GaBlog

Diner is a simple movie about a bunch of twentysomethings’ get togethers in a diner and elsewhere in 1959’s Baltimore. That’s about it. They drink, eat, fight, chat, share stories, joke around, and they prepare for the wedding of one of their own. I’ve seen it about a month ago and as plot goes I don’t remember a lot of it.

There were three memorable scenes though. One of them involved a guy eating every item on one side of the diner’s menu. While he accomplishes this fea(s)t the others observe him and chat about unrelated things at the table surrounding him. It was another waste of food originating from the culture of abundance. At least it was better than the food fights show in movies about grade and high school kids cafeteria. I can’t stand those scenes, because the “meanwhile they are starving in Africa” meme is too deeply embedded in me. Here the guy overate on purpose, but at least he food didn’t end straight in the trash or no his cloths.

The next bit I remember was about a groom giving a really hard test on football to his bride, and making the wedding dependent on the results. She does really well, but fails by a few points on the randomly made up scoreboard. His buddies are waiting and overhearing the whole oral test outside. This could be a funny part but feels tragic when he comes out of the exam room ad declares that the wedding is off. A joke pushed too far. But that’s how these kids operated. (And the wedding is not off.)

The final scene I remember was the wedding scene itself. It was a Jewish wedding. Up till that point I had no idea that any of these boys were Jewish; I saw and heard no indication of this. It made me wonder whether I missed them, because of my lack of understanding of the nuances of US, particularly East Coast culture or they were intentionally missing, or not considered important. Unfortunately I have no way of knowing unless I get somebody to view the movie for me and enlighten me. I would need somebody from the East Coast, preferably who was in his/her twenties in Baltimore at the end of the 1950’s. That’s unlikely to happen, so I will stay in the dark on this one.

It is a Zeitgeist movie of an era and lifestyle I had no direct knowledge of. It is not as “larger than life” as Grease, or not as action and emotion packed as American Graffiti. But it conveyed an authentic ambiance and for that I applaud it. Just don’t ask me to tell about the plot.

DVD @ Amazon.com.

This is a top 1000 movie.

IMDB’s summary: A group of college-age buddies struggle with their imminent passage into adulthood in 1959 Baltimore.

Trailer:

The heroine, if you can call her that, of Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded” evoked mixed emotions in me. On hand I felt pity for her as she was facing a tough situation. I also admired her persistence of resisting her master’s advances. On the other hand her letters showed that she was a master manipulator even at the age of 15. Often I couldn’t decide whether to feel worse for her or for her master. She kept emphasizing that her only value is of her virtue, virginity.

On the other hand when she was writing about going home to her parents, to her poor background from her master’s house as a resolution for the conflict her voice always felt insincere. She wrote that she is ready to be and live poor again, but her heart was not really willing to accept it. I could look at those letters as preparation for herself to accept the seemingly inevitable, but it felt more like airing her grief over the unfortunate backward social mobility. Her concerns of being “undone” were similarly double connotations. It was clear that her only hope, towards she moved every thing and every body she could, was to getting married by her master, who was much higher on the social ladder.

Despite or because the above observations it was interesting to read the book. I got immersed into 18th century British countryside life, which was a worthy trip on its own. It provided an opportunity to muse about the shifting value system of society. What Pamela and her society considered a “virtue,” nowadays much less universally considered as such; at least in the western, “enlightened” world. I also thought about the change in language. She didn’t want to be “undone”, meaning her future ruined. Today wed use the word “done” for the same concept. “I am done” can be pronounced with intonation suggesting being ruined.

I am glad I read this book from the “1001 books to read” list, even if it took a long time.

The book @ Amazon.com

I am slowly catching up with most Stanley Kubrick movies. He only directed 16 of them in his 48 years long career. I have seen each of these several times in the past: The Shining, A Clockwork Orange , 2001, and Dr Strangelove. I also bits pf Spartacus once on TV. Last year I watched Barry Lyndon. Now it was time to check out “Full Metal Jacket.” On one hand it is easy to categorize it as another Vietnam War movie, not unlike Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986), The Killling Fields (1984), Rescue Dawn (2006), The Quiet American (1958 and 2002) or We Were Soldiers (2002), to name just a few); but quite unlike The Deer Hunter (1978).

The movie has three parts. The first 45 minutes covers the boot camp of the soldiers at an army base in the USA. This is focusing on the dehumanizing nature of the process that is designed to turn the incoming group of young men into Marines. Here are some of the drill sergeant’s words of “wisdom”:

You are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit. …If your killer instincts are not clean and strong you will hesitate at the moment of truth…. You will not kill. You will become dead marines and then you will be in a world of shit because marines are not allowed to die without permission…. [God] plays His games, we play ours! To show our appreciation for so much power, we keep heaven packed with fresh souls! God was here before the Marine Corps! So you can give your heart to Jesus, but your ass belongs to the Corps!

I can’t tell you how this section ends, but the treatment bears its results. The next 40 minutes shows what these Marines do in Vietnam, including fighting with the enemy, using local prostitutes, editing and censoring news, infighting with each others. As a segway to the next section we get a few mini-interviews of the soldiers as it could have been done by the military TV crew. This section starts of them standing around two of their dead buddies. The camera shows the circle of soldiers, one by one, each saying a few words from the dead men’s perspective. This was one of the most effective scenes I’ve seen. It shows that we/they are all dead already.

Finally the last 30 minutes shows the group’s fight with a single sniper after they got off from their track. They unsuccessfully face a Catch 22 (to use another military related metaphor.) The sniper wounded one of them on the open field. If they go after him to try to save his life they would be shot too. They know it, but one cannot resist doing so, thus he is wounded and eventually killed too. Eventually they find and wound the sniper too. Then comes the conflict whether to kill her, which would be the “humane” thing to do considering her wounds or abandon her, and let her live a bit longer to prolong her suffering. Depending on their temperament and to what extent the dehumanizing worked they give different answers to this challenge.

The movie ends with soldiers walking in the night in front of burning buildings, while the narrator gives a short monologue ending with “I am so happy that I am alive, in one piece and short. I’m in a world of shit… yes. But I am alive. And I am not afraid.”

I am, on the other hand, is afraid. War kills not just people, but kills the inside of the people who are doing the killings. Even the purpose of such a hopeful character as the Joker/narrator transforms this way “I wanted to see exotic Vietnam, the jewel of Southeast Asia. I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture and… kill them. I wanted to be the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill.” I am afraid of this change and never want to experience anything remotely similar to it.

DVD @ Amazon.com.

IMDB’s summary: A pragmatic U.S. Marine observes the dehumanizing effects the Vietnam War has on his fellow Marine recruits from their brutal basic training to the bloody street fighting set in 1968 Hue, Vietnam.

In 1992 I spent one day in Madrid. Unfortunately I had a high fever, so I don’t remember much. I do recall though that the only thing I managed to do was visiting the Prado, where amongst and against many Spanish classics I saw Picasso’s Guernica. The most vivid part of my impression was how immense this piece was. Overwhelming not just in its brutality but in its size too.

Fast forward 12 years in my life: In a college history class we spent about 5 minutes learning about the 1937 bombing of Guernica. I don’t think the word “Basque” was mentioned, but “bombing”, “first”, “systematic” and “devastation”, were definitely part of the vocabulary used then. These were the basis of my minimal knowledge about what happened in this basque town in 1937, when I started to read Dave Boling’s novel of the same title. Now I have a wider knowledge about the topic and I can recommend the book for anybody wants to know more.

My recommendation stands despite that the main characters were fictional or at best composites of basque types. But all the historic players were real, and the events described happened the way they were, as far as I can tell. The civil war, the people smuggling, the German bombing, the military alliances, the Catholic church’s role… these were part of the historic tapestry.

In the main story line we meet people, who we learn to love for their characters and overall goodness. I read in interview with the author that creating it was intentional: he wanted to create heroes like Atticus in “To kill a mockingbird.” As you knew from the beginning that the book’s central event is the bombing, you had to know that some or most of these people would be killed off. Thus you could invest their attachments into them only with trepidation, waiting for whom the author would kill off in the inhumane bombing. If you read the book you get your answer.

A not about the horror of the systematic bombing itself. I’ve never been to a war so I can’t tell how it feels. I do know that lots of movies depicting fights are using various techniques to share the participants hypnagogic state, where the edges of reality are getting blurred. The book did something similar, although it was describing the damage to the people and the buildings. But the survivors all seemed to be shocked to different reality. That is also the essence of Picasso’s painting, of which we learn the background of in the book.

I read this book for a book club. At the discussion there were several elders present, including a lady who worked at a collage at the time and another one who was in grade school. The former recalled her and her colleague’s support for the Lincoln brigade and the latter recalled collecting the alufoil from cigarette boxes that would be turned into bullets to be used in Spain. Another gentleman pointed out that the book didn’t mention the Lincoln brigade, or any other international help, only how the Italians and the Germans supported Franco. On the other hand this gentleman and his wife, who were young Jewish teens in Germany at the time, were probed how Germany reacted about the Spanish civil war, what was their reactions at the time. The explained that in public there was no criticism of any type, only the official news were supposed to be known. But in the confines of their own walls they knew what was happening. I appreciated that I could sit with these people for whom Guernica was not just history of the distant past, but had personal memories related to it. Made the book more alive for me.

The book at Amazon.com

Jeremy Irons is a genius actor. That’s the highest praise I can say about “Dead ringers“, a 1988 movie, directed by David Cronenberg. There wasn’t anything else I liked about this twisted psycho horror. The idea that identical twin boys, with different personalities, grow up to be both gynecologist and then share a woman who cannot tell them apart first is weird enough on its own. But the madness, caused by the resulting tension in their close relationship to each other, was too much for my taste.

It could have been thought provoking as there were some ideas about substance abuse, codependence, doctor-patient relationships and a host other topics. But the sheer horror washed any potentially interesting idea out of me. The only reason I watched the movie through was to see Jeremy Irons’ two sides. Now I should rewatch Peter Greenaway’s “A zed and two noughts“, which also follows twin doctors’ relationship with a woman to a tragic end. But that’s an art film, while this one was directly violent and scary.

DVD @ Amazon.com.

This is a top 1000 movie.

IMDB’s summary:  Twin gynecologists take full advantage of the fact that nobody can tell them apart, until their relationship begins to deteriorate over a woman.

Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” was the third alternative history novel I read recently where Nazi Germany (and Japan) won WWII. (The other two was Robert Harris‘ Fatherland and Jo Walton’s Farthing.) However this was the oldest, written in 1962, while the other two are from 1992 and 2006 respectively. Two more comparisons than I stop, I promise. As it is set more or less in the same year it was written it had more of a sense of alternative reality as opposed to alternative history. Dick was writing what could have been his own life or presence, while the others put the settings behind the safe veil of the past. If the plot is set in the past, then it is possible to develop a story line for sequels, where the Nazis’ power declines in some way. (This was the implication in Fatherland’s ending, but not necessarily of Farthing’s.) On the other hand the novel is set in the here and now (i.e. in Dick’s 1962) one is less secure what kind of world can come after the events described in the book are over.

The final comparison of the three books I want to mention is the location. Fatherland is in Germany, Farthing is in England, but High Castle is in the US. A US that has been divided between Germany and Japan’s sphere of influence. It is a country broken into three parts with twenty years of political and cultural divergence. Slavery is legal and practiced again, Jews can hide for a while under assumed identities in the Japan West Coast area, but not in the nazi controlled East Coast part (and they are best of ni the wide buffer zone between the two); and the i-ching became a tool for decision making at all levels of society where Japanese set the cultural norms.

There is so much politics is revealed and going on in the novel that I felt that story line and characters are just tools for introducing and enhancing the political climate. Instead of summarizing the story (which you can find elsewhere), let me point out that unlike many other Philip K. Dick books, this has not been translated to Hungarian. I wonder why. Maybe its subject topic is too controversial in a country where nowadays a clearly racist (and occasionally antisemitic) political party enjoys a 15-20% support. Or Maybe it is too philosophical not enough action happening to have wide enough appeal for a publisher to justify the publishing. Or maybe people don’t want to read about living in an oppressive regime, after having lived under communism. Either way I’d be interested in the public’s reception of the book in my native country.

My own reception was mixed. I was occasionally confused by the language and the structure, but rereading always cleared the issue up. The ending and the “man in the high catsle” himself made me think which part of the novel was the dream, where are the borders of reality in a science-fiction book. These are exactly the right kind of questions when reading such a book, so Dick’s purpose has been fulfilled: it made me question my own reality for a second or two.

The book at Amazon.com.