Here’s a clever commercial, fitting for this site. It cracked me up. The dude looks like Marcel Marceau on growth hormones and steroids. Those wacky Germans and their subtle humor.
Mr. W
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Category Archives: film
I Am Legend
I Am Legend is the third film adaptation of a Richard Matheson novel of the same name. The 1954 novel is credited with being the first work of fiction involving zombies. In the book, a bacterial pandemic has spread through 1970’s Los Angeles. The only survivors have turned into zombie vampires. And only the protagonist has remained human. The expression, I Am Legend, arises from a realization by the protagonist that vampires have become the norm for humankind, and he has become the legend.
The 2007 iteration of the story interprets the expression in a different way. Instead of a realization that humans have changed and that the hero has become a creature of myth, the hero has become a legend because he may have saved humans from the disease. In the movie, instead of a bacteria, the pandemic arises from a virus that had mutated from a cancer cure. This seems to match our contemporary fears of viruses from HIV and the avian flu, as well as a hopelessness against cancer.
The two previous film versions of the novel similarly mirrored the fears of their times. In The Last Man on Earth (1964), a plague spread from nuclear war. And in The Omega Man (1971), biological war between the Soviets and China was the cause of widespread death and mutation.
I wonder what the 80’s and 90’s versions of the movie would blame as the source of the mutation. I imagine the 80’s version would have a plague of poverty that would produce money-grubbing zombies in nice suits, infecting others with their greed. The 90’s movie would have a heavy wave of ennui turning people into mindless slackers.
But back to the movie. The music-less silence of the empty New York streets was both eerily menacing and beautifully serene. I’ve always wondered how a city might return to a natural state. So the lions, the deer and the cornfields that dotted the cityscape was visually arresting. The best scenes were when Will Smith, as Robert Neville, and his dog, were wandering the streets together.
I watched both endings of the movie and wasn’t satisfied with either of them. In one, sacrifice leading to hope in a colony of non-mutants in Vermont (the hippie East Coast version of Oregon) was too transparently Hollywood. Even in a movie where basically the only character is Black, the Black man dies, just as in 90% of all horror or action movies. But at least he’s doing it heroically. For the survival of the human race. So that’s nice. To be fair though, in all the other movie versions, Neville is killed.
In the alternate ending, the alpha mutant, a relentlessly cunning adversary, tries to communicate that all he really wants is his mutant girlfriend back. Neville had previously captured her for experiments. And so Neville realizes that there is some kind of humanity in this new race of rabid, hyperventilating, flesh-eating humans. It was chillingly poignant to see the wall of pictures of all the other mutants that Neville had captured and experimented on and had subsequently died in his lab. Perhaps he was the monstrous predator and the mutants were just trying to survive. But the way it was done was complete nonsense. The alpha mutant went from a growling expression of pure violence to a wide-eyed pitiable victim making impressions of butterflies with his hands.
Still, I enjoyed this movie very much. The zombies were made to have a modicum of intelligence which made them more compelling. Will Smith is always a pleasure to watch, and he carried the movie as the sole actor for most of the film. The Bob Marley references were also nice touches. Best of all was the vision of a deserted New York, creeping back towards a natural state.
Rooftop, My Favorite Soap Opera Character
The Trickster
Of all the archetypes that Carl Jung wrote about, and later Joseph Campbell outlined in his masterpiece of myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, I most identified with the trickster. This might be why April Fool’s Day is my favorite holiday. It’s also my dear friend, Jerry McGill’s birthday.
Fittingly, Jerry has all the tools of a contemporary trickster. He is an accomplished writer, film maker, actor, dancer, comedian, singer, and teacher. And he does these exceedingly well. He’s also a snake charmer, a womanizer, and most tragically a Knicks fan. He truly is a renaissance man of the arts, the modern day trickster. Lost in the shuffle of his kaleidoscopic identity is the fact that he’s quadriplegic. After a few minutes with him though, it’s the one part of him that becomes quickly irrelevant.
I first met Jerry in our local YMCA. Like all great friendships it began with neither of us having a favorable impression of each other. With his brash New York demeanor, I thought he was kind of a cocky jock. He thought I was aloof and arrogant. It turned out that he actually is a cocky jock. And as for myself, I really wasn’t the paragon of humility. So we never talked in the gym. Then one evening, after one of my dance performances, I saw that he and his girlfriend had attended. I didn’t realize he was a lover of the arts and an artist himself. As fellow performers, we quickly bonded.
A Fellow Dancer
I later learned that before he was shot in the back during a random drive-by shooting, he himself was a promising dancer. Out of hundreds of inner-city kids, he was one of 3 who successfully auditioned to apprentice with the Eliot Feld Ballet, a big-time contemporary dance company.
Being in a wheelchair didn’t stop him from dancing, however. Eugene, Oregon, where we lived, was and is the center of a dance organization called DanceAbility, a project inviting dancers with and without disabilities to dance together. Jerry called up the director, Alito Alessi, and said, “Hey, I’m Black and I’m in a wheelchair. You got any scholarships for someone like me?” Alito laughed and invited him to the workshops. Like every other organization and project he’s been a part of, he became an integral leading member of DanceAbility.
Shouting from the Rooftop
Jerry’s main art though has been acting and filmmaking. We still tease him about his stint on The Guiding Light, an American television soap opera, in which he played a character named Rooftop. After realizing he could actually act, thus making the other actors look bad, the writers eventually killed off his character. Most recently he was cast as a homeless camp landlord in Conversations with God. While the movie was widely panned, his performance was repeatedly singled out as one of the few bright spots in the movie.
Throughout the years, he’s produced some of his own short films. If I remember correctly, That Summer of Purple is a charming romance about a cynical New Yorker who goes to a small town in the Northwest and gets involved with a single mother and her kid. His latest project, Gwendolyn, is about a transvestite cabaret singer, with Jerry as the sequined lead.
The Teacher
These days, after years of teaching theater workshops for inner-city kids, working at a homeless shelter for teens, and as a counselor for Mobility International, he’s getting his Masters in Education so he can teach in public schools. “I’ve always loved working with young people. It’s kind of in my blood. We seem to get along well.”
Jerry’s connection with kids led us to collaborate on a children’s theater troupe, performing music and slapstick. Once, when performing to hyperactive hippie children, the kids were so excited that they rushed the stage and mobbed us. Good times.
The Scrabble Nemesis
After years of being friends, it had never occurred to me to ask him how he ended up in his wheelchair. We worked out together, went to bars, smoked cigars, caroused around town, sang karaoke, and had one very contentious Scrabble game during which we almost came to blows. Seriously. We laugh about this now, but after a moment of laughing we would both be still a little pissed off about it, and would go back to arguing over the words in contention.
Through it all, the only time Jerry’s wheelchair was an issue was when me and one of our other friends argued over who got to sit with him courtside in the wheelchair section, during basketball games, and in the sweet, spacious wheelchair booth during football games.
It wasn’t until a book came out that I thought about what Jerry had gone through in his life. One of his childhood friends, Dalton Conley, wrote a memoir titled, Honky, about his experience as a White kid growing up in a Black neighborhood. Jerry, as Dalton’s best friend, figures prominently in the book, as a bright-eyed, sparkling, charismatic personality, exuding promise. Conley traces their friendship until Jerry got shot, after which Jerry was hospitalized, and Conley’s parents ended their experiment in living in the projects.
After reading this book, an excellent sociological autobiography by the way, I understood something about his stubbornness, which must have helped him to get through all the trauma, the surgeries, the radical adjustments in lifestyle. At the same time I recognized the talented trickster, the kid with the sparkly eyes, which must have been even more important to just stay in love with life, to create art out of experience.
When we’re out and about, people he doesn’t know often come up to him and tell him what an inspiration he is. I don’t know if this annoys him, but he’s always gracious with well-meaning strangers. Maybe he is inspirational. But it’s not because he’s in a wheelchair. It’s because he’s fulfilling his promise as an artist, taking the role and the lines that were given to him and stealing the show.
Babel
In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, all the people of the earth lived in one place and spoke one language. They formed a great civilization and thus they felt that they were as good as God. So, aspiring to be divine themselves, they began building a colossal tower that would reach heaven and God. God didn’t take too kindly to this kind of arrogance so the people of Babel were made to speak different languages. Thus, people were no longer able to communicate with each other and construction of the tower ceased. Thereafter, people spread out all over the world, forming nations and tribes with those they could communicate with.
Babel, the movie, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and written by Guillermo Arriaga, is a meditation on the difficulty and tragedy of intercultural communication. The movie is filmed in English, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Berber and Sign Language, with bits of French. Since I watched a Japanese version of the DVD there were no English subtitles. I watched the movie only able to understand the English. Having grown up in Southern California I was able to pick up some of the Spanish and living in Japan now I was able to catch smatterings of the Japanese. But otherwise, it truly was Babel to me.
Yet, it didn’t matter. I was able to understand the general meanings of what the characters were saying and follow the narrative fairly closely. After the movie, I checked online for a synopsis to make sure my perception was true and it surprisingly was close to what I “heard”.
The film is set in four countries: Japan, Morocco, Mexico and the U.S. And it involves the story of four intertwined stories. Previous Iñárritu/Arriaga movies also followed this conceit, with events and choices made by one character affecting another and so on. Babel is the least focused of these of films. Amores Perros, the first of their trilogy, is a tightly wound cinematic masterpiece set in Mexico City. 21 Grams is an excruciatingly cathartic follow-up. Babel though just as challenging and finely crafted, is just not as satisfying. The Japanese story, though mesmerizing, is the most tangential, while the other three story lines abrasively cleaved to each other.
Like their other films, Babel’s narrative jumps back and forth in time and only by the end does the viewer comprehend the timeline, the choices and the consequences.
The story can be followed through a Winchester rifle. It was given by a Japanese hunter/tourist to his guide in Morocco. Then it was sold to another Moroccan family of goat herders. It was accidentally fired by one of the sons, hitting an American tourist. Because of the medical emergency, the American’s children back in San Diego had to be taken care of longer than expected by their Mexican nanny. However, the nanny has to attend her son’s wedding in Mexico, so she takes the children over the border.
Each choice leads to both tragedy and redemption. But it’s mostly tragedy for the Moroccans and the Mexicans, and redemption for the Americans and the Japanese. The American couple grow closer through their harrowing experience, and the Japanese father and daughter learn to grieve together. Meanwhile, the Mexican nanny, soulfully played by Adriana Barraza, loses her livelihood and home, while the Moroccan family loses a son. Perhaps this is a parable on how bad choices disproportionately effect people from developing countries, while those of us in the developed countries are more insulated.
Even with such heavyweights as Brad Pitt and my favorite actress, the ethereal Cate Blanchett, the lesser known performers stole the show. Both Barraza and Rinko Kikuchi, who played the deaf Japanese schoolgirl were nominated for many awards. (Click on the picture on the right for an interesting article on how these two actresses first met, since they never met during the filming.) But the actors who played the Moroccan father and his two sons were also compelling.
I was troubled by what I felt was unneeded nudity by Kikuchi. At times I felt I was watching some cheesy fantasy stereotype of a horny Japanese schoolgirl trapped in a scene from Basic Instinct. Much to her credit, Kikuchi portrayed the character as a complex teenager who was struggling with her sense of low self-worth and how it was enmeshed in her emerging sexuality. One could argue that the nudity and overt sexuality was necessary to convey her vulnerability. But Kikuchi did a fine job of doing that with just the expressions on her face. If anything the casual titillation distracted away from the emotional force of the performance.
I can’t say I fully recommend the movie. It’s not a comfortable moviegoing experience. Although it was a valiant attempt to expand the trilogy onto a global scale, for a casual moviegoer, you’re better off with Amores Perros.
The Notebook
It’s said that one of the best ways to rid yourself of toxins is to empty your tear ducts. Crying, like laughing, is a healing act. To reach your quota of lacrimation, or tearing, I recommend The Notebook. The movie appears to be standard poor boy meets rich girl. And that’s partly true of this movie. Social pressures eventually push them apart in a heartbreaking scene. You can predict what happens by the end. Do they get back together? Well, of course they do. It’s Hollywood and that’s just the way it is.
Still, there’s a twist to it all and you can see it coming a mile away. But it doesn’t matter. This film is designed for maximum lacrimation. It’s best not to fight it.
The cast is stellar, with all kinds of little gems of performances from the supporting cast, from the easy rural elegance of Sam Shepard, the heartbroken charm of James Marsden, and the poignant regret of Joan Allen. It’s an idealized world, where everyone has good intentions, of a pre-Civil Rights South where black folks and white folks play banjo on the porch together, and a blue-collar single parent makes his son recite Walt Whitman to cure him of stuttering.
Rachel McAdams shines in the starring role. But James Garner and Gena Rowlands steal the show as the couple in their twilight years, as Rowlands’ character deals with Alzheimer’s and Garner’s character patiently tries to remind her of their love.
Usually a Hollywood love story ends with a couple at the beginning of a relationship. Rarely does it reflect on the well-worn love story from the perspective of a shared life-long love.
