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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On the importance of variety

I'm sure you've all heard of and read - to nauseating levels in pop culture, sometimes - the saying that "variety is the spice of life." I'm sure at least some of you have read nerdlikejazzy's recent viral blogpost '18 Things I Wish Someone Would’ve Told Me at 18,' point number 4 of which elaborates on "exploring new ideas and opportunities often." In this post, which in all likelihood will be my last one for the next 6 months owing to my busy schedule, I'll add a few points to support the imperative of varied experiences in life. Don't worry, I'm not gonna get into any heavy-handed, pseudophilosophical discussions about the meaning of life or the "painful journey" we call life. I'll try and work it out from a scientific perspective only and skim the surface of the scientific basis that substantiates the claim.

The American psychologist Fred Attneave writes about the human brain:

"If there were just one brain cell to cope with each image that we can distinguish in all its presentations, the volume of the brain would have to be measured in cubic light years."

Meaning that there is just a tiny bit of information (information as in an image) that can be stored in and processed by one brain cell, and since we come across literally infinite images (well not literally!) each waking moment of our lives, each human brain would have to be the size of a galaxy to be able to successfully process all the images (or other information) we see at any given time, all the time. But we know this isn't true, since we know how big our brains really are - anywhere from the size of a coconut, for most of us, to the size of a peanut, for some people like Arindam Chaudhuri and his disciples. Despite the size that is really required of the brain to process information, our brain does it with extraordinary precision using a size that is only a billionth of what is required. How so, though?

The brain has a workaround trick to solve this, discovered independently in the 1950s by Barlow and Attneave. It has evolved a very sophisticated and complex system of erasing redundancy. Redundancy is the opposite of information; redundancy is a measure of unsurprisingness, information a measure of surprisingness. To illustrate this with an analogy, imagine what a worthless waste of paper it would be if the newspapers reported every single day that the sun rose in the east that day. It's redundant information, and everyone knows without being reminded that the sun rises in the east everyday. However, in the unlikely event that the sun rises in the west on a fateful day, that would be something of a news to report. That is a change from the daily routine of sun's rising in the east, and newspapers will not fail to report it the following day. The information content of it would be high, measured as the 'surprise value' of the message. The brain works in a very similar way, regardless of the body sense to which it is responding or the memory it is storing, as there is only a limited number of neurons for the brain to work with. In fact, the entire nervous system works this way. I'll explore two examples, of senses in particular.

The eye. Suppose you are looking at a black rectangle on a white background. The whole scene is projected on to your retina - you can think of the retina as a screen covered with a dense carpet of tiny photocells, the rods and cones. In theory, each photocell could report to the brain the exact state of the light falling upon it. But the scene we are looking at is massively redundant. Cells registering black are overwhelmingly likely to be surrounded by other cells registering black. Cells registering white are nearly all surrounded by other white-signalling cells. The important exceptions are cells on edges. Those on the white side of an edge signal white themselves and so do their neighbours that sit further into the white area. But their neighbours on the other side are in the black area. Using a phenomenon called 'lateral inhibition,' the brain can reconstruct the whole scene with just the retinal cells on edges firing. There is a massive savings in nerve impulses. The eye tells the brain only about edges and the brain fills in the boring bits between. Once again, redundancy is removed and only information gets through. Any image you see, including these words as you read as well as of anything else that is laying by your computer, is reconstructed in your brain through this same process of inhibition of redundancy.

You can see this lateral inhibition in action in this optical illusion below. Cover the central divide between the two shades of grey with your index finger and stare at your finger for a few seconds. Now both sides appear to be made of the same shade of grey, or very nearly the same. Now move your finger off the screen, and the difference between the shade drastically increases. Can you reason why?

The ear. Hearing, all audible sounds as analogous to images, works very similar to the eye as described above: by cutting down on the redundancy in the pitch of the sound, filtering in only the information about the variation in pitch, and then the brain processing and reconstructing the sound - all in real time. But with sound, there is an additional factor: of time itself. To explain just how dramatically the brain filters out redundancy, let me cite this study conducted by researchers at Rice University. Two groups of subjects were made to listen to two sound pieces respectively. The first sound, given to the first group, was of constant pitch whereas the second sound, given to the second group, was of varying pitch. The groups were not told of the duration of the sound they were listening to, and none of them had clocks or watches or any other way of measuring time. After both groups finished listening to the sounds, when asked to guess the duration of the sound piece they just listened to, all the subjects of the first group (the constant-pitch group) reported a duration that was much less than the duration reported by the subjects of the second group - despite the fact that both sound pieces were of the exact same duration! The first group subjects' brains not only cut down on the redundancy of constant pitch but also reduced the subjective perception of time that was associated with the redundant information. The second group subjects' brains, however, because of the variation in pitch and thus more 'surprise content,' were able to store not only more information about the sound but also more of the overall time associated with it.

Where I am going with all these illustrations and citations should be clear at this point. The reason why four years of college feel like four months is because of the same reason that the brain remembers a constant-pitch sound to be shorter than it is: repetitive, routine tasks are compacted by the brain into just a few, typical, representative prototypes and stored into memory locations where the subjective perception of time is also cut short in accordance with those compressed memories, thereby filtering out not only the redundancies of the experience but also much of the perception of time that the experience is made of. This essentially is the same way our brain retains boiled-down memories over an entire lifetime.

So, to counter this seeming 'drawback' in the design of our brain, to keep life from feeling short-lived and having passed in a flash, to avoid the perception of time having flown like an arrow, it's most advisable to have different kinds of varied experiences that the brain can perceive as information or 'surprise content', to try new things if only for the sake of the feel, to break the patterns of tedious, recurrent routine that come off as redundant, and also to collect as many photos, videos and souvenirs of the experience - because remember this: there's only so much the brain can remember.

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Glimpses of genius

The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it. This is the way of people. Suddenly ask what’s wrong and whether they open up and spill their guts or deny it and pretend you’re off, they’ll think you’re perceptive and understanding. They’ll either be grateful, or they’ll be frightened and avoid you from then on. Both reactions have their uses, as we’ll get to. You can play it either way. This works over 90 percent of the time.

-The Pale King, pages 17-18, David Foster Wallace

Trivia: While googling a sentence from this paragraph to find the rest of it and thus save the effort and time in typing it out for this blog post, I discovered that dozens of other bloggers have blogged this exact same quote! (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3 , and many more...)

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Source Code: A Review, or a Review of a Review

Under peer pressure or with sly secondary intentions, I’m being made to write this review by the two other, equally worthless assholes (Rohan & Himanshu) I watched this film with yesterday at the movies. I civilly oblige.

So, yeah. First things first. Unlike them both, who thought this film didn’t live up to the hype (what with all the raving reviews and a 90% rating at Rotten Tomatoes that gave Inception an appropriate 75%), I thought it way surpassed the hype. Actually, leaving popular hype where it belongs (in the shitbucket), Source Code surpassed my own expectations of Duncan Jones whose directorial debut, Moon, being awesome and everything, had me looking forward to his next project for about a year now. And having now seen this piece of celluloid masterpiece, I’m looking more forward to his next project, Mute, than I did for this.

OK, my personal raving aside, time for that which is implicitly promised when I review: Less discussing and more diss-cuss-ing. Source Code is as bad a title for a film as it is for the sci-fi invention used in the film. Source code, as all you proper, would-be and engineer of sorts know, is a generic term for the text part of a computer program. To name your biggest, game-changing technological creation as Source Code makes me question your judgment as well your credentials as a PhD who can tap into the residual consciousness of the dead. Additionally, naming your film by a dry, common software engineering terminology can have anyone – engineers and non-engineers alike – assume or even judge before actually watching it as most do that it’s a computerish or softwarish or geekish film – none it could be any further from. Use some creativity, of which you are evidently brimful, while naming your films for future reference, Jones.

And now the Holy Grail of film critiquing: Masand ki pasand. To put it in simple terms, Masand’s one review of Source Code has more insights and penetrating observations, and a rating that is objectively accurate to the fifth decimal, than the planetary congregation of insights of all those who saw the film, made the film and wrote the screenplay. His unnatural eloquence and insightfulness are on display in what he aptly calls Masand’s Verdict (seriously, why call it anything else when it is exactly that – a verdict, not a review), as can be seen in this exemplary concluding statement of his Source Code verdict: "It’s not perfect." Oh man, what a bummer! It’s not perfect!

Masand’s ideal definition of a perfect film is Avatar, which he gave a singular 5/5 despite acknowledging, using his remarkable I’ve-seen-more-films-than-you-duh power of dissection, that the plot was so predictable as to numb your mind like anesthesia.

In his infinite wisdom, Masand also suggests that Inception lovers and dopers should go watch Source Code. At the risk of being exiled into oblivion for disagreeing with His Insightfulness’ suggestion, I recommend you suspend any expectations of seeing an Inception or some other pop film in this and watch it with a blank-slate preconception plate. When the movie ends and the titles roll and you realize it’s not another Inception or Déjà Vu, you are more likely than not to feel let down. Every film has its inspirations and aspirations from past films – regardless of how original it superficially appears – but to cite those films as a ruler to weigh this film against and to give false ideas of what to expect would lead to despair when the film fails to meet your expectations or goes in a different direction altogether. So put simply, let the film thrill you in its own right.

But yes, both Chris Nolan and Duncan Jones – besides hailing from England, bah! – have similar philosophy at filmmaking, though to varying degrees. Like Nolan, Jones doesn't patronize the audience by either spoon-feeding the story or preaching moral lessons at them. While much is presented visually comprehensibly, he does leave at least some aspect of the story to our imagination and lets us work out why this or that happened by following the clues here and there. He did that in Moon and he does it in SC as well in the much-discussed ending, and he does it so efficiently that the audience feel immensely rewarded when they figure out the why post gestating the questions. However, more important than these intellectual puzzles, and this is the hallmark of a good director, he packs and transforms the whole story into an engaging emotional medium that connects the screen to the audience and lets the drama, the action, the compassion for the characters and the progression of mood flow. He does this consistently for the stretch of the film, and at no point did I feel “left out” or disconnected; I was involved in it; I had lost myself in it. This sadly doesn’t happen with most films I watch.

That, however, is not to say it was all sentimental goo. Far, far from it – subtlety is the key. If there is any director who can pull off a happy ending without making it repulsively cloying (refer: Rajkumar Hirani’s brilliant, amazing, soul-bonding, generation-defining body of work that is saturated with didactic moral chapters on the "right way to do things"), it is Duncan Jones. He has decidedly become an object of envy for me, and I hope to God it stays that way!

8.5/10. Yeah!

Note:
1. Anish Kapoor’s famous sculpture Cloud Gate is featured towards the end of the film – partly chosen for its reflective features, mirror reflection being an important plot device in this film, and partly for artistic purposes.
2. Michelle Monaghan is very cute, damn it!
3. If you do not grasp the answer to the lingering question that’s on everyone’s mind at the end of the film, read this explanation below (not mine). But read only after you watch it – contains spoilers, even the very reading of the question.



SPOILER ALERT:

Q. How does Colter survive longer than 8 minutes in the final transfer to the train bomb scene in the end?

A. Colter's consciousness is sent from his body attached to the source machine in the starting universe to Sean's body in the newly created parallel universe each time source code is "started". When Sean's body is killed in the parallel universe, Colter's consciousness is returned to his body in the starting universe (because of the link via source code). Even if Sean's body isn't killed, Colter's consciousness is still returned to his body in the starting universe, and Sean regains/resumes possession of his own body in the parallel universe. Once Colter's consciousness returns to the starting universe, the source code team then interrogate his conciousness (via the computer terminal) to find out what Colter has learned and then send him to another parallel universe, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat until they get the information they need.

When Colter is sent to a new parallel universe for the final time by Goodwin, he is able to defuse the bomb and arrest the bomber within 8 minutes and gets prepared for the last kiss of his life just at the end of 8 minutes. When Goodwin in the original universe switches off Colter's life support at the end of 8 minutes, she has terminated Colter's body, but his consciousness is in the final parallel universe. By switching off Colter's life support she has severed Colter's link to his body and he is forever trapped in Sean's body in the final parallel universe (which is what he suspected and wanted to happen). When Colter/Sean dies (presumably of old age) in the final parallel universe, only then will Colter's consciousness finally die.

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My Latest Pet Peeve

Another in a long line of my pet peeves, the phrase “open to/beyond criticism” has really started to tick me off. I’d first come across the term “beyond criticism” in the context of Oprah endorsing a book into her elite class of Oprah Book Club (does she have anything in her life whose title doesn't contain her name in it, that self-indulgent, narcissistic bitch?), and I didn’t give it much thought back then for reasons I can neither recall nor, if could recall, justify. But with the increasing frequency of this term in print – used often by critics and reviewers of literary, cultural, religious and political phenomena – my peeve detector has finally rung the alarm.

Since I came across this phrase exclusively in literary context, I’ll stick to what I know. Calling a book or some other work of literature as beyond criticism categorically submits that any opinion or point of view that opposes the established awesomeness of the work can be either discredited because the (insecure) majority who pushed it past the unsafe zone of criticism disagree with it, or restricted from being uttered altogether. Now, “open to criticism” can superficially come off as a critically superior term that, as it manifestly suggests, opens the book to criticism and allows novelty and variety of opinions to be expressed unlike the other phrase; but really, it is just an elastic extension of ‘beyond criticism’ that when let free returns back to the intolerant connotations of its base phrase, ‘beyond/above criticism.’ Being ‘open to criticism’ insinuates that it can also, at some time in the future and with sufficient consensus attained, reach the point of being ‘closed to criticism’ – just a fancy way of saying it is now beyond criticism. Well, fuck that! A phrase which fundamentally grants any work of art that privilege is illiberal and despicable in equal measure. At what point, may I ask, does a work go from being ‘open to criticism’ to ‘beyond criticism’? In my book, never. As long as I am alive, no book ever written is above or beyond or closed to criticism!

This pet peeve, however, as I mentioned earlier, is highly context-specific. I have no qualms with this phrase being used in a few other areas of human affairs, such as science. That earth goes around the sun and not the other way around is above and beyond criticism, and that evolution is true hasn’t been open to criticism for well over a century and a half now.

I want to go on about how blinkered we Indians are about other people’s outlook towards something that is different from our own and how closed we make our objects of praise to criticism. But that could, true to our Indian form, make this into a pissing contest and flame war, so I’ll conclude the pet peeve with my original intention of just expressing the peeve, and nothing more.

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