Garden 0207
Dazed and Confused (1993, USA)
It must be a generational thing that Dazed and Confused avoided me to the extent that I ever heard of it. It looks like a cult movie for either those who graduated high school around 1993 (when the movie was made) or for those who graduated around 1976, the era the movie is set. Neither was my era a I graduated right between in 1986. Not to mention that I did in Hungary, where high schools in general, but the one I went to in particular (as it was a somewhat “elite” school) provided different social milieu compared to what was depicted here. The jocks, the drugs, the hazings, the central role of sports, the cliques – I didn’t experience any of these, although I am sure some of these elements of teen culture were present in my native country too.
On the other hand the more general themes are the same everywhere, struggling with hormones, wanting to party all the time, wanting to impress the others, budding love, using the newly acquired knowledge pieces and piecing them together to new patterns to look smarter, learning to handle relationships, the primeval appreciation of music and attributing more significance to it than other age groups do. These are definitely things I could and did relate to. It could have been my story. And that is one key to its success.
The other is to have a great cast. The funniest aspect of the movie for me was to see actors I knew only as their slightly older selves, from later movies such as Adam Goldberg (the Hebrew Hammer), Milla Jovovich (The Fifth Element), Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, Joey Lauren Adams (Chasing Amy) and many more. Watching this movie after I had seen them in later works was like peaking into their own high school. I wanted to keep remind myself that this was just a movie. After a while I gave up as I was having way too much fun.
The film @ IMDB. (Summary from there: The adventures of incoming high school and junior high students on the last day of school, in May of 1976.)
Sabar: My father’s paradise (2008)
Couple of weekends ago I went to Los Angeles for a family event. It’s a five hundred miles drive, so bit of a trek. It happened to be there that I started to read Ariel Sabar’s My father’s paradise, a son’s search for his Jewish past in Kurdish Iraq.” The first chapters of the book are set in Los Angeles (where the author grew up), while most of it is thousands of miles away, in the mountains of Iraq, where his ancestors, including his grandparents grew up and In Israel, where his father grew up after the age of 12. I liked this kind of coincidence, me being in Los Angeles, because it helped me immerse myself into the book.
If the objective of reading is being transferred with the help of imagination to distant places, one would never go then this book reached its goal. I have a vivid picture now how life in the town of Zakho in the Kurdish part of Iraq, at the beginning of the 20th century might have been. That picture includes the peaceful coexistence and respect of Jews and Muslim and the few Christians. It also includes the use of Neo-Aramaic, a main focus of the book. That’s the language of the Jews, who lived there since exiled from Eretz Yisrael two thousand years ago. That’s also the language that the author’s father became the researcher, professor and preserver of. We learn a great deal about the language as that’s one of the central features that kept the Kurdish Jews unique during their long exile. Since they were lifted an masse to Israel in the early 1950’s the younger generations lost the language, just like most of second and third generations immigrants n any country. Thus Yona Sabar, the linguist father, is fighting against time to save as much of it as possible.
The book is usually described as part history, part biography and part memoir. These are all true, although the opinions are divided about the value and quality of the latter. The New York times suggest that the “obsessively self-analyzing his dissonant relationship with his father” is a drawback. I thought it was an important element of the book as the guilt derived from this tension rove the author to write the book the first place. It’s true that this was not the most exciting part, because others worked through this kind of distrait already, in a more literally valuable way, but it didn’t disturb me.
Reading the book made me think that I might the person who is distant yet close enough to my own father’s generation to write his (hi)story. It is a different story, but worth preserving.
Infestation (2009, USA)
With the exception of the actor playing the protagonist I didn’t know anybody in “Infestation“. Even he, Chris Marquette, was just vaguely familiar from the TV series Joan of Arcadia. This and the lack of expensive visual effects made me think of the flick as a “B” or even “C” movie. Once labeling kicked I could enjoy the movie more as my expectations got lowered. I soon realized that if I think of the movie as the movie “Office Space” or the sit-com “Office” without that familiar characters and with half as many or funny jokes (but with giants bug attacking the crew) it will be fairly enjoyable. The comparison is fairly unfair as the office setting ends pretty early in the movie as the little group that survived the initial coma inducing attack gets on the road towards assumed safety, but by then my mind was set.
There is awkward chemical tension between males and females, there is father-son relations to work out, and there are heroic features where one would not expect. The day is saved of course. Lots of clichés used in the visuals, which otherwise are fairly well done. The dialogue is mixing well-known formulas too, but some of them still seemed funny when I watched the movie. But they passed as now, weeks later I don’t remember any of the punchlines I thought at the time as gracious enough.
Days of heaven (1978, USA)
Days of Heaven was the most implicitly Biblical film I have seen in years. It opens with a scene where Richard Gere’s character hits a manager at a noisy factory (so noise that we don’t even hear their conversation) who falls, hits his head and presumably dies. Then Gere flees with his girlfriend and sister. This whole setup is very Moses like. He doesn’t part the red sea, but he travels on the top of a freight train with others and the rails part the wheat fields in a similar manner.
Later he tells the people that his girlfriend is really his sister. Abraham was using the same trick when wanting to protect Sarah. Neither story ended well in terms of the efficiency of protection. We see plagues, including locust. The cinematography allowed us to experience it the way we never wanted. First you get one insect, then a few more. Then you get every one to smoke them out so t least some of the harvest could be saved. But the attempts are futile. The all-consuming fire seems like just a disaster that could provide closure, but that’s just the beginning.
Gere’s life end like Moses’ started. On the river amongst the reeds. But instead of being gently put in a basket to be taken to a better place, he is shot down like fugitive that he was.
The epic feeling was strengthened by a number of other factors. Ennio Morricone music faded in and out. About the third of the movie was nature shots and seeing the plants and animals from premier plan helped me to bring nature close in the sense that it became more obvious that humans are intruders in their territory. Most of the fields were idyllic as you’d thinking the Garden of Eden, or heaven itself might look like. The problem was always the people and the tension between them.
I found the perspective of the narration interesting too. By having it done through the younger sister, who should be considered a supporting character one has to question who is important here. It might have been her days of heaven, while the painful love triangle theme was the background story. The last scene, according to which her life just goes on after everyone from her first life left her, would certainly suggest so.
No matter, this is a beautiful, bucolic, biblical film.
The film @ IMDB. (Summary from there: A hot-tempered farm laborer convinces the woman he loves to marry their rich but dying boss so that they can have a claim to his fortune.)
Walton: Farthing (2006)
The devil is in the details. In the case of Jo Walton’s Farthing almost literally. Others have written alternative history books about the “what if” scenario of the Nazis wining WWII. But those books are often set either in Germany or decades after the war ending. This book however is set only a few years later and (mostly) in the English countryside. The details of the political system are sketched early on with wide brushstrokes, but the best parts of the book are the minutia details of how this imaginary system worked. The way nationalism, red scare (i.e. anti-bolshevikism) and anti-Semitism flawlessly could be combined with both the traditional British aristocratic temperament and get accepted by the working classes was frighteningly realistic. The nobles’ penchant for understatement and keeping out for their own interests made the events depicted here too believable.
The events quickly are: the leading person of the “Farthing Set” (who signed the peace agreement and created friendly terms with Hitler) is killed in his own countryside house during party night. An unwanted Jewish man, who married in the family and a random fake communist are wrongly insinuated in the death and this I used as pretenses to breaking down on reds and Jews. Meanwhile the real killers are the other members of the Farthing Set, who are rapacious for more power. The narration’s point of view is alternating between the gay detective’s and the family’s daughter’s who married out to the Jewish small-loan banker. The voice Walton created for her is subtle, honest and the funniest in the whole lot.