above-linked video discusses working directly on the genes themselves and manipulating them consciously, and not indirectly through medical science as I just described, to eliminate harmful genes altogether and tune our mortality, but that is not what I want to talk about here. I am more interested in how medical science has indirectly worked on our genes and helped you and I come into existence and stay in existence.

The following are five of the most important and impressive pharmacological miracles which either we owe our existence to or which humankind is much, much worse off without. I say humankind as a collective term, of course. Individually, we all have, or will have later in life, a medicine which is as important to us personally as these are to mankind as a whole.

1. Penicillin.
The granddaddy of all modern antibiotics and the first antibiotic ever discovered. It is estimated that 75% of today’s world population would not be alive if penicillin hadn’t saved our ancestors from infections. 75% of our current population would never have known what it means “to live.” Penicillin, more than any other single factor, led to the exponential rise in population in the 20th century. We are currently developing resistance to penicillin and gradually making it ineffective on several bacterial infections, but secondary antibiotics derived from penicillin and many other antibiotics discovered even today through the same method Dr. Fleming used to (accidentally) discover penicillin in 1928 are rising up to fill the grandmaster’s place.

2. Ether
What we generally call anesthesia, was discovered in 1842. All surgeries performed until then were live surgeries, with the patient conscious. If a mass had to be removed, you had to be cut open when you could feel every moment of the excruciating pain, many dying of the pain itself. Not that we are here and alive because of this chemical compound, but without it, the millions of surgeries taking place every year would either never take place because of the fear of pain, or be so painful as to suck the life force out of you. In the awe-inspiring HBO TV mini-series John Adams, set in 18th century, one of his daughters undergoes a breast removal for a diagnosis of malignant, cancerous tumor – while she is still awake and feeling every inch of the pain as the blade cuts her breast off, and as Mr. and Mrs. Adams cry in each other's arms at the screams of their daughter's agony during the procedure. The cancer recurs in the other breast a while after, and she refuses surgery and accepts death.

3. Smallpox vaccine

The first successful vaccine in medical history, it symbolizes man’s ascendancy over the dark side of nature, a symbol in the form of a healed lesion on your left shoulder. Small pox has been one of the deadliest epidemics in recorded time – notorious not just for its mortality rates but also for the stretch of time it lurked in our species, spanning over 12,000 years. Even the Spanish flu, which claimed over 50 million lives in early 20th century, did not last longer than a few years. This vaccine used to treat the smallpox virus is ironically made of another virus – cowpox virus. Classic case of fight fire with fire, huh?




4. Antidepressants
There is a very sick mentality among the general population of judging people who are on antidepressants. I once very briefly worked on a psychiatry department account and had a long stint with general physician consulting in my line of work. I could never cease to be surprised at the number of patients with a very chronic case of depression who refused to go on antidepressants simply because of the fear of what their friends might think (I am not exaggerating. I’m barely even paraphrasing). What other people might think! I don’t think the patient is completely at fault here, because as Col. Walter Kurtz rightly put it, “It’s judgment that defeats us.” We are all inherently afraid of being judged, and that fear surfaces in these depressed patients at the sound of being on a drug for the mind, emotionally helpless as they already are. But what sickens me to my gut is when I see or hear someone judging, either vocally or with subtle facial expressions through which they so wonderfully communicate condescension, a person who is on antidepressants. No one judges patients with diabetes, heart diseases, renal failure, or any other physiological issues, but when it comes to a psychological issue, an emphatic “OH!” ensues. Right, here is the truth: clinical depression is neither a choice nor a reflection of the state of lives of people suffering from it. It’s as physiological a condition as osteoarthritis or congestive heart failure. Chronically depressed patients’ brains are physically incapable of producing the appropriate amounts of chemicals required to be happy. The only way to treat it is to fight it with an antidepressant drug, the way you would treat a backache with ibuprofen – i.e., with medicine! You can't (read slowly: CAN'T) cure it by thinking optimistically, thinking happy thoughts, taking a freakin break, or any other pop culture bullshit worthless advices people give. Go watch this enlightening Stanford video, educate your ignorant, harebrained ass, and refrain from making any smartass judgment calls the next time you hear someone is on an antidepressant: you could potentially save them their lives, just by being a decent human being. Too much to ask?

As Maria Bustillos, studying the reason for DFW's suicide, wrote the most sensible words I've ever heard from a lay person:

I have known intimately and looked after depressed people, and have no illusions about my ability to understand the real nature of that illness. The sort of blues I occasionally suffer through compares to real depression like a broken fingernail compares to being shot in the head and then set on fire and drowned. But it seems to me that the victims of that terrible disorder are often trying all their lives in vain to figure out why this must be so. Why them. And maybe there really is just no reason, or the reason is completely random, a cluster of neurons misfiring one day by accident, a bad thing that happens and could not be helped.

On a similar note, as much as I admire and appreciate Sir Ken Robinson’s intricate critique of the current state of our pathetic school/education systems worldwide, a glimpse of the judgmental attitude towards psychogenic drugs can be seen in these two (1, 2) million-plus-views Youtube videos of his. In the second video although he correctly admits that he is not qualified to comment on ADHD, he somehow believes he is qualified to comment on ADHD drugs. The very least bit of qualification required to comment on this class of drugs is to try one. But without knowing what it feels like to be on one, without conducting proper research into the drug, and without knowing what the drug does inside the brain, Sir Ken confidently posits that psychostimulant ADHD drugs numb your senses and enable you to focus on the “boring” subject by disabling you from attaining the heightened state of enjoyment you feel while watching a work of art. But the reality of it is hilariously contrary – ADHD medications heighten, NOT numb, your senses and therefore enable you to focus on whatever it is you want to focus on, including art. As someone who has tried modafinil, I can vouch for it, and so can academic sources and millions of others on it. Just try watching a film while on modafinil, and you’ll bet your life savings you are enjoying it better than Sir Ken. So making daft statements like these shows not just how uneducated (no pun intended) and biased he is against the science of mind and drugs, but also displays the stupidity of the audience that nods its heads and shares his judgment of ADHD drugs and of those who prescribe or support it. Another sad example comes from Doug Stanhope, one of my favorite and extremely bright comedians. As I said, I love both Robinson and Stanhope in all other respects but fall short of sympathizing with their disdain and judgment towards psych drugs. And all this is just a glimpse; the bigger picture is much uglier.

[I’m sorry about the tone of these two paragraphs above. I vent bitterly because I too was on an anxiolytic for a brief period last year, and save a few friends, pretty much everyone else gave me a judgmental look for it and it wasn’t too long before I realized this was a universal phenomenon that’s causing millions of people around the world to commit suicide simply because they’d rather deal with the consequence of not being treated for their psychological condition than be judged for accepting treatment.]

5. Antihypertensives
Approximately 1 billion people in the world currently suffer from hypertension (high blood pressure), and it is estimated that one out of every four people born will develop severe, chronic hypertension into their adulthood, and another one of those four will develop moderate hypertension (hypertension classification here). Hypertension has been academically called a “silent killer” because the symptoms of hypertension are so mild and unfelt over a long time that you become adjusted to its abnormality as normalcy and it slowly begins to eat away your longevity. One day, thud! Hypertension in rare cases can occur even at young age but normally occurs well into your adulthood, so antihypertensives are drugs that extend your days, and not (just) help you survive till you give birth. Many of us owe our parents’ and grandparents’ long life to this class of drugs.

Of course, utterly needless to say, every class of drugs is important, not just the ones I have chosen to mention here. From nutritionals to antivirals, NSAIDs to antipyretics, analgesics (very commonly used) to ACE inhibitors, insulin to even birth control pills and emergency contraceptive pills – sometimes not just to restore normalcy but to elevate normalcy up to higher standards of healthy living. Some are personally more important to us than any of these drugs mentioned above. But we all need them. Even those who prefer Ayurveda, Homeopathic and other alternative medicines and show a general sense of disdain towards Western medicine owe their existence to them, deny as they might. Pharmacology and medical science is what makes living today better than living in the past – more so than any other perks of human development.

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** (It's also worth noting that the death before reproduction of a single member of a species containing an undesirable gene isn't necessarily going to eliminate that gene from the gene pool. The individual's siblings, their chances of having inherited the same undesirable gene from the common parent, and other members of the species possessing the same gene - all influence how long a gene survives in the system, which is why undesirable genes tend to survive for several generations.)

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I have some thoughts on how wealth affects genes and the human gene pool from an evolutionary perspective, but they are still raw, disorganized and incomplete, so hopefully by next year I can write a blog post about it. 

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The Tree of Life, The Tree of Death

“Summing it up, one might say that the screen rectangle must be charged with emotion.” — Alfred Hitchcock

“The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it." — Stanley Kubrick

“I can’t quite tell you what the film was about, I can’t analyze it. I’m not a film critic, I can’t tell you where Fassbinder was going with that film… But I had a certain emotional reaction to it, and that’s what I admire. The spirit of that picture permeates the attitude of a lot of the scenes in Taxi Driver. And that means everything.” – Martin Scorsese on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons.

I generally hate articles that begin, and for that matter films too, with a quote. It’s a cut-and-dried cliché that has been juiced to the brink of meaninglessness. But I take an exception here, both because those three quotes quoted above condense the point of this post eloquently and also because the film in question opens with one, a quote from God Himself from the Old Testament:

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation ... while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" – God

The filmmaking guidebook conventionally dictates that a film should set the tone in the opening 10 minutes of the film, but Terrence Malick sets a big part of the tone with that quotation itself, establishing the spirituality of the film and the spiritual themes of the origin of the universe and life, channeling our emotions in the direction of that undeniable poetic sensation central to the God concept even an atheist like me cannot deny. The spiritual tone set here together with the first words softy uttered by Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica “Goddess-Like-Beautiful” Chastain) becomes the heart and soul of the film and suffuses smoothly into the rest, carrying with it and tying together all the elements that go into making it.

There is much to be said about all the elements that go into making it, technically and artistically, from sound mixing to editing, cinematography to narrative structure to the hypnotic background score. It would be farcical even to try to dissect every single one of those to ascertain how the experience is brought to life, but in a Portuguese interview one of the editors of this film, Daniel Rezende, quoted the very first advice Malick gave him before beginning the editing, an advice which Rezende says in this interview changed his approach to editing forever, and this attitude in essence reflects Malick’s creative process for this film and the attitude he has tried to spill over to the rest of the cast and crew he has worked with while making it (Keep in mind that there were five editors for this film, one after another over a period of two years of editing, and different cinematographers in different countries of shooting):

“I know you can edit this scene. But please show me what you'd never do with this scene. Let's try to find the opposite of what you plan to do. What you know is not interesting to me. I don't care if the movie does not please all audiences. But I want to give them a new cinematic experience.” - Malick

And a new cinematic experience he gave us alright!

I want to comment a little on the central themes of this movie. The most common interpretation of the film I’ve heard is that it’s Nature VERSUS Grace. And given the opening monologue by Mrs. O’Brien about the contrast between Way of Nature and Way of Grace, it’s almost tempting to believe it to be a versus-themed film, but I couldn’t distance myself from that opinion any further even if I tried. It wasn’t a Nature-versus-Grace story at all, but rather how Grace originates out of Nature. The long, mesmerizing visual scenes of the origins of the universe, and their cold and heartless feel, are not immediately contrasted with the birth of the O’Briens’ children and their joyous upbringing by their angelic, playful, loving mother and an equally loving yet domineering, authoritative father. There exists a transformation between the two sequences – that of the evolution of life from lifeless primeval soup to oceans bursting with life, from abiogenesis to biogenesis – where you can literally feel your emotional response transform from unsympathetic to sympathetic, as you watch the first images of a beating heart in a developing fetus, the first images of a predator dinosaur walking away from its wounded prey out of compassion for its suffering. In other words, Way of Grace is shown as being born out of Way of Nature; they are not two independent entities that are being contrasted but one entity taking birth from another and then vanishing back into the same (the scene towards the end where Earth is shown being blown to dust as the Sun expands into a supernova). Our place in the universe reduced to oblivion by one tiny puff of the Sun.

Search for our place in the universe is another recurring theme in the film, along with loss, bereavement, and deeply bonded sibling relationships. Mr. O’Brien is always on a quest to make a mark on the world, to become significant, to make his existence meaningful, while Mrs. O’Brien has already found that meaning in sharing love with her children in the brief time she gets to be with them on earth. The expressions of merrily joy on the faces of the three children when only their mother is around turn to fearful, blank expressions of forced respect when Mr. O’Brien enters the vicinity. This actually is one of the several ways in which Malick creates the mood pattern by fluctuating the emotions – by using alternating scenes of Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien’s spending time with their children. As a result, each scene feels like a distinct bubble of emotions and the entire film becomes a bubble bath – it’s all one big interconnected cluster of conjoined bubbles, but they are still not a continuum. This I personally feel is what distinguishes The Tree of Life from most other mainstream/conventional films.

Another thing worth noting is the apt title for the film. The evolutionary tale I talked about above is referenced in a very ingenious way in the film title: Tree of Life being the name biologists give to the evolutionary tree of life, referencing Nature, and Tree of Life also being the Biblical Tree of Life, referencing Grace.

When all is said and done, I thank the reclusive Mr. Terrence Malick for giving me this once-in-a-lifetime experience of watching something that is quite possibly the greatest film made when I was alive: A class never before achieved, and perhaps never will be. An ode to the potential and limitlessness of cinema, as eloquently expressed by David Lynch:

“Every medium is infinitely deep.” - DL

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Trivia 1: Zbigniew Preisner's Lacrimosa is a rendition of Mozart's Lacrimosa.
Trivia 2: Heath Ledger was supposed to play the role of Mr. O'Brien, but I have absolutely no complaints because Brad Pitt plays the character as honestly as and more powerfully than Ledger could have. This to me is by far Brad Pitt's best acting performance of his career.

Trivia 3: The intended irony that a film titled The Tree of Life actually begins with the death of a character. Hence, the title of this post.

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George Clooney's 100

Hokay so George Clooney, in a recent interview for his upcoming film The Ides of March, has published his list of the best 100 films from 1964-76, which some (excluding me) consider to be the Golden Age of Cinema. Excluding me because such pigeonholed classifications are usually based on blindspot biases, and every generation has its greats. Only ignorant/bigoted idiots would stoop to say that great filmmakers/artists have all perished.

The list.

The list has some really great titles, interspersed with some that are in my opinion junk yet highly overrated, and some lesser known gems. Those who use the IMDb Top 250 as a recommendation list should immediately identify the good titles in this list, so I'm going to recommend some from it that are NOT in IMDb Top 250 but are truly great films in their own right:

In order:

Deliverance (1972)
The Conversation (1974)
All The President’s Men (1976)
The Last Picture Show (1971)
The Blow Up (1966)
The Producers (1968)
The French Connection (1971)
Wait Until Dark (1967)
Marathon Man (1976)
MASH (1970)

Going to watch Badlands this weekend, and I might add that pending my response. And one very important and worthy film that's missing from Clooney's list is, of course, Barry Lyndon. Though not as popular as Kubrick's other endeavors, Barry Lyndon is a period masterpiece with Kubrick's signatures signed all over it, a paragon of artistic, dramatic and technical perfectionism he was known for.

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A dash of light-heartedness

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"Good evening, this is Orson Welles!"

Orson Welles has been dubbed many times with many titles: prodigy, unfathomable genius, creative genius, natural, greatest, &c. I couldn't agree more with all those titles, but I prefer to dub him with my own invention: Awesome Welles. The story of how Orson Welles became Orphan Welles at age 15 and Awesome Welles at age 25 and kept on going up and up the scale of awesomeness is long and, I hate to say, sad. Sad because he was considered too much of a genius (or to use their own term, "rebellious") for his time and had to struggle, despite all his inborn talent, to earn his bread. In fact, he used to act in other filmmaker's films and sell his inimitable voice to narrations and present himself in hack TV commercials (another) for only one reason: salary.

While there are many reasons for his lifelong poverty, both external and internal reasons as he himself was at least partly responsible for his poverty being bad as he was with managing money, this post is not about any of that. I am writing this specifically to (try to) express my inexpressible appreciation of one of his films, The Trial (1962), about which Welles said:

Say what you will, but The Trial is the best film I have ever made. I have never been so happy as when I made that film.

I'm not trying to write a review of the film (if need be of that, I refer you to a well-covered, 4-star-rated Roger Ebert review of The Trial, four stars being the highest he gives any film). Rather, I'll comment on the general character of the film and why it really is, as Welles said in the afore-quoted statement, the best film he ever made, along with, of course, Citizen Kane.


A brief history of how this film came to be: Citizen Kane is the first and the only film, up until the 70s, in which the director had been given absolute control over all aspects of the film. So much control, in fact, that even the producers and the studio people weren't allowed to see rushes or any part of the film until the final cut of the film came out, and when it did, even if they hated it, they couldn't do anything to it. Welles often said that that was the reason why Citizen Kane came out as good as it did, and since he was never given that kind of control again, he had put up a challenge: "Give me that kind of control again, and I'll give you a film better than Citizen Kane." The only other time he came close to it was with The Trial, where European producer Alexander Salkind offered him near-complete control except for small sections of score, which eventually did come out great anyway and Welles did not complain. Unfortunately, however, once the film was completed, it was not marketed the way Citizen Kane was and thus did not receive the same kind of attention and as a result has largely remained unseen by critics and public. Typical. The film eventually ended up in the public domain, which means no one can claim copyright to it and anyone can distribute it anywhere -- which has both pros and cons.

Anyhow...

The Trial is an adaptation of Kafka's surreal novella of the same name, and as someone accurately described it: "The film is a competition between Kafka and Welles, with Kafka coming second place." This is one of those rare gems of adaptation where the film outperforms the book.

The film makes you feel uncomfortable and disorientates you at every possible opportunity, and there's absolutely nothing the audience can feel safe about. It punishes you for watching it. It disorientates, makes you dizzy, psychologically upsets you, confuses even. It's cruel to the audience. But in that cruelty lies a strange sense of amazement and attraction that showcases the directorial potential of Orson Welles as truly deserving the title of the Greatest Director Ever, an undisputed master of mood. Welles himself appears in the small role of The Advocate -- a mean, harsh, overpowering character that he plays with such conviction that I can't help but place him into the same rank as Marlon Brando, which previous to watching The Trial I hadn't felt so strongly.

At the end of the opening pin-animated sequence Welles says, "Some have said this story has the logic of a dream...of a NIGHTMARE." It's impossible to say exactly what, after watching the film, made the entire thing feel so nightmarish. It was the totality and combination of everything in the film, of course, but it's impossible to consciously assess how all those factors come together into making it feel creepy and disturbing. There is nothing overtly creepy or disturbing about it, but Welles works so much on the subtlety of its nightmarish feel that only the emotions are transferred, not the inner workings of it. Given that Welles was an accomplished magician in real life, it only makes more sense that he would do something this brilliant without letting the audience in on how he is doing it. And Kafka cannot be given credit for its nightmare-like character, at least not entirely, because there have been numerous other adaptations of The Trial and none of them come even one-tenth close to the utter magnificence of Welles' impossible-to-emulate adaptation.

As for the plot line of the film: A man named Joseph K. is brought in for a courtroom trial without being made aware of the charges, and he and the audience struggle, in this surreal world he is surfing through, to find out what his charges are while at the same time he attends the trial and defends himself like he knows precisely what he is accused of: of being himself (Ebert's review has good exposition on this). And as is characteristic of surreal stories, interpretation is open to every member of the audience.

In a 1981 documentary/interview called Making The Trial, Welles in answer to a question said, "My vision of The Trial is not the same as Kafka's vision, and no director should ever find the need to stay true to the novel, because once adapted, it becomes your perspective, and hence, your story." I wholeheartedly agree. To me, The Trial is as much of a crowning glory in Orson Welles' oeuvre as Citizen Kane.
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And oh, before I forget, Anthony Perkins, who played the antagonist in Psycho, has put forth one of the best performances screen has ever seen, and his unsettling presentation of body language and dialogues is one of the things, I reckon, that makes this film like living through a nightmare. Perkins in Making The Trial stated that the high point of his life was having acted in an Orson Welles film, having been directed by Orson Welles.

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August: Movies

Harry Potter Part 7 Part 2 - 7/10
Being There - 8/10
The Lincoln Lawyer - 7/10
Super 8 - 4/10
Delhi Belly - 3/10
Horrible Bosses - 7/10
Limitless - 6/10
Sunset Blvd. - 8/10
Scream 4 - 7/10
Tootsie - 8/10
The Trial (1962) - 9/10
The Adjustment Bureau - 2/10
The Witness - 5/10
I Saw the Devil - 7/10
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly - 8/10
Taxi Driver (Extended Version) - 8.5/10
I Spit on Your Grave (Remake) - 6/10

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Writing impulses surface

So...I've been pretending to be busy for many a month now and nothing good has come out of it. Meanwhile, I've been suppressing my psychotic writing fits and avoiding thinking about any topic for more than 15 minutes. But, as it so often happens when you suppress urges, they manage to manifest as other behavioral aberrations: I've killed three hookers in the last month alone, and lost count of it before that.

And to spare those presumably innocent lives, I'll try and write something in a free-flow form, without much deliberate thinking.

As you've probably guessed, that part about killing hookers is rank bullshit. But I enjoy talking about bullshit, I enjoy seeing people bullshit, I enjoy psychoanalysing bullshit. Bullshit surrounds us as thickly and imperceptibly as the air we breathe. I don't mean bullshit in terms of lies, rather, as just idiotic shit we are better off being ignorant of. And one of those is the way people get you to open up, to spill the beans on something by guising themselves as pseudoacademic experts citing their own personal expertise. Now, to be fair, we are all psychologists. We all try to understand how people's minds work, and in doing so, understand our own. Having an understanding of the nature and attitude of people you interact with, and people in general, gives you an edge on manipulating them. But when the line between that understanding and the pretense of understanding begins to blur, you will end up shitting in the minds and lives of those you are attempting to manipulate.

Now, I feel an obligation to be specific. Remember, when you are down and out after life has completely fucked you over (we all have those moments, right?), a friend always very comfortingly tells you "talking helps, I'm here, you can share it with me"? That's bullshit. No, actually, it isn't total bullshit, because talking does help, but:
1. It comes with constraints.
2. The friend could:
a) Be genuinely trying to comfort you by letting you share your sorrow with them, or
b) Just be curious about your plight and is attempting to get you to open up. Morbid curiosity is part of us.

About the constraints: Talking about your situation or misfortune with someone helps only when the talking is done immediately post the misfortune, and the talking window is open only for a brief time period. I read about this in a Martin Seligman (a very respected, important and real psychologist, also the former President of American Psychological Association, elected by the widest margin in all the history of the association) book, so I'll get right down to the source:

Another widely believed theory, now become dogma, that also imprisons people in an embittered past is the hydraulics of emotion. This one was perpetrated by Freud and insinuated itself, without much serious questioning, into popular culture and academia alike. Emotional hydraulics is, in fact, the very meaning of "psychodynamics". Emotions are seen as forces inside a system closed by an impermeable membrane, like a balloon. If you do not allow yourself to express an emotion, it will squeeze its way out at some other point, usually as an undesirable symptom.

In the field of depression, dramatic falsification came by way of horrible example. Aaron Beck's invention of cognitive therapy, now the most widespread and effective talk therapy for depression, emerged from his disenchantment with the premise of emotional hydraulics. The crucial experience for Tim came in the late 1950s. He had completed his Freudian training and was assigned to do group therapy with depressives. Psychodynamics held that you could cure depression by getting them to open up about the past, and to ventilate cathartically about all the wounds and losses that they had suffered.

Tim found that there was no problem getting depressed people to re-air past wrongs and to dwell on them at length. The problem was that they often unraveled as they ventilated, and Tim could not find ways to ravel them up again. Occasionally this led to suicide attempts, some fatal. [...]

Anger is another domain in which the concept of emotional hydraulics was critically examined. America is a ventilationist society. We deem it honest, just, and even healthy to express our anger. So we shout, we protest, and we litigate. [...] If we don't express our rage, it will come out elsewhere - even more destructively, as in cardiac disease. But this theory turns out to be false; in fact, the reverse is true. Dwelling on trespass and the expression of anger produces more cardiac disease and more anger.

[...]

I want to suggest another way of looking at emotion that is more compatible with the evidence. Emotions, in my view, are indeed encapsulated by a membrane - but it is highly permeable and its name is "adaptation," as we saw in the last chapter. Remarkably, the evidence shows that when positive and negative events happen, there is a temporary burst of mood in the right direction. But usually over a short time, mood settles back into its set range. This tells us that emotions, left to themselves, will dissipate. Their energy seeps out through the membrane, and by "emotional osmosis" the person returns in time to his or her baseline condition. Expressed and dwelt upon, though, emotions multiply and imprison you in a vicious cycle of dealing fruitlessly with past wrongs.

The summed up point is, when shit happens, express it healthily to people close to you who you trust, express it soon after the incident and be done with it - that is of course assuming that you want to express it at all. If you wish to keep it a secret and not share it with anyone, freely abandon any fear that it'll outwardly manifest in other ways. As Seligman says, and he knows what he is saying, left to its own devices all those negative feelings will dissipate over time and will turn into nothing more than a faint memory of a bad incident. But dwelling over it, recollecting it to some curious bystander who is pretending to comfort you by claiming it'll make you feel good to talk about it or "blow out the steam" even long after the incident, is only going to make things from good to bad and bad to worse.

As I write all this, there's an avalanche of thoughts pouring into my mind over this topic, one particularly important (about the dangers and perils of reading psychology books by self-supposed "pop" psychology authors who do not have a formal training in psychology). And another important topic, a sort of online experiment if you will, I wanna cover about how easily we can be influenced by a cluster of similar opinions, but it's too much to write and I'll save it for another time.

So for now, over and out, goodnight!

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Coincidences

I've been a fan of the two Davids: David Foster Wallace (DFW) for a couple of years now, and David Lynch for longer. In the past year, my admiration for both these guys has escalated exponentially. Generally, I try not to admire the artist himself/herself and instead just constrain my admiration to the work alone. (This keeps me from creating any biases towards the artist or against another artist, the way those idiotic Sharukh Khan and Aamir Khan fanboys squabble over which of the two is the greatest human being ever in all of recorded history). But I'd be lying if I said it's not hard to not admire the Davids, especially when I'm reveling in the works of those artists to the point where I forget I'm having breakfast as I'm reading/watching the piece of work and lose myself in it body and soul until I have no brain space left to even think of the food plate on my table.

Just recently, I was reading an essay by DFW online, and as coincidences do so often happen, the opening sentence of the essay had me hooked like a fish to the bait:

This is not because of anything having to do with me or with the fact that I'm a fanatical David Lynch fan from way back, though I did make my pro-Lynch fanaticism known when the Asymmetrical (studio) people were trying to decide whether to let a writer onto the set.

One of the two artists I fanatically admire himself fanatically admires the other of the two.

It's a small, strange postmodern world.

(The essay, on going back and reading the title which I usually skip, was about DFW's experience of visiting the shooting set of Lynch's Lost Highway, the number 4 film on my all-time favorite films list. Can be accessed here. The subtitle reads: "In which novelist David Foster Wallace visits the set of David Lynch's new movie and finds the director both grandly admirable and sort of nuts.")

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