MOVIES - Kingdom of Heaven

Score: 6.2

After reading up on this movie, I feel a little jilted. Apparently there is a 49-minute longer director’s cut version, wherein Ridley Scott’s more ambitious film-making is given further time to flounder or flourish. However, having seen just the standard theatrical release, I have to state that this movie largely flounders.

Shoddy characterization, cringe-worthy dialogue, poor acting (Bloom is especially guilty, though Liam Neeson seems to be growing more limited the more I see of him), and historical inaccuracies are simply too much to beat back the great action shots, good cinematography and score, good acting (Edward Norton was in that movie? WTF?), and a decent attempt at trying to connect with (and possibly ease?) Islamic-Christian tensions in the present day by looking to the past.

Perhaps that is the easiest and most direct place to discuss the merits and weaknesses of the film. Through some rather blatant dialogue symbolism, Scott sets up Jerusalem as more or less what Western audiences perceive it to be to this day: a place of mystical powers and history, which, it is perceived, many millions are willing to kill to obtain in order to achieve their lofty (and completely misguided) sense of heaven. Scott’s own view of that heaven quickly comes out however, as a mystical place that exists only in our heads and the only purpose of which is to serve as a sounding board for the epitome of whatever ideology we are under the sway of. Balian, Orlando Bloom’s character, gives a speech near the end of the film that advocates a completely secular understanding of God, worship, and the Crusades as a whole. To many people I think this is a big bone of contention, and rightfully so. Could the horrors of war turn even the most devout of medieval believers into some form of atheists? Absolutely. Did it turn men like Balian into such atheists? No. Firmly insulated by nobility, political power, and a fierce investment in the power represented by the Catholic clergy, leaders like that of Orlando Bloom’s character would never have advocated a 21^st century view of equal-but-different faiths, and that is just the biggest of all the historical fuck-ups of the movie. If, as Scott seems to have advocated, the movie was designed as an examination of religious conflict, his examination is both topical and completely unilluminating. The “we can all get along if we just understand we’re all human” approach is true, but none of the people in this movie, historically (or if their characters are imposed on the leaders of today), are secular humanists, and as much as it pulls at my bleeding heart strings, an impassioned plea for us all to abandon religion is not going to solve the problem and bring about the typical Hollywood ending this movie concludes with. It wouldn’t have in the past, and it won’t now. It’s really superficial proselytizing, and as much as I love left-leaning Hollywood for presenting this stuff, there are better ways of doing it. Check out Brokeback Mountain.

Still, for all the historical mistakes, there is a degree that his analysis of the possible peace between faiths (actively at war then, undoubtedly at tension with one another on a number of topics now) is useful, if not tastefully done. The very idea of touching a Crusade movie in our current religious climate is ballsy, if nothing else, and it’s not like Scott placed machine guns or suicide bombers in the movie in some messed up form – he kept it firmly within the limitations of the time period, and he deserves credit for it.

Other criticisms quickly have to come up though. Another one at the forefront is the simple sensation one gets, in watching the movie, that Scott bit off more than he could chew. There are too many characters, too little exposition, and too few major plot events to make up for it. For an example – rather than leaving Saladin as an enemy without back-story or conflict (which might have actually worked better for the movie, leaving only the final meeting between Balian and Saladin to show the Muslim character’s compassion and willingness to compromise – a far stronger showing, and one the actor likely would have been up to), needless scenes depicting an apparent conflict between him and one of his advisors are shown, the totality of which lead to nothing. Perhaps in the extra 49 minutes more is fleshed out, but I don’t see how it would be enough. In reaching for the epic scope, writer and director both missed the fine balance between personable and expansive. You sort of get the one, but the other is just a mish-mash of overly simplistic and mildly conflicted motives.

Besides story and plot however, there are several positives to the film. Much like The Painted Veil most of them revolve around the more technical aspects. For recreating Jerusalem in the Moroccan desert, the crew should be applauded. The special effects are good, and the action scenes are both more believable, better filmed, and just plain cooler than the ones in say, King Arthur. As much as I may deride Orlando Bloom’s acting, he has the swagger to control action flicks like few other. It’s too bad this movie wasn’t trying to be one.

Unlike The Painted Veil though, the acting wasn’t uniformly good or bad, with strong and weak points throughout, and the shots weren’t as uniformly beautiful or intriguing either – never once did I think to myself, “Wow, that was pretty cool how they did that.” It’s pretty prototypical filming, and it works for some things, for most, it well, flounders.

MOVIES - The Painted Veil

Score: 7.3

This is a beautifully shot movie with a quite horrible script. And that about sums it up. From the opening few shots, through to the end, the camera and lighting work is exquisite - all the details are illuminated, the play between shadow and light is immaculate, the scenery is the character that constantly dominates every shot, and the landscapes are simply mesmerizing to a prototypical Western viewer who has never been to the Chinese countryside (myself included). Unfortunately, the landscape is too big a character in this novel-come-movie, which would have sufficed in far easier times as a parable play. As it stands it's merely a set of really great shots, with some decent acting but relatively little characterization.

Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh, but considering Edward Norton's character declares his love for Naomi Watts after dancing a single time with her (which the audience isn't even privy to), you can tell this isn't a story big on back-story or character development. It's merely taking cliches (the simple but beautiful woman and the intelligent but not so good with women scientist) and thrusting them onto a backdrop where they have yet to be fully played out - Colonial China in the 1920's, with Cholera to boot. The tale of love, betrayal and reconciliation is trite and predictable to the last (I predicted the final scene involving flowers after witnessing its counterpart in the beginning fifteen minutes), but serviceable. The dialogue is merely atrocious, without a hint of following the old adage "Show, don't tell." The word "love" comes up so often it makes me wince. Rather than showing the two characters fall in and out of love, the director and writer were satisfied to have the character's talk about falling in and out of love with each other. The few times it even achieves a decent parlance into this manner of story-telling, it is still the camera that is doing the work (Edward Norton's watching Naomi Watts undress was particularly telling). The topical dips into anti-colonialism are pretty weak as well, seemingly thrown in for the purpose of... well actually I can't tell the purpose, other than to provide some background to the time period for western viewers I suppose.

Still, in many respects it is a good film - the soundtrack delivers, the backdrop is adequately epic, and the acting is still heartfelt, even if the stars, or anyone else really, was given rather little to work with. For me though, it's just a little too light on the things that could have catapaulted it into a great film, and when you have all these other pieces in play (like an obviously talented director and cinematography team) it's really inexcusable.

MUSIC - Motown Classics: Gold

Score: 9.8

Holy crap what a collection. Usually when I'm listening to two CD's worth of various artists, there isn't a whole lot of good stuff to say. Quality varies so much from artist to artist, from time to time for each artist, and the huge changes in sound that usually come with anything that spans fifteen years is often too much to take in, even if quality isn't an issue.

But for the 13 years covered here, Motown was at its best, and America knew it. The Temptations, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder (I didn't even know he performed when he was young enough to be labeled "Young Stevie Wonder"), The Jackson 5, Four Tops, etc. These were huge names singing hugely popular songs, and they were all doing so under the guidance of Motown records. These songs have had such an impact on popular culture that I recognized half of them without having ever "heard" them before, on their own, as music. That means they were used in TV, movies, in shopping malls, or were simply relics of my parents' meagre music collection in the 80s which I mostly blocked out. These are great pop songs, without any doubt.

The more critical part of me wants to question the ingenuity of such mass-produced tracks (the HDH songwriting team apparently wrote 25 number one hits, as many as Lennon-McCartney, which is itself simply amazing) and the artistic "integrity" of the artists who performed them, but I simply can't. I don't care that every song was in 4/4 time, or that few of the artists wrote their own material, or that certain tropes were repeated time and time again; all I care about is hearing another tune, because I know it will be good. That this collection just scratches the surface of most of these artists (all of whom brought special touches to the songs, and delivered them with a professionalism and soul rarely heard amongst the pop stars of today) makes me happy, because I know there are more songs (perhaps not of the same quality, but probably not far off) just waiting to be discovered and rediscovered. I'm sold, I love Motown.

U.S. Economy.

Score: 2.8

Headlines like the one for this: "Dow jumps more than 250 points after prior day's big drop" make me even more scared every day that the United States is headed into a huge recession, possibly even a Depression (yes with a capital D). Nobody knows what the economy is doing, quite obviously. The fact that the DOW hasn't fallen much more significantly than it has is evidence of only one thing in my mind: the true effects of the housing bubble, the war in Iraq, job losses, oil and other commodity prices, and any number of other smaller forces, have not yet been felt properly in the market. With Bush's massive tax cuts, America is in the best consumer position in its postwar history (in terms of imagined disposable income) yet the Fed and Whitehouse seem to think "economic stimulus" (ie. quicker tax refunds, lower taxes, etc.) will somehow create income in middle class households. It won't. Wages have simply not matched inflation, good-paying jobs have disappeared due to globalization, and the credit crunch may soon mean a prime rate nearing 0. All this to avoid a recession that was brought on by stupidity all around. The people who didn't predict the housing bubble and the GDP contraction that is on its way, are the same people that are causing huge fluctuations in the day-to-day stock markets. In other words, the people who have no idea what's going on, but are trying to predict it anyways. I have little faith.

BOOKS - War and Peace

Score: 9.1

The title in the least is a cliché to end all clichés, a testament to the ability of a simple phrase to create, and conjure within each person who glimpses it, an indefinable aura of pathos and epic. I mean, just think of a world without War and Peace. It just can’t exist (which is kind of Tolstoy’s point, but we’ll get to that later). Sooner or later someone was going to come up with the two great contrasts of the multitudes in our era of the nation-state, and novelize it with as much force and devotion as Confucius’ philosophized it thousands of years earlier before nation was even a distant science-fiction-esque thought. That Tolstoy did it first, and did it in the manner that has shaped our understanding of that titular phrase, isn’t surprising given his knack for epic, large-scale stories. Like War and Peace’s 1400-page marathon, Anna Karenina is no overly-long novella, and neither will ever be mistaken for the product of an imagination with a short attention span. Indeed, above everything else, the novel is best remembered for its sheer size: spanning two decades, three generations, and the largest war then known to mankind, Tolstoy’s vision was enormous; of course the pathos of the title arises not from millions clashing against millions, but from our seemingly instinctive knowledge that the monstrosity of the title gains it’s gravitas merely in the individual lives that are caught in the midst of the two extremes - it is there that Tolstoy focuses and ultimately falters.

“Falters?” You say. How can War and Peace, a book which I myself have just devoted a rather languid paragraph extolling the virtues and cultural/linguistic impact of, falter in any respect? It is literature qua literature, the end-all and archetype of nearly everything that has come before it. It is faultless, beautiful, eloquent, vast, and timeless. Much of this understanding of the novel is true, and much of it is false.

Take timelessness for example. Sure, the core elements of love, live, death, strife, politics and power, war, and peace, are all present in the book, and all front and centre as they should be. Yet Tolstoy’s understanding of all these things, and even their minuatae, are ultimately very dated. The central love relationship between Pierre Bezuhov and Natasha Rostov, for example, ultimately winds up as merely another Victorian-ideal relationship of subservience and domestication of the female spirit, even though there is no way the character of Natasha (which, up until the last sixth or so of the book, is one of the most vivacious and promising women I’ve read) could in any reality succumb to such domestication. While I’m a big proponent in the idea that socialization plays a huge role in our personalities and the abilities of our personalities to change, there’s a certain level at which a personality simply is: and Natasha’s sudden change to domestic queen is nothing but contemporary wish-fulfillment in the characteristically narrow view of femininity. That Tolstoy himself viewed his own wife’s domestic care as the epitome of love, seems to mean that he translated such love to be universally desired and attainable, by both sexes, throughout war and peace. Such domestication is clearly unsuitable to many people in this day and age, and as such, timeless goes out the window.

Similarly in terms of its effect on literature. While early proto-Modern writers may have borrowed heavily from Tolstoy, his rather limited play in terms of format, style, diction, etc. are nothing compared to say Joyce’s Ulysses (which, admittedly, I am currently reading) which was written a mere fifty years later, and his heavily realist based fiction is light-years distant from the post-modern world of a JPod or a Warrior Woman. Rather than the halberdier of future literature, War and Peace is more the undertaker of its past. In the following years the Dickensian tropes, the beautiful, sentence-long paragraphs that describe the most ornate of details, all the assurance that arose from having a single viewpoint and being absolutely sure that viewpoint was correct (ie. Before God died), largely vanished.

“But,” you exclaim, “this is a contemporary reading of a novel that cannot be read as such. Allowances must be made, the base and superstructure (and the ideology therein) have changed dramatically, human psychology has adapted, the world is not the same!” And such an exclamation is true. But it simply doesn’t matter. It’s not that Tolstoy is a complete failure at touching the deeper cores of the points he is reaching for, it’s that he shies away from them when they naturally arise.

Take, for example, the climax. It is not, as may be thought, the fall of the French army, or Pierre’s marriage to Natasha, or Prince Andrei’s death. Instead it comes at a crossroads between the two extremes of the novel, wherein a wounded Prince Andrei looks upon his rival and foil Anatole Kuragin, who is suffering horrendously in a field hospital alongside Andrei. To understand the moment, you need to know only that the two are foils, and that Kuragin stole Andrei’s fiancé Natasha Rostov (see above), prompting a great amount of subliminal hatred between the two. Yet in that single moment, Andrei views Kuragin screaming in sheer agony, in a quiet, peaceful din in the midst of a field of war, and feels not hatred, or pity, but the indescribable understanding that Anatole Kuragin is human just the same as Andrei himself, and as such his actions were necessitated by nature just as much as were Andrei’s, or Napoleon’s, or anyone else’s. Gone is any sort of trivial emotion in the face of overwhelming understanding, an understanding of human existence that cuts through all sense of culture or socialization, and shoots straight to the essence of being. Within the novel it is expressed in a clearly Christian display of God, but its power is agnostic, and means one thing to all people, regardless of who reads it. This is the climax in that it ties in directly, on both a character and plot level, with Tolstoy’s thesis within the novel – the destruction of free will as a viable metaphysical notion.

To think that versions of the book were made wherein Tolstoy’s rather long-winded philosophical tracts were removed completely from the body of the novel is simply disappointing. Tolstoy’s one gigantic tract throughout War and Peace is to show how the minute and tiny pieces of human and natural interaction combine to form the sweeping forces that, so clearly to Tolstoy, pushed the national forces which formed the central conflict of 1812. This point of view, whether Hegelian or a much firmer determinist point of view, isn’t completely fleshed out at any point, but is merely taken for fact, and all the characters, actions, and events of the book play out with this point of view narrating and controlling each step along the way. That view leaves no room for freedom, and Tolstoy’s long, final essay concerning the appearance of free will is a well argued one that concludes only in the very last paragraph, wherein Tolstoy pleads for human beings everywhere to merely accept that they are not free, and accept their dependence on fate.

Such a thesis is obviously a touchy subject, and one’s acceptance of Tolstoy’s vision will largely be decided on whether they agree on this singular subject. Since I personally agree with Tolstoy, I find it his saving grace, the one point at which he truly does achieve timelessness. So don’t take it wrong, this is not a negative review. Whereas much of his narrative is what I would now consider flawed, I can accept and appreciate the contemporary reading of his novel; I can see how his eloquence could be mistaken for perfection, or how his near exact control and understanding of his characters could be mislabeled as an understanding of sheer reality. Without doubt there are many things Tolstoy does admirably if not perfectly in this work, but he lacks the post-modern understanding of equality of being that shines through so much clearer in a Toni Morrison or Don DeLillo novel. Though it means that this review itself will ultimately be very dated, I cannot help but wonder what someone with Tolstoy’s abilities and vision could accomplish were they born in the current world, wherein they would experience the entire totality of human life, from its smallest most beautiful forms (which Tolstoy all-too-often ignores for his characters of nobility and privilege) to its most horrifying depths (which he actually does a fairly good job of describing). Such a modern novel would be even longer than War and Peace, filled with the internet, nuclear fears, media censure, Kid A, Black History Month, third world sweatshops, Brokeback Mountain and millions of other things on top of the millions Tolstoy himself dealt with in his time. Yet such a book would be much closer to the one thing Tolstoy obviously sought to connect with most radically in his narrative of human life: the truth.