Month: July 2010

I saw the pulpy and reasonably-entertaining Solomon Kane, based on a Robert E. Howard book that is not Conan the Barbarian. It is essentially Conan refashioned as a Puritan. Cool hats! But fewer loincloths. And the demons seemed pretty wussy.

I tried to watch the new Day of the Triffids, but good lord it sucked. What’s wrong with British people? I give ’em props for Quatermass and Hammer films but their version of scary is lame: walking plants, haunted tea cozies, Eddie Izzard. And apparently when plasma waves from the sun make almost everyone blind, those afflicted will run about impotently yelling and crashing into one another like the passengers in Airplane. Stiff upper lip, my ass.

Mother—a story of loneliness, obsession and grief—is an extraordinary film. Though it maintains Bong Joon-ho’s interest in sophisticated tonal complexity and generic self-reflexivity (hallmarks of earlier releases Memories of Murder and The Host), I’ll argue Mother to be his most successfully cohesive work of cinema, which is due, in part, to the multidimensional portrait of a woman in her late-sixties who dominates the narrative and will undertake whatever is necessary to protect her child (a mentally-disabled adult in his late-twenties) from unjust accusations of murder in a small, South Korean city. Kim Hye-ja, who plays the title role, is simply astounding. Kim appears in nearly every scene, and her character’s unlikely journey into the political quagmire of corrupt lawyers, provincial police detectives, disaffected teenagers, and South Korea’s penal system leads to discoveries and revelations which confound and, at times, provoke and disturb. This is surely screen acting at its finest. Furthermore, Bong Joon-ho toys with audience identification and reception, casting Kim (who appears to be South Korea’s version of Harriet Nelson having played mothers on television for decades) to play the morally ambiguous and certainly unglamorous role of the upstart detective who conducts her own procedural examination into the violent death of a young girl in order to clear her son’s name and presumed guilt. To build on the above comparison, the young man who plays the son, Do-joon, is Won Bin, a South Korean actor and sex symbol (just think Ricky Nelson). I won’t give any more away, but will comment on the first and last shots of the film, which present a sublimely ecstatic vision of human subjectivity that is best described as uncanny (which is about as close as I’m going to get to referencing Sigmund Freud).

i’m teaching a new class next year on imperial adventure/intrigue narratives from the turn and first few decades of the 20th century. this is a 100 level class and will be light on theory. the reading list so far is as follows: conan doyle, the lost world; kipling, the man who would be king; sax rohmer, one of the fu manchu books; rider haggard, either she or king solomon’s mines; the first tarzan book; and herge, tintin in the congo. i’d welcome more suggestions for readings from the era, but what i’m mainly looking for here is recommendations for the secondary list of texts which will provide a (more or less) contemporary slant on the subject: action films that inherit/re-write/exploit the conventions of those texts. so far i have: the second indiana jones, the brotherhood of the wolf, the ghost and the darkness, zulu, and the mummy. i need two or three more. i’m not looking for high art or anything aimed as oscar bait (no out of africa). suggestions?

Inception is Christopher Nolan’s latest film, and it rolls in on the back of overwrought trailers in which the laws of physics seem to disappear inside the dreamworld: cities crumble; the horizon bends backwards on itself; and slow motion explosions seem to pop off the screen. The story concerns a team whose usual task is to illegally extract information from subjects by inserting themselves into dreams. Each member of the team has a specific function, such as designing the dreamworld (architect), administering the appropriate sedation to the subjects (drugs), or depicting someone familiar to the dreamer in the dream (forger). Now its leader, Leonardo DiCaprio, has been persuaded by a wealthy industrialist (Ken Watanabe) to try something much more difficult: “inception” is the insertion of a new idea into the dream of a subject, rather than simply the stealing of existing information, such that the subject comes to fully believe the idea. Continue reading Inception

So I’m teaching a new course, a freshman seminar, entitled “Socialism: Real and Imagined.” In the context of economic crisis and the willingness of the right to throw about the word “socialism”, the idea is to have first year students think through the different meanings of the word, examine some concrete experiments in socialism (Mondragon, Swedish wage-earner funds…) and then imagine feasible and plausible forms of socialism, applicable to highly industrialized democratic societies (i.e. societies like ours).In the imagining section of the course, I’d like to use some utopian novels and some movies that deal with socialism. I’d welcome any suggestions for either books or movies. I’m thinking of using Bellamy’s “Looking Backwards” and Le Guin’s “Dispossessed” for novels, but others would be welcome. In the movie category, I’m less interested in the Soviet experience than how socialism has been discussed or proposed in the West.Thanks for any help.