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Burning the Past

Saturday 15 June 2019

We sit around the small fire, burning Nana’s and Papa’s old documents. Nana hated — hated — clutter of every kind, but she was something of a hoarder in one sense: she kept all receipts and bills, neatly organized, filed away discretely. Had the IRS ever audited one of their returns, the auditor would have faced a mountain of evidence through which to sort. So as Papa downsizes, we have to get rid of stuff. And truth be told, there is no reason to keep tax returns and receipts from, say, 2006.

The Boy is eager to start the fire. He’s as fascinated with fire as anyone, I suppose, and the act of setting something ablaze, of doing something so otherwise forbidden, makes him almost literally shake with excitement. Once the fire gets going, we pile on some bigger pieces of wood. Tonight, we’re burning the remains of our broken swing as we talk about getting a new swing to replace it, all the time wadding paper and tossing it onto the fire.

Occasionally, a bit of glowing paper lifts out of the fire pit and wanders around indecisively in the hot up-drafts from the flames. The Boy stands on guard, ready to hunt down and stomp out any glowing bits of almost-flaming paper. Truth be told, it rained so much last week and the week before, and it’s been so relatively cool that I doubt there’s much of a hazard at all, but the Boy enjoys the responsibility.

After the last of the fire dies down, Papa and I watch a movie as K gets the Boy in bed. Conspiracy is one of those movies that sounds like it shouldn’t be as moving as it is: it’s literally set for 95% of the film in a single room, with about sixteen men sitting around a table talking. But it’s what they’re discussing that makes the film so moving and horrific: it’s the Wannsee conference during which Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann disclose and explain to those present the plan for the use of gas chambers to eradicate the Jews from Europe and eventually the planet. Kenneth Branagh plays Heydrich, and as always, he’s absolutely brilliant. He manages simultaneously to smile and seeth at the same moment.

Tron

Thursday 7 August 2014

It looks dated now, but when I first saw Disney’s Tron at age ten, I was blown away. I didn’t really notice the Pac Man embedded in the control screen, though. Those guys at Disney — silly, silly.

tron_pacman

Maria

Thursday 9 May 2013

“How do you find a word that means ‘Maria’?” the nuns ask early in Sound of Music. Showing that she might understand it a little better than I initially would have thought, the Girl calls her own name in response.

Motion

Friday 29 July 2011

Those things which we take most for granted are usually the same things that we could not do without. It’s the paradox of familiarity: we sometimes say nastiness to those we love the most because familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least laziness: we assume there will always be time for amends. We go from day to day assuming that the last words we say to our wife, daughter, parents that day won’t be the last words. We take for granted that we’ll wake up in the morning and be able to start, if not afresh, certainly again.

The alarm clock chirps and without thinking of the miracle unfolding in front of us, we casually slide our arm from under the sheet and smack another seven minutes of silence out of the clock. When we finally pull ourselves out of bed, an entire ballet of muscular motion has made it possible to sit up on the edge of the bed and rub our eyes in an attempt to smear the last bits of drowsiness away. A yawn is an engineering marvel that goes unappreciated, and lacing our shoes is as complicated as any dance.

Certainly that which we waste the most of is that which we can never replenish: time. We waste it as if our present moment were eternity, as if we were some kind of god, able to alter time and space and make an endless loop of tomorrows. Of all the meaningful things I could do with my time on a Friday night, for example, why do I sit and troll YouTube videos or play chess? “One day I will take all the photos and memories I have of Poland and write a book,” I promise myself continually, yet there’s always a caveat: “But not tonight. Tonight, I just want to relax,” and I load chess.com and drive myself to frustration over a silly game.

These three are related: the ability to move freely and the time to do so allows us to place our bodies in nearest proximity to those who mean the most to us. With few exceptions, these freedoms are universal, even in the most repressive regimes. It’s rare that something takes them away, at once, in a flash. It is necessarily an act of aggression, an imprisonment, a forcible, irresistible subjection of one’s will to the will of another.

Sometimes we imprison ourselves through misplaced priorities. We watch YouTube videos when there are more productive goals; we go to a class instead of attending our daughter’s performance; we rush conversations with our parents because some trifle is more important at the moment.

Occasionally, though, we’re blessed: something shakes us out of our assumption that that which we have now will never change and is therefore not worth cherishing fully at this moment. It might be something we experience that shakes us, that turns our head around, that lifts us for a moment to see where we stand and forces us to appreciate the view, regardless of what it might be.

Usually, though, it’s a vicarious glimpse of someone else’s experience, and often it’s an experience that we find ourselves wondering whether we could endure it, much less profit from it in any way. Watching The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (or reading it, I would assume–something that’s now a high priority) is just such an experience. French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, almost completely paralyzed by a massive stroke, wrote the entire book by blinking his left eye, the only part of his body that he could move. Claude Mendibil recited the letters of the French alphabet in order of their frequency, and Bauby blinked his left eye when he heard the next letter of the word he wanted to dictate. “E S A I T N R U L O” began Mendibil again and again until Bauby dictated, letter by letter, the entire text of the memoir he composed and edited in his head. That alone says more than most could in a lifetime of babbling.

It is, in short, a film all should see.

Putting the “Scat” back into “Eschatology”

Tuesday 18 August 2009

There are movies out there that are so awful that you just have to recommend them to your friends. Like the old Saturday Night Live sketch in which Chris Farley has everyone trying the rancid milk and rubbing his clammy belly, there are some evils that we simply must share to appreciate.

The Omega Code is one of them. Without a doubt, it is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, yet one film everyone should endure just to see how bad a movie can be.

There is nothing redeeming about this film, and that’s its perverse charm. The acting is awful, sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold, most times just not there; the script is pathetic, ranging from faux Elizabethan nonsense to middle school scribblings; the special effects are neither special nor effective; the cinematography is along the lines of “put the camcorder there and hit the red button”; the soundtrack has all the subtlety of a mix prepared by an eight grader who’s just discovered Carl Orff; the direction lacks any whatsoever; the costumes are late-eighties high school drama club quality.

If someone sat down to plan a worse movie, it would be tough to top this one.

A look at the production credits brings everything into focus, though. TBN Films, as in “Trinity Broadcast Network”–Paul Crouch’s network. Writing credits include Hal Lindsey as a consultant for biblical prophecy.

A-ha! It’s not the film itself that’s important, but the ideology behind it. In short, it’s propaganda portraying the soon-coming end of the world according to a certain fundamentalist Christian interpretation of the Bible.As a bizarre aside, there is a bizarre theological menage a trios involved in this film that is about as dumbfounding as the film itself. Both Casper Van Dien and Michael Ironside play in The Omega Code and Starship Troopers. Troopers, in turn, was directed by Paul Verhoeven, who was a fellow of the notorious Jesus Seminar, the ultimate liberal theologians club, hated and scorned by Crouch’s TBN. Talk about working with directors of diverging views!

Michael York plays Stone Alexander, “beloved media mogul turned political dynamo,” whose rise to power is never explained. Within a few minutes of the film, however, he’s “named chairman of the European Union,” developed “an inexpensive, high-nutrient wafer that can sustain an active person for more than a day and a revolutionary form of ocean desalination that will bring life-giving water to the driest of deserts,” and won the “United Nations Humanitarian award.”

And there you have it, folks: if you haven’t figured it out already, Alexander is going to set himself up as the miracle working Beast prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

Initially, “motivational guru Gillen Lane,” played (or rather, played at) by Casper Van Dien, joins forces with Alexander in an effort to make a cliche difference in the world. He soon realizes the evil of Alexander’s true aims and becomes determined to stop him.

Lane's talk show entrance
Lane’s talk show entrance

In the meantime, though, he has some of the choicest moments of the film, often serving up the lines that other characters hang themselves with. For example, Lane suggests that, in order to motivate people, Alexander needs to be someone “to rally behind,” an “archetypal figure to embody the message.” His ultimate suggestion, after mention Martin Luther King and Gandhi, is “a new Caesar,” to which Alexander memorably replies,

Oh, no, no! No, not Caesar! Why man, he’d have to stride the narrow world like a colossus, and we petty men walk beneath his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves. Oh, no! No, I’m not that ambitious.

Yes, your sophomore English serves you well–Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene ii.

"Why man, he’d have to stride the narrow world like a colossus, and we petty men walk beneath his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves"
“Why man, he’d have to stride the narrow world like a colossus, and we petty men walk beneath his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves”

Is this an attempt at high-brow script writing, or is it York improvising, flexing his theatrical muscle, so to speak? I’m not sure which alternative is more frightening.

Yet as the film progresses through the second half, it gets worse. Or better. Or both, if you’re a masochist.

Some examples: Alexander develops technology that “neutralizes” nuclear weapons, unites the world into a single government, with a single-currency, rebuilds Solomon’s Temple, and literally comes back from the dead.

5-Fullscreen capture 12262013 122052 PM
“Gentlemen, we all know the rules to Risk.”

Gillen Lane’s close friend Sen. Jack Thompson, played by George Coe (The Mighty Ducks, Bustin’ Loose), laments,

I don’t know anything about visions. I never had one. But I know about marriage. And I know about family. And I know the worth of a real man will show in the countenance of his wife’s face.

" I know the worth of a real man will show in the countenance of his wife’s face"
” I know the worth of a real man will show in the countenance of his wife’s face”

The director, Robert Marcarelli, introduces bizarre attempts at plot twisting which, to anyone really thinking during the film, are inexplicable plot complications. Characters faced with immanent danger react with increasingly baffling shortsightedness. And most puzzling, the relationship between the purported Bible code (the crisscross, three-dimensional code supposedly hidden in the Torah, a la Jewish Kabbalah) and Biblical prophecy is never explained, though it seems clear to everyone in the film.

This is perhaps the film’s most confusing point. The waters get muddied right at the film’s opening, when Lane, who also has “a doctorate in both world religion and mythology from Cambridge,” is interviewed on a talk show by Cassandra Barashe, played by Catherine Oxenberg.

Barashe: In addition to your many other accomplishments, you seem to be an expert on the Bible code. […] Explain to our audience what this Bible code is, and how it works.
Lane: Well, crisscrossing the Torah is a code of hidden words and phrases that not only reveals our past and present, but foretells our future. […] Most amazingly, in the Book of Daniel, an angel tells him to seal up the book until the end of days. But Rostenburg[, an expert on the Bible code,] may have found the key to unlock it. See, he believed that the Bible was actually a holographic computer program and that instead of two dimensions, it should be studied in three. If this could be achieved, the code would actually feed us prophecies of our coming future. Anyway, the reason I discuss this in my book is because what we want to believe as religion really traces back to myths born out of our collective consciousness.
Barashe: Has anyone raised the question of how people like yourself can believe in these hidden codes within the Bible, and yet not in the Bible itself?
Lane: You mean like, “Jesus loves me, this I know [Looks at the audience with skeptically raised eyebrows], for the Bible [Air quotes, returning his gaze to Barashe] tells me so?” [Looks at the audience as they laugh at his wittiness]
Barashe: Yes, exactly.
Lane: My mother used to sing me that song. But you know what? She died in a tragic car accident when I was ten years old, and I finally realized that her faith in this loving God, her truth, was just a myth. Therefore, myth must be truth.

"We are the higher power!" to applause in middle America
“We are the higher power!” Lane proclaims, to applause in middle America. Highly realistic.

This kind of twisted logic is the basis for the film and snakes its way throughout the whole script. The Beast rises to power by following the secret codes of the Bible, yet we’ve all been warned of it in the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation, as other characters make clear. We’re left wondering, “If it was supposed to be so clear to us mere mortals, why did Satan–and that’s really who Michael York’s Stone Alexander is, a possessed megalomaniac–need the secret Bible code to figure out how to bring it all to fruition?”

That’s a question that not only does the film not answer, but it doesn’t even realize it raises it. I suspect this confusion between code and prophecy arises from TBN’s effort to get “real prophecy” into a mass marketed, main-steam film. The popularity of Michael Dorsnin’s The Bible Code and similar books seems to have gotten the writers at TBN to thinking, “Hey, we can use this as a springboard into the Bible’s real code: prophecy!” As a result, it’s a mess.

As a whole, the biggest flaw of The Omega Code is its earnestness. Films usually don’t take themselves as seriously as The Omega Code does, for it not only depicts but is a battle against the wiles of the devil. Yet what the cast and crew end up making, instead of the Biblically-based, thought-provoking thriller they think they’re working on, is a B-movie, and the absolute worst kind: an accidental B-movie. Its “B” status slipped up unawares, probably just a few moments behind the initial idea was taken seriously by all involved.

Even if the film were made in earnest but intelligently, it wouldn’t be so bad. But not only are we dealing with an awfully written script, but we’re also enduring characters who are simply stupid. They scribble “bug” on a legal pad to let one another know a room is wired, then proceed to talk in hushed stage whispers that no known listening device can detect. They run for their lives, literally the most wanted individual on the planet, then start ranting about visions they’re having when they finally find someone who’ll help them.

What kind?
What kind?

God bless them all, but they’re freaking idiots, each and every one!

The clear stupidity of the characters lets us sigh in relief, though. In the end, their idiocy transforms the film into a hopeful vision for the future, because if Revelation’s Beast turns out to be half as dimwitted as any one of the characters in this film, there’s hope for humanity.

Unless he starts producing films.

Kanał

Tuesday 22 May 2007

Only a Pole could make a movie like Kanał (Canal, 1956). Such resigned nihilism can only arise from a country that has literally both ceased to exist (the Partitions) and been razed completely (Poland 1939-1940).

The second in Andzrej Wajda’s trilogy about World War II, Kanał tells the story soldiers in the Polish Home Army who were encircled by Germans during the last days of the Warsaw Uprising. Ordered to retreat, the 44 soldiers try to escape via the sewer system. Most of the film takes place in that most unimaginably horrid location: encircled by the enemy above, surrounded literally by s— below.

While at first glance Kanał seems to be a film about Poles resisting the Nazis, it’s equally — if not more — a critique of the lack of Soviet intervention during the Warsaw Uprising. The common Polish view is that the Soviet army camped out on the eastern bank of the Vistula and did little if anything to help the Polish soldiers. Some historians, it seems, dispute that account, but having lived in Poland and married a Pole, I am partial to the Polish view (and, generally speaking, the majority view, I believe). In that sense, it’s a minor miracle that the film made it past the censors, as it not only lacks a show of communist brotherhood but even hints at the opposite.

Certainly not a movie for simply “kicking back,” but well worth viewing.

Breakfast with Audrey

Thursday 27 July 2006

We watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s last night — first time for me.

When Paul gets out of the cab in his first appearance, I could only think of one thing: Henry Mancini directing a mellow arrangement of the A-Team theme…

The Omega Code

Saturday 14 January 2006

There are movies out there that are so awful that you just have to recommend them to your friends. Like the old Saturday Night Live sketch in which Chris Farley has everyone trying the rancid milk and rubbing his clammy belly, there are some evils that we simply must share to appreciate.

The Omega Code is one of them. Without a doubt, it is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, yet one film everyone should endure just to see how bad a movie can be.

There is nothing redeeming about this film, and that’s its perverse charm. The acting is awful, sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold, most times just not there; the script is pathetic, ranging from faux Elizabethan nonsense to middle school scribblings; the special effects are neither special nor effective; the cinematography is along the lines of “put the camcorder there and hit the red button”; the soundtrack has all the subtlety of a mix prepared by an eight grader who’s just discovered Carl Orff; the direction lacks any whatsoever; the costumes are late-eighties high school drama club quality.

If someone sat down to plan a worse movie, it would be tough to top this one.

A look at the production credits brings everything into focus, though. TBN Films, as in “Trinity Broadcast Network”–Paul Crouch’s network. Writing credits include Hal Lindsey as a consultant for biblical prophecy.

A-ha! It’s not the film itself that’s important, but the ideology behind it. In short, it’s propaganda portraying the soon-coming end of the world according to a certain fundamentalist Christian interpretation of the Bible.

As a bizarre aside, there is a bizarre theological menage a trios involved in this film that is about as dumbfounding as the film itself. Both Casper Van Dien and Michael Ironside play in The Omega Code and Starship Troopers. Troopers, in turn, was directed by Paul Verhoeven, who was a fellow of the notorious Jesus Seminar, the ultimate liberal theologians club, hated and scorned by Crouch’s TBN. Talk about working with directors of diverging views!

Michael York plays Stone Alexander, “beloved media mogul turned political dynamo,” whose rise to power is never explained. Within a few minutes of the film, however, he’s “named chairman of the European Union,” developed “an inexpensive, high-nutrient wafer that can sustain an active person for more than a day and a revolutionary form of ocean desalination that will bring life-giving water to the driest of deserts,” and won the “United Nations Humanitarian award.”

And there you have it, folks: if you haven’t figured it out already, Alexander is going to set himself up as the miracle-working Beast prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

Initially, “motivational guru Gillen Lane,” played (or rather, played at) by Casper Van Dien, joins forces with Alexander in an effort to make a cliche difference in the world. He soon realizes the evil of Alexander’s true aims and becomes determined to stop him.

Lane's talk show entrance
Lane’s talk show entrance

In the meantime, though, he has some of the choicest moments of the film, often serving up the lines that other characters hang themselves with. For example, Lane suggests that, in order to motivate people, Alexander needs to be someone “to rally behind,” an “archetypal figure to embody the message.” His ultimate suggestion, after mention Martin Luther King and Gandhi, is “a new Caesar,” to which Alexander memorably replies,

Oh, no, no! No, not Caesar! Why man, he’d have to stride the narrow world like a colossus, and we petty men walk beneath his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves. Oh, no! No, I’m not that ambitious.

Yes, your sophomore English serves you well–Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene ii.

"Why man, he’d have to stride the narrow world like a colossus, and we petty men walk beneath his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves"
“Why man, he’d have to stride the narrow world like a colossus, and we petty men walk beneath his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves”

Is this an attempt at high-brow script writing, or is it York improvising, flexing his theatrical muscle, so to speak? I’m not sure which alternative is more frightening.

Yet as the film progresses through the second half, it gets worse. Or better. Or both, if you’re a masochist.

Some examples: Alexander develops technology that “neutralizes” nuclear weapons, unites the world into a single government, with a single-currency, rebuilds Solomon’s Temple, and literally comes back from the dead.

5-Fullscreen capture 12262013 122052 PM
“Gentlemen, we all know the rules to Risk.”

Gillen Lane’s close friend Sen. Jack Thompson, played by George Coe (The Mighty Ducks, Bustin’ Loose), laments,

I don’t know anything about visions. I never had one. But I know about marriage. And I know about family. And I know the worth of a real man will show in the countenance of his wife’s face.

" I know the worth of a real man will show in the countenance of his wife’s face"
” I know the worth of a real man will show in the countenance of his wife’s face”

The director, Robert Marcarelli, introduces bizarre attempts at plot twisting which, to anyone really thinking during the film, are inexplicable plot complications. Characters faced with immanent danger react with increasingly baffling shortsightedness. And most puzzling, the relationship between the purported Bible code (the crisscross, three-dimensional code supposedly hidden in the Torah, a la Jewish Kabbalah) and Biblical prophecy is never explained, though it seems clear to everyone in the film.

This is perhaps the film’s most confusing point. The waters get muddied right at the film’s opening, when Lane, who also has “a doctorate in both world religion and mythology from Cambridge,” is interviewed on a talk show by Cassandra Barashe, played by Catherine Oxenberg.

Barashe: In addition to your many other accomplishments, you seem to be an expert on the Bible code. […] Explain to our audience what this Bible code is, and how it works.
Lane: Well, crisscrossing the Torah is a code of hidden words and phrases that not only reveals our past and present, but foretells our future. […] Most amazingly, in the Book of Daniel, an angel tells him to seal up the book until the end of days. But Rostenburg[, an expert on the Bible code,] may have found the key to unlock it. See, he believed that the Bible was actually a holographic computer program and that instead of two dimensions, it should be studied in three. If this could be achieved, the code would actually feed us prophecies of our coming future. Anyway, the reason I discuss this in my book is because what we want to believe as religion really traces back to myths born out of our collective consciousness.
Barashe: Has anyone raised the question of how people like yourself can believe in these hidden codes within the Bible, and yet not in the Bible itself?
Lane: You mean like, “Jesus loves me, this I know [Looks at the audience with skeptically raised eyebrows], for the Bible [Air quotes, returning his gaze to Barashe] tells me so?” [Looks at the audience as they laugh at his wittiness]
Barashe: Yes, exactly.
Lane: My mother used to sing me that song. But you know what? She died in a tragic car accident when I was ten years old, and I finally realized that her faith in this loving God, her truth, was just a myth. Therefore, myth must be truth.

"We are the higher power!" to applause in middle America
“We are the higher power!” Lane proclaims, to applause in middle America. Highly realistic.

This kind of twisted logic is the basis for the film and snakes its way throughout the whole script. The Beast rises to power by following the secret codes of the Bible, yet we’ve all been warned of it in the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Revelation, as other characters make clear. We’re left wondering, “If it was supposed to be so clear to us mere mortals, why did Satan–and that’s really who Michael York’s Stone Alexander is, a possessed megalomaniac–need the secret Bible code to figure out how to bring it all to fruition?”

That’s a question that not only does the film not answer, but it doesn’t even realize it raises it. I suspect this confusion between code and prophecy arises from TBN’s effort to get “real prophecy” into a mass marketed, main-steam film. The popularity of Michael Dorsnin’s The Bible Code and similar books seems to have gotten the writers at TBN to thinking, “Hey, we can use this as a springboard into the Bible’s real code: prophecy!” As a result, it’s a mess.

As a whole, the biggest flaw of The Omega Code is its earnestness. Films usually don’t take themselves as seriously as The Omega Code does, for it not only depicts but is a battle against the wiles of the devil. Yet what the cast and crew end up making, instead of the Biblically-based, thought-provoking thriller they think they’re working on, is a B-movie, and the absolute worst kind: an accidental B-movie. It’s “B” status slipped up unawares, probably just a few moments behind the initial idea was taken seriously by all involved.

Even if the film were made in earnest but intelligently, it wouldn’t be so bad. But not only are we dealing with an awfully written script, but we’re also enduring characters who are simply stupid. They scribble “bug” on a legal pad to let one another know a room’s wired, then proceed to talk in hushed stage whispers that no known listening device can detect. They run for their lives, literally the most wanted individual on the planet, then start ranting about visions they’re having when they finally find someone who’ll help them.

What kind?
What kind?

God bless them all, but they’re freaking idiots, each and every one!

The clear stupidity of the characters lets us sigh in relief, though. In the end, their idiocy transforms the film into a hopeful vision for the future, because if Revelation’s Beast turns out to be half as dimwitted as any one of the characters in this film, there’s hope for humanity.

Unless he starts producing films.

Substandards

Wednesday 12 October 2005

Yesterday evening Kinga and I watched Człowiek z Marmuru  (“Man of Marble”), something of a 70’s Polish Citizen Kane, directed by Andrzej Wajda. I decided to watch it with the subtitles on, with the thought of possibly reviewing it for Anvil and Sprocket, a friend’s film review site.

I was horrified, though, at the pathetic translation for the subtitles. I would say no more than sixty-five to seventy percent of what was said was actually translated. The subtitles were more a summary of the dialogue than the dialogue itself. So many subtleties were completely dropped as a result that some of the more interesting characters in the film were simply flat, boring characters. If I didn’t know Polish, I would have said, “Oh, it’s okay.” But it’s not just “okay.” It’s a brilliant film, which does lose a bit of momentum at the end and Krystyna Janda does over-act a bit here and there. Still, the idea is solid – a Polish Citizen Kane that tracks the rise and fall of master mason Mateusz Birkut, a humble man who becomes a symbol of Polish Communist labor through propaganda films. It is one of the most accessible films for non-Poles, for there is a lot that depends on an intimate knowledge of Polish culture. But if you don’t know the language and rely on the subtitles, it is significantly diminished.

It got me to thinking about the art of subtitles. You certainly can’t write everything the characters say, for no one could read that fast and keep up with what the visual aspect of the film – which is, after all, somewhat important in film! And yet, you have to leave enough in to round out characters, else you get a film with flat characters.