“And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” – 1st Corinthians 13:13 (NKJV)

Upon watching the Criterion bluray release of Three Colors: Blue, one of my favorite films and a title I’ve seen many times, I was met with a shocking discovery. The musical finale of the film happened to be from the Bible: 1^st Corinthians 13 in the ancient Greek. Besides geeking out over the fact that I recognized some of the actual words (I took ancient Greek in Undergrad), this revelation added an extra layer of dimension and texture to the concluding vignette.

I’ve always held the closing scene of this film as a bit of a mystery, but with the sudden knowledge of what the lyrics meant, I was met with a revelation. Throughout the film, Kieslowski has been exploring a perverse idea of freedom. After Julie (Juliette Binoche) suffers the loss of her husband and daughter, she gains a newfound freedom and decides to break all ties and move off to live on her own in urban seclusion.

However, this newfound freedom becomes perversely selfish and cold. Throughout the film Julie is haunted by this music, the music her husband was composed before her death, the music she will later give the words of 1st Corinthians 13. The instant, overt message is the idea that love is what is most important and that Julie’s freedom has just been an attempt to escape loving others. And while I like that idea, I’m suddenly struck with a new idea.

The entire Three Colors Trilogy is constructed around the three colors of the French flag which represents Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. However, screenwriters Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz perverse these values, turn them on their heads and make them negatives, or, at the least, complicate them. What if this culmination into 1st Corinthians 13 in Three Colors: Blue represents an attempt to replace the three French virtues, virtues of a worldly government, with three divine virtues?

As 1st Corinthians 13:13 says, “[A]nd now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” What if these three are the virtues Kieslowski is using to replace the French virtues he paints as faulty? Moving forward with this idea, I believe we can track the positive manifestation of these virtues throughout the trilogy.

In Blue, one of the recurring images is bungie jumping which can see as a symbolic expression of the idea of taking a leap of faith. In one scene where this symbol is evoked, Julie says to her-self, “Now I have only one thing left to do: nothing. I don’t want any belongings, any memories. No friends, no love. Those are all traps.”

Julie is a character who has lost faith in living. She has moved away from her past, literally, and now lives alone with no friends, no longer having the faith that those relationships will be meaningful. However, she has not lost all faith. She still clings to the blue beads from her daughter’s room and her husband’s music still haunts her memories. While she does her best to repress these ruminates of her past, they cannot be stifled.

Therefore, the conclusion of the film is an amalgamation of images making up the various characters Julie has come into contact with throughout the film. This montage builds to a glimpse into Julie’s eye, suggesting that all these characters are now inside Julie once again and that her faith has been renewed, that she’s able to take that leap into having human relationships and messy emotions once more.

While White is bookended by two revenge plots revolving around the divorce of Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) and Dominique (Julie Delpy), I’d argue the core of the film is Karol’s relationship with Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), a fellow countryman who offers him a job which involves helping a man commit suicide. This man turns out to be Mikolaj himself and Karol decides instead of killing him to give him a newfound goal in life.

The two friends get drunk and slide across the frozen river whooping with glee and laughing at their childish behavior. And as Mikolaj lies on the ice, catching his breath in-between whips of exhalation, he says “I feel like a child again. Anything is possible.” Karol is a character who through his own perpetual hopefulness spreads hope to others. After Karol uses the money from Mikolaj’s job to start a business, he makes Mijolaj a partner in his business, giving him a new goal in life.

Likewise, Karol’s elaborate revenge on his wife actually instills hope that the might be united once again. For the first time in the film, Dominique becomes kind and pleasant to Karol. And, as the end of the entire trilogy gives is insight into, the two actually do end up back together.

It’s in Red where the demonstration of love begins to emerge as the clear, concluding virtue of the trilogy. When talking about love, it is important to recognize that the love the passage in 1^st Corinthians is talking about is not the catch-all word used in the English but, ἀγάπη (agape). The word agape in this context refers to the idea of charity, a selfless love.

Red evokes this love of charity in the relationship between Valentine (Irène Jacob) and the Judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant).Valentine meets the Judge after she accidently hits his dog, Rita. While initially the idea of charity might be seen in the fact Valentine takes Rita in after the Judge seems disinterested in her well-being, the film complicates this idea of charity, suggesting Valentine takes in the dog to make up for the guilt she feels.

Real agape happens in a moment like when Valentine helps the old lady put her bottle into the recycling cylinder. It’s an act in which Valentine will gain nothing, a pure act of charity. Likewise, as the relationship between Valentine and the Judge grow, their friendship becomes more that the affectionate phillia in the Greek, but a deep, selfless interest in each other’s well-being. Valentine supports the Judge even as he works through the dark secret of his life and in turn the Judge seeks to set Valentine on the path through life he missed out on during his youth.

But the final act of agape, the love of charity, in the film is a divine act. The film concludes as the only survivors of a ferry accident are brought ashore. Six of the seven survivors are the key characters of the three films in the trilogy brought together and protected in what seems almost like chance. However, I would argue it’s a divine external act of love by the screenwriters for these characters, Kieslowski’s final expression of agape towards his characters.

© 2012 James Blake Ewing

After watching the lighthearted and sweet silent romance It, I struggled over the question of what is the responsibility of the storyteller when it comes to depicting giving the characters consequences for their actions. It isolates the two romantic leads in a cushion of sex appeal and chemistry, insulating them from moral and societal obligations as well as distancing them from consequences.

Saleswoman Betty Lou Spence (Clara Bow) sets her sights on the rich and hansom Cyrus Waltham Jr. (Antonio Moreno), the new store manager. While her sexy flaunting and “accidents” fail to get the attention of Cyrus, they do catch the eye of Monty Montgomery (William Austin), close friend to Cyrus. Betty takes a chance and begins dating Monty to get closer to Cyrus, who as it happens is being pressured by his steady girl Molly (Priscilla Bonner) for something more engaging.

While the film wishes this unlikely romance to succeed, it becomes hard for one to share the sentiment when one begins to see how Cyrus and Betty treat everyone else around them. On the immediate romantic level, both lead on their potential romantic partner. Betty has no qualms in using the buffoonish and doting Monty as little more than a stepstool for a better man. Likewise, Cyrus fails to ever truly communicate or show interest in Molly, simply treating her like another fine object in his life.

So what is there compelling the audience to see these two enter a romantic relationship? The film’s answer is “it,” that hot, sexual aura that some people are effortlessly able to exude. It’s certainly true that Clara Bow and Antonio Moreno are two fine looking people, but is that all there is? Are beautiful people simply made for each other and hence the viewers should cheer on their pursuit for maximum hotness by coming together? Is the romantic drive truly that shallow?

Beyond the romantic relationship, the film also shows how both leads seem to have a shocking disregard for their closest friends. Cyrus is much more interested in appeasing higher-ups than giving his supposedly close friend Monty time of day, consistently disregarding and ignoring him to his personal detriment.

Betty’s situation is a bit more complicated. She shares her apartment with a mentally ill woman and her young infant. While Betty does provide them shelter, even going so far as to risk her societal reputation to protect them, when push comes to shove, she’s back off to the rat race for love, quickly sweeping aside the distraught mother and her child to hunt down her man.

While these relational issues in and of themselves do not make the story bad, what does is that these characters are never forced to face the consequences of their actions. There are tangible problems with the way these two treat everyone around them and how quick they are to disregard all else for romance. And without true consequences, the conflict and resolution is cheap and easy.

It is sexy and charming, but the film’s inability to make engaging characters makes the romance hollow. They’re left in their isolated orb of self-absorption, never forced to be challenged, to grow or become fully human. Great romances challenge the characters to change (those that do not are tragic romances) in order to make the relationship work and this is a notion a film like It cannot even begin to understand.

© 2012 James Blake Ewing

Setting aside the three monumental pillars of Buster Keaton’s acting career (The General, Steamboat Bill Jr. and Sherlock Jr.), there’s an intriguing emergence of Buster Keaton as a figure of social critique. While he still fulfills this role, to an extent, in his great films, a handful of his other features give precedence to the notion that Buster Keaton functions as a societal outsider that allows the audience to laugh at him, but also one that brings into question cultural values.

Starting in 1923 with Our Hospitality, Buster Keaton plays a young man raised by his aunt to keep him away from the family feud that claimed his father’s life. When he comes of age and goes back to collect his father’s estate, he’s oblivious that the “friends” he stumbles across are actually the members of the feuding family who seek to kill him.

The film then becomes a series of gags where Buster Keaton narrowly and obliviously escapes near death from the attempted killings by feuding family. While it makes for a hilarious series of perfectly timed gags and miscommunicated meanings, the ridiculousness of the film is not so much in these jokes as in the feud itself. Our Hospitality explores how futile, silly and ridiculously obsessive the institution of the feud is in this community, the final gag of the film a nod to how excessive and ridiculous force is as a solution to resolution between neighbors.

Seven Chances in 1925 mocks the lofty role marriage plays in society when struggling lawyer discovers that all that keeps him from coming into an inheritance is an addendum that says he must be married before his 27^th birthday. It’s his misfortune that his birthday falls on the same day he receives the news and after his true love refuses his flippant proposal, he’s forced to go about town asking the handful he women he knows for a hand in marriage. Of course, Keaton continually fails to find a bride.

It’s this setup that brings into question the unhealthy societal status marriage is given. If Keaton can marry a girl, all his troubles will be solved with a snap of a finger. That man just needs a good woman. And while that’s the societal delusion, in practice, it quickly becomes clear that compatibility, love and marriage are not easy endeavors, or even necessarily the solution. Sometimes, they’re the problem.

Keaton’s third feature in the same year, Go West, takes on the Western myth. A still budding film genre, it’s surprising how easily the writing is able to make Keaton seamlessly work in the world of the Western. A city bloke who decides to work as a cowboy, Keaton embodies almost everything a cowboy isn’t. He’s clumsy, naive, not able to work with rough animals and also sensitive. Instead of branding a cow, he simply shaves a design into the fur.

The film mocks Keaton for failing to embody the masculine traits of the Western hero. His weapon is a pocket sized revolver he found in a woman’s purse and every time he needs it, he finds it stuck in the bottom of his holster. Instead of taming and mastering a steed like the real cowboys, he rides a donkey and later ends up walking around with his pet cow at his heels.

However, even though the film makes fun of Keaton’s inability to become that masculine hero, it’s his lack of those traits that make him endearing and lovable for the audience. He’s the underdog, the cowboy who doesn’t win on grit or skill, but on a naïve persistence. He’s coded as prepubescent and he never becomes that mythic man, but that doesn’t stop him from triumphing at the ending.

College in 1927 is yet another film where Keaton is the object of ridicule: the bookworm surrounded by strong, athletic young men. After graduating high-school and going onto college, he decides to reinvent himself and become the athletic star to win the affections of the girl he loves. The film’s runtime is comprised of Keaton consistently failing at an array of athletic events.

Where College fails is that unlike the rest of these films, it never finds a way to embrace the Keaton character for who he is. The intellectual bookworm might be praised at the beginning as academia’s savior, but once wrapped up in the veneer of the sports world, the film loses focus of what makes the Keaton character exemplary. In fact, his shallow pursuits for a girl’s narrow-minded affections, while called into question, are ultimately rewarded.

And while Keaton stands as a figure continuously mocks the imbalanced societies, he often reaffirms that there are good reasons for why we value certain ideas. While Seven Chances makes fun of the pursuit of marriage, it ultimately concludes that marriage a good thing. Likewise, even for College’s shortcomings, it establishes that the pursuit of athleticism is good insofar as it trains us to have the potential to protect the weak and helpless.

However, for films like Go West and Our Hospitality, the critique stands. While Western depictions of masculinity aren’t painted as evil and ignorant like revenge is, it’s still seen as an unfairly privileged value. Whether for or against whatever the critique is, Buster Keaton is a figure that reminds society of the importance of perspective and balance in our values institutions. Therefore, Buster Keaton is more than just a stone-faced misfit; he’s one of cinema’s funniest social critics.

© 2012 James Blake Ewing

As a Hollywood blockbuster, Rise of the Planet of the Apes delivers a compelling, CGI-driven action extravaganza. However, Hollywood once again proves its propensity to leave story by the wayside, abandoning well-developed characters, an engaging plot and conflicts that matter for making a bunch of slick movie moments and presenting another cynical and misguided thematic underpinning.

Prequel to The Planet of the Apes, the film chronicles the aftereffects of a compound scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) develops to cure Alzheimer’s disease. His initial test on apes results not only in healing brain cells, but also expanding cognitive growth. However, after a demonstrating gone bad, the project is shut down, the only remaining test subject is an ape baby Will decides to raise privately and his Alzheimer’s stricken father, Charles (John Lithgow), names Caesar (Andy Serkis).

There’s a foundation for an involving story here, but the film consistently under-develops character relationships. The father/son relationship could give the film a beautiful and tragic underpinning amidst the more fantastical elements, but the film is more interested in tracking Caesar’s physical and mental growth, using Charles as a cheap device to push Caesar into conflict with the wider world.

Even more disappointing and cheap is the superfluous female character. Caroline Aranha (Freida Pinto) is given three important tasks the entire film: patch up Caesar after a scrape, make out with James Franco and distract a cop. While X-Men: First Class and Sucker Punch have come under attack for the putting women into sexist roles, at least those women have roles significant enough to criticize. Even among the apes, it’s a man’s world.

Equally disappointing is the film’s lack of meaningful and interesting conflict. The villains of the piece are pompous, sniveling and as subtle as a foghorn. Likewise, the conflicts feel superfluous, forced and arbitrary. This is, in part because Caesar as a character lacks any sort of compelling inner conflict which the audience can identify with, leaving him as an alien and distant character.

The film build so much pathos for the character, strains every which way to create a performance and circumstances to allow the audience to forge empathy with Caesar, that his depiction is emotionally overwrought.  And is Caesar a character worth rooting for? Is his rampage in the second half of the film one audiences should root for? Is humanity so irredeemable that the apes should put those humans back in their place? Are humans so eager to celebrating their own destruction? Then again, Avatar is one of the bestselling films of recent years.

I’ll be the first to admit humans are a flawed species, but I’m not so judgmental, so caught up in visions of hellfire and brimstone, to delight in a plague of their own destruction, a plague which Rise of the Planet of the Apes seems to think we deserve.  Sorry, but I’m not so quick to conclude humanity is irredeemable.

Do we hate ourselves that much? Are we so caught up in self-loathing over angst of destroying nature and capitalist exploitation that we’re ready to cheer on societal suicide? Do we really want to hit the cosmic reset button and go back to square one? Of course, the irony is that if we honestly think that, we’re celebrating this notion by buying into a system of capitalist sensationalism through the entertainment industry. Perhaps we even topped it off with a bucket of popcorn while we relaxed in our air-conditioned sanctuary.

As a piece of entertainment, I’ll admit it’s a slick, well-made film. The CGI is fantastic, the camerawork strong and there are a lot of tantalizing sequences. But it’s not a good story and I, for one, am not cynical and self-loathing enough to celebrate a character that ostracizes and pits himself against my species. Sure, I may not a people person, but if I’m forced to choose between an ape and a cop just doing his job, you can bet your money I’m rooting for the cop, not some damn dirty ape.

© 2012 James Blake Ewing

By coupling the science fiction genre with the intellectual pontifications of writer/director Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville emerges as a congruent and cohesive synthesis of narrative and genre with the arthouse themes of Godard. While perhaps not his moth aesthetically boisterous or intellectually provoking films, Alphaville is quite possibly his most consistent work.

The film follows the investigation of Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine), a man from earth who ventures to Alphaville to discover what the city is planning against the outer countries. As he searches for the elusive scientist von Braun (Howard Vernon), he finds himself constantly running into the man’s daughter, Natachia (Anna Karina), who he believes has a hidden connection to the outer countries.

Godard’s construction of the world of Alphaville is built around reason and rationality becoming the cornerstone of society, the ultimate, and perhaps only, human virtue. It’s a world in which man has fallen in love with his intellectual capacity, crafting a deity in the supercomputer Apha 60 which runs the city of Alphaville.

While it might seem like Godard is dealing in extremities, he is building of an assumption that became prevalent in the past century, the notion that humanity is defined as distinct and unique by its rationality. If this is the foundations of what humanity believes separates man from animals, where does this assumption logically take human society in the future? Godard’s answer is Alphaville.

If not rationality, what then makes us human? Godard tackles this question through the two characters of Lemmy Caution and Natacha von Braun. Lemmy represents notions of an everyman, able to express the quest for truth, fear of death and ethical conscious which I would argue serves are a representation of an informed philosophical exploration, one that does not exist in the vacuum of reason which gave birth to Alphaville.

Natacha is an exploration of that intangible quality of humanity, the things we know, but cannot say, those lingering, elusive ideas and notions that defy pure reason as a source of explanation. Some might quantify this as the emotional aspect of humanity, but I think Natacha’s struggle goes deeper, that her evolution represents the awareness of a human soul.

Therefore, Godard’s Alphaville represents a predecessor to Philip K. Dick’s famous novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The intersection of noir and sci-fi and the exploration of that intangible human quality are shared among both. And the film adaptation of Blade Runner shares more than a few similar sequences to Godard’s piece. In some ways, Godard’s film works as a more restrained and controlled film.

Since the release of Alphaville, the notion of humans as the rational being has only grown in prevalence, making Godard’s deep insights even more relevant and profound. We stand on the cusp of creating machines more rational and intelligent than ourselves, in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some already existed. Our future either lies in creating these machines as our deities (and perhaps we’ve already done that) or taking heed of Godard’s warning and realizing that man more than a rational machine.

© 2012 James Blake Ewing

I’m sympathetic towards those who found Film socialisme pretentious and incoherent, I certainly had the same experience with Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, but Film socialism is a provoking and profound work for those willing to tease out the why Godard’s latest feature is so flamboyant, dissonant and damn cryptic. It’s not simply pretentious dribble, but a bleak and fragmented postmodern clash of ideological flaws and corrupt media depictions.

And while the film is entitled Film socialisme, Godard’s freeform exploration of modern media branches out beyond just the world of film. How are we affected by philosophical thinkers, world dictators and the Internet in an age of an overwhelming sea of media? If Godard’s presentation is anything to go by, it’s a seascape of distorted and problematic depictions of a reality of our own creation.

Throughout the film, certain images are downgraded, glitches and warped, not because Godard couldn’t find a good cameraman, but because he’s suggesting there’s something corrupt, sinister and broken about our media depictions. There is not clarity and truth to these images, but fabrication, lies and deceit. The fact that these corruptions are coded as explicitly digital suggests a critique of the digital age as inherently problematic. Such malleable images make fabrications pervasive.

Likewise, throughout the film most of the dialogue in French and German is only partially translated, sometimes as a few snippets of words which male little sense in conjunction. While this might suggest utter nonsense, it could also be seen as a reference to censorship between countries that often restrict access and understanding from one another, only allowing bits of information to go out or come into the country.

Godard, as usual, is also interested in the broader social ideals that pervade our society. Perhaps his most bold depictions of society are ones in which issues of race are made explicit. There’s the inherent focus on the minorities serving the mostly white Europeans on the cruise boat, but there’s also some shocking lines in the film that suggest that there’s still a heavy social bias against Blacks.

And while these moments show an inciting side of Godard who isn’t afraid to broach social hot potatoes, Godard also has some fun by playing around a bit as well. There’s a folksy singer and a llama which likely aren’t there to convey anything profound but simply to provide some absurd humor to what Godard probably realized is an esoteric film on the verge of utter madness.

Of course, for Godard, it’s this cruise ships inhabitants that are mad, sailing amidst the see where their eccentricities festers, espousing the ideological current of our time. The question is where is this current taking us and how will it end? Thinking about it that way, the film’s almost a bleak, apocalyptic vision of a media infused society stuck in an ocean of information it cannot comprehend, an ocean that will forever keep it adrift and lost. [Note: only a day after writing this, the boat used in the film, the Costa Concordia, ran aground.]

Godard’s musings are a mix of profound and obtuse. His trains of thought aren’t easy to follow or necessarily something to comprehend on a first viewing, but I don’t think that lessens his accomplishments. I’ll admit not every moment in Film socialisme intrigued me, but there’s enough compelling material here to keep me thinking for a good while and it’s a film I’m likely to rewatch as I’m sure there’s more to get than can be caught in one viewing.

© 2012 James Blake Ewing

Like the beauty that cannot be photographed in the song “Linda Linda,” I find it hard to put into words the joy Linda Linda Linda brings me. Somewhere in the amalgamation of the awkward comedic setups, the endearing characters and bad music practice sessions is that intangible quality which makes me smile with glee throughout the film’s runtime.

The story of four high-school girls and their attempt to play a few songs by The Blue Hearts, a Japanese punk rock group, is not particularly dramatic, incredible or unusual, but it’s pure delight. After a falling out with the old lead singer, guitarist Kei Tachibana (Yuu Kashii) recruits the Korean exchange student Son (Doona Bae) to be the new lead singer, which means she’ll have to learn Japanese first.

As they practice with drummer Kyoko Yamada (Aki Maeda) and bassist Nozomi Shiroko (Shiori Sekine), the group learns they’re terrible. Besides just being a tribulation of the group not gelling and everyone being out of sync, it becomes the group’s endearing flaw that they’re awful and not afraid to laugh and have fun with how terrible they are.

Most of the fun of this film comes from how hilariously awkward the situations are. Awkwardly timed humor about off situations are difficult to execute as they can just be a step away from being uncomfortable, but the film has pitch perfect timing, knowing just how long to keep each gag going and always making sure to mock the situation and never the characters involved.

The film also smartly plays with expectations and conventions of the high-school film, especially the romances which the film doesn’t feel the need to treat as a cheap device to fulfill the female characters as accomplished. In fact, it’s to be lauded that the film finds a good balance between romantic encounters and also never pandering to girls as romantically needy creatures. After all, these are girls in a punk-rock band.

Linda Linda Linda also doesn’t bother to completely explain the rocky past of the band. There’s been a huge fallout at the beginning, but the film is more interested in focusing on the four core characters and using the outlying subplot as simply a running gag as “that event” which never gets talked about, and once it is, the film jokes that it really makes little sense.

It’s the payoff that makes the film so delightful. It’s not grandiose, swelling or epic, but simultaneously a small triumph and a moment to wonder at what the girls might have lost by being in this band. It’s this sense of balance that makes Linda Linda Linda exhilarating without feeling cheap or overwrought, building to an emotional ending that is warranted and satisfying.

It’s been a while since a film has made me laugh as much and smile as much as Linda Linda Linda does. It’s a cinematic delight, a radiant gem with an infectious joy. And it’s smart enough and strong enough to never fall into a moment that feels cheap or unwarranted. Here’s to the beauty that can’t be photographed and the delight I can’t fully put into words.

© 2012 James Blake Ewing

Domestic trouble and creative struggle mingle in writer/director Lee Chang-dong’s unusual film Poetry. A stark, almost clinical drama is juxtaposed with a whimsical, cheeky story of artistic pursuits. The way they synthesis into something, well, poetic gives Poetry and ethereal quality.

The elderly Mija (Yun Jeong-Hie) find herself in a troubling situation when she discovers her grandson, Jongwook (Lee Da-Wit), who lives with her, is responsible for a horrific crime. As she tries to figure out a way to resolve this problem, she also faces artistic troubles when she aspires to take a poetry class at the local community center while inspiration constantly eludes her.

Mija is presented the idea of poetry being a way of truly seeing things for what they are, for taking things one has “seen” before and truly seeing and understanding the truth of it. This leads to wry humor where Mija intently looks at things at awkward moments, so lost in the hopes of finding inspiration in inappropriate contexts. But the important thing is that she’s trying to see with new eyes.

Poetry invites the audience to become a part of this process by constantly adding detail and nuance to the scenes. Most sequences involve action going on around the characters, things that may or may not be of interest beyond the main actors of the frame. Are these aspects crucial to the story? Perhaps not, but the film adds that dimension which invites the viewer to look at see as well.

Where Poetry becomes complicated is in some of Mija’s later actions. In particular, a song she sings at a karaoke joint and a surprising change of heart begin to invite her into being a different kind of victim to her grandson’s crime. While there is certainly a strain of Mija trying to understand this crime and she seems to be aligning herself with the victim, the film verges on the edge of misogyny.

However, it could be possible that this is part of Mija’s exploration to truly come to terms with the crime of her grandson, to see that truth, the one she must do more than simply imagine. Throughout the film she’s faced with this incongruency between others who know of the crime, both those who will not fully acknowledge it or those who fail to give it the proper weight and gravitas it deserves.

Later in the film, Mija expresses offense at a fellow poetry lover who constantly inserts crass jokes into his analysis of pomes. She holds that if poetry is about beauty, than this man is ruining poetry. It’s an expression of Mija’s real problem is that while she can find the beauty in the outside world, she cannot find it in her own person life, hence the lack of inspiration.

Poetry’s ability to bring both the beautiful and revolting together demonstrates one of the core struggles of art. Creativity and art often leans toward beauty, but we live in the shadow of evil. How can we see that beauty when the sun is blocked? Poetry struggles with that question and while it finds an answer, it’s an answer that’s just as tough as the question.

© 2012 James Blake Ewing

It what could have easily been the quickest cash-in of 2011, Fast Five shifts into fifth gear and offers up a film that is more about well-developed character relationships than car chases. It’s the flip side of Mission: Impossible –Ghost Protocol, a film lean on action, but high on developing a memorable and engaging ensemble cast.

The returning trio of the film makes up the emotional core of the film. After busting Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) from prison, his sister, Mia (Jordana Brewster) and her boyfriend ex-federal agent Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) run off on their own in and take up a job in Brazil which the two only scarcely escape with their lives when Dom shows up to distract the double-crossers. The deal gone bad pits them against Hernan Reyes (Joaquim de Almeida), the seemingly untouchable drug lord.

It’s this premise that sets up the one last job which will allow the trio to live as a peaceful family in anonymity. In order to put it off, Dom hires the best leading criminals. From the constant one-upmanship of frenemies Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej Parker (Ludacris) to the playful professional romance of chameleon Han Lue (Sung Kang) and gun export Gisele Harabo (Gal Gadot), the film takes the times to make these arcatypes memorable, not so much in there attributes but in their relationships between each other.

But the show-stealing performance is by Dwayne Johnson who plays the role of uber-macho special agent Luke Hobbs who’s tasked with arresting Dom, Mia and Brian. Johnson chews and spits out every line with an infectious bravado and he carries himself as if he’s at least a hundred pounds bigger than his own already considerable physique. The end result is an unrestrained, gleefully cheesy performance that Johnson embraces wholeheartedly, making it one of the most enjoyable and infectious performances of the year.

Even the film’s potentially throwaway villain, Hernan, is memorable for his sneaky approach to business and his philosophy of how the charade of benevolence is simply a trap to keep a population dependent upon his malicious graciousness.  He’s a character who gets little screen-time, but doesn’t stop him from being a provoking and interesting villains.

In fact, the film spends so much time with the characters and teasing out their relationships that the film’s action setpieces aren’t always as well realized or executed as they could be. Part of this is due to the overreliance on CGI which makes some of the conceptually engaging moments of the film ruined by the cheap, plastically feel of artificiality.

Still, director Justin Lin refrains enough from the overindulgent kinetic editing and shaky camera of Fast & Furious to make the action watchable and enjoyable in Fast Five. More reliance of wide shots and a good eye for keeping action in proportion makes this a much-improved action film. Where theaction excels is with using action to hide, divert or usurp audience expectations. One of the film’s best moments is when it builds to an action scene and simply cuts to the aftermath, creating a playful, cheeky moment which keeps the audience on their toes.

Fast Five is a blast. While it’s not nearly as much action as Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol, the ensemble cast is so enjoyable and the film so fun that it’s actually nice that the film spends more time with the characters than lost in a sea of crashes, fights and explosions. While it’s not the most meticulously crafted action film of recent years, it’s probably the most fun.

© 2012 James Blake Ewing

I don’t remember the exact context, but I do still have memory of the feeling when I came to the deep realization that it is impossible to live in the present because all thought, all response, all understanding exists in the past, even if it’s an infinitesimally small distance in-between that present moment and the first thought it elicits. We are ever presently engaging in the past and it’s this revelation that forms the foundation of Patricio Guzmán’s documentary Nostalgia for the Light.

His entry point is the thriving research being done in the Atacama Desert in Chile by astronomers. These scientists that gaze into the celestial realms often depicted as visions of the possible future of humanity are actually forever engaged in studying the past. Even the light of the closest interstellar body, the moon takes moments to reach Earth, leaving these astronomers studying lights that reach us after minutes, hours and days.

These studies of the heaven are tied to the earth as Guzmán looks at the equally thriving scientific research of archeologists who are uncovering ancient artifacts pristinely preserved in the dry climate of Chile. Both archeologists and astronomers are still looking to answer the same basic question rooted deeply in the past: where did we come from?

While the scientific inquiry provides an interesting bridge into this philosophical pontification of the importance of the past, where the film takes off into the most fascinating and intriguing material in the film is when Guzmán shines a light on the paradox of Chile, a place in which scientifically thrives in a study of history, but one in which the government hopes to repress the dark past of atrocity which still haunts Chile to this day.

Guzmán approaches this material in two different ways, the first is by delving into the history of what happens, with a basic overview of the history, outlining a very generic depiction of the totalitarian regime that took over Chile and threw many political prisoners into concentration camps. Guzmán isn’t interested so much in the details, but how this past has effected and formed Chileans today.

He explores this notion by going into personal testimonies of various people who were affected by these concentration camps, the son of one family forced into exile, the daughter of two parents who were imprisoned and killed, one of the political prisoners who survived and a number of the wives, daughters and sisters of the prisoners who have scoured the desert for almost two decades searching for the remains of their loved ones.

In addition to all these explorations of the past, Guzmán weaves his own personal history into the story, a native of Chile himself, he offers occasional insights into his own past to make an addendum. But most of these interludes are ruminations on his childhood, moments from the past that he aesthetically ties to the vessels he uses to explore the overarching theme of the past.

Nostalgia for the Light is a tightly woven tapestry, a document that illuminates the importance of history not by preserving one particular artifact of history, but by examining why our past is so important and how it impacts and changes who we are and how we relate to the world. It’s a beautiful, tantalizing illustration of a deep philosophical truth, a film of deep illumination and piercing insight.

© 2012 James Blake Ewing