Orange Orange (category:movies)

My friends and I made an unexpected find yesterday at the video store, thanks to a “free documentary with any rental” deal at Quickflix. We grabbed Grizzly Man, a documentary by Werner Herzog about the conservationist-filmmaker Tim Treadwell.

The story is pretty simple, and uncannily similar to the plot of Into The Wild, another movie (based on a book) based on real events. Tim Treadwell is a troubled, aspiring actor in California who finds the answer to his life crisis in filming and advocating for the preservation of grizzly bears in Alaska. He goes on summer-long expeditions alone in the wilderness, only rarely accompanied by his girlfriend, and delivers rambling expositions on nature, conservation, and the meaning of life in front of a tripod-mounted camera. Treadwell’s offbeat, exuberant, and frequently profane manner belies how impeccably composed and crystal clear each shot really is — Herzog seems to match this style in the interviews he shoots with Treadwell’s friends and family. Each interview is established by a few seconds of silence, and often progresses with a barely imperceptible zoom into the subject or a sideways pan, as if to mirror the inexorable, fateful unwinding of Treadwell’s own life.

The filming sometimes has such a quiet quality that the dimensionality of what is being filmed seems to disappear. The lush grass and picture-perfect mountains become a photograph, and Tim’s larger-than-reality persona a digital artifact or a trick of the blue screen gesticulating wildly on top of the flatness of the wilderness. After all, as Herzog himself confesses, he is less interested in nature than he is in the story of Treadwell as a person, and in the story of every person as told indirectly through him.

The punchline is tragedy. After more than a decade out in the Alaskan wilderness, Tim is attacked in his tent by a grizzly bear in an audio-recorded sequence that is alluded to and described in terrifying detail but never directly replayed in the film. His girlfriend, who is actually afraid of bears, stays with him, and both are killed and eaten. The end is baffling and gruesome, and forms the basis for Herzog’s own appraisal of nature: “He seemed to ignore the fact that in nature there are predators. I believe that the common denominator in nature is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.”

Why, then, did Tim seem to have so much faith in and love for these creatures? Was he simply too naive or impassioned to see the chaos and hostility that the filmmaker saw in nature? Or did Tim understand something that even Herzog couldn’t? Maybe that’s why Herzog chose Tim as his subject, and why we are so gripped by a story that seems on the surface to be so absurd and disturbing, but ultimately enlightening, and even cathartic to watch.

On Sunday I went to an advance screening of Charlie Kaufman’s new movie, Synecdoche, New York (trailer here), in Harvard Square. Wow! Advance screening, you say! How many hipster points is that? I don’t know. Elsa will have to claim them, because I didn’t realize that this movie existed or that it was showing here until she invited me, 10 minutes before show time.

I also didn’t know who Charlie Kaufman was. Naturally, I kept this to myself and nodded knowingly while my better-informed friends talked about his movies. Apparently Kaufman’s writing credits include Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I’ve only seen Eternal Sunshine, but I thought it was one of the most beautiful and romantic movies I’ve ever seen. It was about love and erasing memories.

We were waiting in line with about 500 other people, and passersby would repeatedly come up and ask what the line was for. Growing up in China where I was always lucky to get a seat anywhere, I tried to make up an answer that could plausibly attract a crowd, but not appealing enough for anyone to join in the scramble for seats. “A burlesque show with Macaque monkeys” or “Free vegan burritos” came to mind, but not before a more honest, more helpful moviegoer had already intervened. Drats.

Synecdoche did not disappoint. It was quirky, nonsensical, and full of surprises and jolting comedic flourishes. Philip Seymour Hoffman played Caden Cotard, an aging, depressed, death-obsessed playwright not just a little bit reminiscent of the hero in Fellini’s 8 1/2. He gave a soulful performance, as always, and spent half of the movie looking like he had pink eye (as always). Catherine Keener (who was, and whom I will forever identify as, Harper Lee alongside Hoffman’s Truman Capote in Capote), played Cotard’s wife of too many years, and promptly disappears after enough screen time to convince us of her disappointment in their marriage. Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, and Samantha Morton provide muses for Caden, and keep the story bursting at the seams with sexual energy, even as plot and logic are eventually left at the wayside — admittedly, to good effect.

At the center of the movie is a question: how does an artist tell the truth? Or, maybe equivalently (at least the movie thinks so), how can a person love truthfully? The sprawling screenplay sees this question through to all its direct and indirect manifestations, in romance and in family, in creation and loss. Caden Cotard as a director, Caden Cotard as a writer, Caden Cotard as a regretful father, as an ailing, ugly old man — the movie ambitiously tries to draw together a series of emotional vignettes into a cohesive whole, but doesn’t escape overextending itself once or twice. I sat through the credits feeling exhausted, but also with my heart and mind racing. How strange that a movie about death ends by making life seem more mysterious and exciting.

Part of the screening was a pleasant surprise that I felt I almost didn’t deserve to enjoy. Charlie Kaufman came up to the front of the theater and fielded some questions, not-quite-questions, and hyperbolic gush-fests from the audience. Kaufman skillfully deflected any attempts to pry an explanation of the movie out of him, and was careful not to name any sources of inspiration or influence for his work. I was waiting for him to tell the audience, “You just saw the movie. Think about it for yourself.” Which, in a way, was exactly what he was saying by refusing to give a straight answer.

I went home and got on netflix to revisit Kaufman’s older movies, and discovered both Adaptation and Being John Malkovich on my queue, ready to arrive next week. I guess I was a Charlie Kaufman fan after all. How mysterious!

Love is fragile, awkward, painful, and hilarious. Sometimes awkwardly, painfully hilarious. Love is all of these things, but above all it is something even more–love is not your fault.

This is the message I pondered through most of Un baiser s’il vous plaît, a kitschy romantic comedy with an occasional cruel streak that aired today at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as part of the museum’s summer French film festival. I’m sticking with the French title here not because I’m pretentious (though I am) but because the English translation, Shall We Kiss?, might make you expect to see Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez dancing around and giving each other awkward glances. No, that would be the wrong impression. The actual awkwardness in this movie transcends anything a Hollywood actor could conjure up (except maybe Woody Allen), and this is probably why the writer-director Emmanuel Mouret plays the lead role himself. With a few nervous glances and breathily uttered “oui”s from Virginie Ledoyen to back him up, Mouret shows us that even the liberated French have the occasional embarrassing sexual experience–in this case, comically, excruciating so. Then again, they probably make up for it by having even more of the non-embarrassing kind.

The plot is simple yet clever, and starts with a question. To kiss or not to kiss?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anjVjj4w5rA]
Music: “Gayane’s Adagio” from the ballet Gayane by Aram Khachaturian

Also by Khachaturian: Adagio from Spartacus, which repeats a chord progression (I-iii-I7-IV for you music geeks) until you start remembering every sentimental pop song every written (Beatles anyone?). It’s just those first four chords though–after that the adagio stops sounding like a pop song and wanders off into regions of ill-defined tonality, Prokofiev style. This is why I like Russian music.

Saw Harold and Kumar 2 last night. Can’t say it was the cinematic experience to end all cinematic experiences, but at least one blog-worthy moment came out of it. People joke that the aspiration of all Asian males is to be Harold or Paul Kariya’s father. I beg to differ. I’d like to believe that when real people fall in love, it inspires them like it inspired Kumar when he wrote this poem:

I’m sure that I will always be
A lonely number like root three

The three is all that’s good and right,
Why must my three keep out of sight
Beneath the vicious square root sign,
I wish instead I were a nine

For nine could thwart this evil trick,
with just some quick arithmetic

I know I’ll never see the sun, as 1.7321
Such is my reality, a sad irrationality

When hark! What is this I see,
Another square root of a three

As quietly co-waltzing by,
Together now we multiply
To form a number we prefer,
Rejoicing as an integer

We break free from our mortal bonds
With the wave of magic wands

Our square root signs become unglued
Your love for me has been renewed
[via melc_33 on Yahoo Answers]

Stay tuned, I’ll probably start having interesting thoughts once I start watching real movies again some time…