The last two movies of Leonardo DiCaprio center around two classic philosophical views of reality. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (based on Dennis Lehane’s eponymous novel) uses Kantian a posteriori, that what we know about the world is subject to our perceptions and thus not entirely objective. Christopher Nolan’s Inception builds on Cartesian dream argument, about the limited means of distinguishing illusion from reality.

I watched Shutter Island on its last show in town, and lost the chance to rewatch. Inception, I watched its first show in town and then again five days later. I am likely to have missed and misunderstood several things in both the movies but as enjoyably ambiguous as both tried to remain I found the former more interesting.

The Kantian philosophy of subjective reality is not new to cinema. Roman Polanski’s Rosemary Baby and to some extent Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix are among the most celebrated and classic examples. I also recall Mark Pellington’s Arlington Road, Joseph Ruben’s Forgotten and Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan, all of which have parents fighting desperately against some universal perceptions in order to save their sons or daughters. Shutter Island takes a very different approach than all these. By setting it on an island filled with certified mad men and untrustworthy authorities Scorsese directly brings forth the classroom discussion about the justification of a mad man’s perception of the world. The reason I find this interesting is because it is only an exaggeration of the mild differences between the perceptions of two uncertified individuals (sane or otherwise), something that is most exceptionally handled in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly.

I have never seen the Cartesian dream argument in cinema before. Inception uses another classroom discussion, about reality possibly being a part of an infinite dream sequence. Christopher Nolan’s biggest nod to the philosophy comes in the form of Mal/Cobb’s totem, a top which is to spin indefinitely within dreams but stop spinning in the real world. In a world following the laws of physics — dream or real — every top is to stop spinning at some point according to the second law laws of thermodynamics and thus Cobb’s totem will stop spinning in a dream just as in reality. There are things like seamless sharing of the dream environment (how?), gravity transcending dreams and the subconscious (what’s with that?), and a single global limbo (like 4chan is on the Internet?) which I found hard to digest. Even after willing to overlook these and some others I didn’t find the movie memorable beyond a level because Nolan — unlike Scorsese — himself overlooked a quote that Cobb makes, something about emotions being the vehicle of ideas. His investment in the emotions wasn’t sufficient to make me care about the motivations of any of the characters, including that of Cobb’s desire to meet his children. Even though I was thoroughly entertained by the plot, the subtle hints, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s lithe manouevres through the zero-gravity dream scenes, and even though I wouldn’t mind watching the movie again.

The reason why I care more about the Kantian philosophy than the Cartesian one is because of the significance of perceptions whether the world is real or not and because there is nothing much I can do about the latter. Not that I could or would about the former. Philosophy is one of my weak subjects, mainly because I never went through a GRE word list. I find the need to reach for the dictionary twice to read any given sentence tedious. I go round and round, looking for the same word again and again as much for the same argument. I haven’t yet the leisure in life to deeply think of such matters while chewing air.

Amazon Ads:

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the few works that I read more than twice, watched more than twice, read the book first and then watched the movie and still didn’t get disappointed. Harper Lee’s novel is also my default gift, the way some gift the Bible when they can’t think of anything else.

The novel is dearer to me than all the other child-protagonist novels that I’ve read, including those by Mark Twain and JK Rowling. Even though Scout, Jem and Dill all together have hardly an adventure that can compete with those of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter’s. Even though their thriller isn’t as thrilling as the others’. Even though their presence to the world is seemingly inconsequential. Perhaps for those very reasons.

What Scout narrates about that summer creates in me the most intense nostalgia of a childhood that I seldom dwell in. I find it effortless to imagine walking beside those three with our hands on each other’s shoulders, to pull Scout’s hair, to grab Jem’s collar, to kick Dill’s shins, to grow up along with them. Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Harry Potter are great fun, but I didn’t belong to their circle as a child.

When I think of the narration, I can hear Kim Stanley whispering in my ears. It is one of the most hauntingly beautiful voices, right there beside Joan Fontaine’s Rebecca. The movie opens with the most creative title sequence I can remember. And Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch. Not getting tired of superlatives, am I?

When I read somewhere that Pauline Kael described Atticus as “virtuously dull”, I had to agree and to face the question of why he was still one of my favorite characters. “There just didn’t seem to be anyone or anything Atticus couldn’t explain.” That’s why. Atticus is seen through the eyes of Scout, his daughter. Most children below ten probably still feel that way about their dads. I hope they do. When I was ten my dad was the calmest, wisest, strongest, noblest and the most loving man there could possibly be in the whole world. He hasn’t changed much, though I have. Harper Lee through her vivid, humorous, and sensitive writing created a magnificent lens to see the world through.

Shush now. I actually wished to type a few lines from the novel on the occasion of its 50th anniversary and this whole post is a tiny thin excuse for it. I may be breaking a law or two here. I consider the following scene the most powerful one I’ve ever read and watched.

———-

“Hey, Atticus?”

I thought he would have a fine surprise, but his face killed my joy. A flash of plain fear was going out of his eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light.

There was a smell of stale whisky and pig-pen about, and when I glanced around I discovered that these men were strangers. They were not the people I saw last night. Hot embarrassment shot through me; I had leaped triumphantly into a ring of people I had never seen before.

Atticus got up from his chair, but he was moving slowly, like an old man. He put the newspaper down very carefully, adjusting its creases with lingering fingers. They were trembling a little.

“Go home, Jem,” he said. “Take Scout and Dill home.”

We were accustomed to prompt, if not always cheerful acquiescence to Atticus’s instructions, but from the way he stood Jem was not thinking of budging.

“Go home, I said.”

Jem shook his head. As Atticus’s fists went to his hips, so did Jem’s, and as they faced each other I could see little resemblance between them: Jem’s soft brown hair and eyes, his oval face and snug-fitting ears were our mother’s, contrasting oddly with Atticus’s greying black hair and square-cut features, but they were somehow alike. Mutual defiance made them alike.

“Son, I said go home.”

Jem shook his head.

“I’ll send him home,” a burly man said, and grabbed Jem roughly by the collar. He yanked Jem nearly off his feet.

“Don’t you touch him!” I kicked the man swiftly. Bare-footed, I was surprised to see him fall back in real pain. I intended to kick his shin, but aimed too high.

“That’ll do, Scout.” Atticus put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t kick folks. No –” he said, as I was pleading justification.

“Ain’t nobody gonna do Jem that way,” I said.

“All right, Mr Finch, get ‘em outa here,” someone growled. “You got fifteen seconds to get ‘em outa here.”

In the midst of this strange assmebly, Atticus stood trying to make Jem mind him. “I ain’t going,” was his steady answer to Atticus’s threats, requests, and finally, “Please Jem, take them home.”

I was getting a bit tired of that, but felt Jem had his own reasons for doing as he did, in view of his prospects once Atticus did get home. I looked around the crowd. It was a summer’s night, but the men were dressed, most of them, in overalls and denim shirts buttoned up the collars. I thought they must be cold-natured, as their sleeves were unrolled and buttoned at the cuffs. Some wore hats pulled firmly down over their ears. They were sullen-looking, sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours. I sought once more for a familiar face, and at the centre of the semi-circle I found one.

“Hey, Mr Cunningham.”

The man did not hear me, it seemed.

“Hey, Mr Cunningham. How’s your entailment gettin’ along?”

Mr Walter Cunningham’s legal affairs were well known to me; Atticus had once described them at length. The big man blinked and hooked his thumbs in his overall straps. He seemed uncomfortable; he cleared his throat and looked away. My friendly overture had fallen falt.

Mr Cunningham wore no hat, and the top half of his forehead was white in contrast to his sun-scorched face, which led me to believe that he wore one most days. He shifted his feel, clad in heavy worn shoes.

“Don’t you remember me, Mr Cunningham?” I’m Jean Jouise Finch. You bought us some hickory nuts one time, remember?” I began to sense the futility one feels when unacknowledged by a chance acquaintance.

“I go to school with Walter,” I began again. “He’s your boy, ain’t he? Ain’t he, sir?”

Mr Cunningham was moved to a faint nod. He did know me, after all.

“He’s in my grade,” I said, “and he does right well. He’s a good boy,” I added, “a real nice boy. We brought him home for dinner one time. Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won’t you?”

Atticus had said it was the polite thing to talk to people about what they were interested in, not about what you were interested in. Mr Cunningham dispalyed no interest in his son, so I tackled his entailment once more in a last-ditch effort to make him feel at home.

“Entailments are bad,” I was advising him, when I slowly awoke to the fact that I was addressing the entire aggregation. The men were all looking at me, some had their mouths half-open. Atticus had stopped poking at Jem: they were standing together beside Dill. Their attention amounted to fascination. Atticus’ month, even, was half-open, an attitude he had once described as uncouth. Our eyes me and he shut it.

“Atticus, I was just sayin’ to Mr Cunningham that entailments are bad an’ all that, but you said not to worry, it takes a long time sometimes … that you all’d ride it out together …” I was slowly drying up, wondering what idiocy I had committed. Entailments seemed all right enough for living-room talk.

I began to feel sweat gathering at the edges of my hair; I could stand anything but a bunch of people looking at me. They were quite still.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Atticus said nothing. I looked around and up at Mr Cunningham, whose face was equally impassive. Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders.

“I’ll tell him you said hey, little lady,” he said.

Then he straightened up and waved a big paw. “Let’s clear out,” he called. “Let’s get going, boys.”

This Friday evening a friend who wanted to get out of the office told me that he hadn’t been to a theatre in a long time. Actually I haven’t been to a theatre in a long time and he hasn’t been to one in a very long time. We decided to watch some movie, any movie. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2 couldn’t be the one for various reasons – I watched it this morning – and after striking through every other movie playing in the nearest multiplex I stumbled upon Allen Coulter’s Remember Me. The title was desperate enough to match our impulsive neediness, and I vaguely remembered Roger Ebert’s review.

The hour-long schmooze before the delayed start and the three-hour-long drunk confessions after it overshadow the movie, but they didn’t need to. I wouldn’t anyway remember anything about the movie apart from its title. The good thing about the movie is that it is mediocre enough to shove me out of my slumber and tempt me to at least show the snarkier side of me. Though being snarky is my first nature, as I show every now and then, it is hardly satisfying being so for an insignificant movie that no one would remember. I am going to try something “different”, as we Indians – filmmakers and moviegoers – like to say.

Within a few minutes of the movie I got bored enough to embark on my own journey making vague references from any given scene. It was largely a purposeless and unconscious act of recalling recent movies and books through Remember Me. Being a fan of Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past (which I haven’t read) and of the concept of involuntary memory, I found the exercise engrossing enough.

Update: Below is only a list of several things that I remembered, and not a description of any of the memories corresponding to them. This makes it boring. It makes sense to delete the post, but I’m tempted to preserve it for posterity. If it stirs any of your own memories, that may give this a little more value.

When the opening scene was set in 1991 and the next scene in 2001 I remembered the many anachronisms that commonly feature in the Goofs section of IMDB.

During the introductory scene of Robert Pattinson several girls sitting beside me gasped in delight on seeing his face. When he bent across a bed to reach for the phone his pajamas fell below the hips. I remembered all the metrosexuals consciously buying low waist jeans to ostentatiously wear and unconsciously walk around in them. Once I saw his face clearly I wondered whether he looked paler in the Twilight series and I couldn’t remember how he looked as Cedric Diggory. Most of all I remembered the year-old interview in which Stephen King declared that Stephenie Meyer couldn’t write worth a darn.

When I saw Lena Olin in the next scene I remembered her tattoo in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate. I was saddened to see how much older she has become in a decade and remembered Kamal Hasan in Gautham Menon’s Raghavan. Later when it was mentioned that her character is a social service worker she reminded me of Urmila Matondkar in Jahnu Barua’s Maine Gandhi Ko Nahin Mara.

During the post-funeral scene when all members pieces of the Hawkins family sat at a table, I remembered JD Salinger’s Catch in the Rye. When it was clear that the only person Tyler cared for was his sister Caroline, the image grew more intense. I quickly wrote off Tyler as the real empty phony, but continued to think of little Phoebe Caulfield whenever Caroline entered a scene. I also remembered Coraline, which I’ve neither read nor watched. (After watching the entire movie, I wish it had been about Caroline Hawkins, about her loneliness and “freakishness” and her way of dealing with the tragedies in her fragile life, because that character had a vivid story arc and because Ruby Jerins can act.)

During the classroom discussion in a Global Politics class about morals and ethics in the recent wake of terrorism (2001, before Sep 11th) I remembered the classroom discussion about the nature of fantasies in a Philosophy class in Alan Parker’s The Life of David Gale. I wondered why there is hardly ever a second discussion in a similar setting in such movies.

When I heard Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich coming from the Craigs’ TV, I was sure that Sgt. Craig must have had a better time watching that movie than I would watching this one and than Ally would with Tyler on their first date.

When Ally started getting intimate with Tyler, I wondered why and how many girls fall for the damaged types. I invariably remembered Dr. Lisa Cuddy, Dr. Allison Cameron and Stacy Warner, and winked at Dr. Gregory House. Of course, Tyler only resembles a violent vampire eternally sucked by teenage angst. Later, whenever Ally looked happily in love with Tyler, immediately after his displays of anger, I was reminded of the few such women I’ve heard about in real life and felt sorry for them.

When I saw Chris Cooper sulking alone in his apartment as Sgt. Craig, I remembered his several lonesome characters like in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty and Billy Ray’s Breach, and realized that I’ve never seen him play an upbeat character.

When the interval began I remembered an old Little Hearts advertisement. Reporter: “Which part of the movie did you like the most?” Moviegoer: “Intruvall.”

When Caroline was shading a drawing with a pencil while talking to her brother’s new girlfriend the soft scratching reminded me of couples rocking on beds, and then the scene where young Forrest Gump sits on the front yard listening to the sounds coming out of the room with Mrs. Gump and the principal inside, and inevitably of the subsequent grunts that the boy himself makes.

Pierce Brosnan showed a paunch in the movie. I don’t know whether it was a prosthetic, but the word (and he himself) reminded me of his panache, more as Thomas Crown than as James Bond. When Charles Hawkins missed his daughter’s art gallery exhibition, I imagined the irony of his Thomas Crown character enamored by Claude Monet. When he finally took Caroline to the museum, I remembered James Stewart looking dazed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. When he argued with Tyler and Ally that some Yankee team member was not fat but only big-boned, I may have laughed louder and longer than anybody else in the theatre, thinking about Eric Cartman’s claim that he was not fat but big-boned and Stanley Marsh’s retort that Jay Leno’s chin was big-boned and that Cartman was a big fat ass. When the family album scrolled on Charles’ office desktop, I remembered Brosnan’s deceased first wife and their three sons. (The word ‘deceased’ is used in the movie once, by Chris Cooper.) When Tyler told Ally that he came from a family of Irish musicians, I wished that they had kept the Irish accent of Pierce Brosnan. The Irish connection sprang several other memories like its great works of literature (I recently completed James Joyce’ Dubliners. Involuntary memories play a significant role in his works like Dubliners and Ulysses.), the current golden age of Irish crime, the beautiful Irish accents, of how Meryl Streep disappointed me with her accent in Pat O’Connor’s Dancing at Lughnasa, and of the Magdalene Asylums.

During the scene in which Tyler was sitting in a theatre, apparently wondering why he is sitting there, I empathized with him. (Or did the director empathize with the audience?) I remembered another recent mirroring of the character in a movie with the audience, in a scene in James Cameron’s Avatar.

Towards the end of the movie, I remembered that namedropping books and writers was regular early on in the movie and quickly died down. Rereading this very post, I realized that it may have been for the best.

When one of the main characters died at the end of the movie, I thought not about Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay, but about K Balachander’s antulEni katha and Mark Rydell’s Intersection. I have been particularly impressed by the latter movie (which I never saw completely), where the death of a character significantly alters the outcome of the movie, and it was not how the character died but under what circumstances the character died that made a difference. After thinking for a long time I also remembered VN Aditya. In all his movies that I’ve seen he gets the hero or heroine stabbed and then promptly recovered, and it felt insignificant in all of those movies. In Remember Me as well, the death is in the Sep 11 attacks. “What a croc of shit!” I thought, and remembered the wonderful monologue in Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman. It would’ve made no difference had that character died of dysentery (like in Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima), for the aftermath is only a montage of closed ones dealing with the death in due course of time. This also reminded me that I haven’t yet read any Sep 11 literature, and decided that John Updike’s Terrorist should be an especially good choice.

After walking out of the theatre I remembered that I seldom watch movies about teen angst as I can neither appreciate it nor tolerate it. This movie actually doesn’t fall under teen angst, for neither of the main romantic pair is a teen (both are college students), but the movie seems targeted on teens.

Amazon Ads:

I was driving home one night. I stopped at a red signal, still thinking furiously about the movie that I had just watched. There was a long queue growing with cars coming out of the multiplex that I had driven out of. The driver in the car behind me got impatient and started honking. I tried not to let it bother me. The signal time was unusually short. I could see him in the rearview mirror, honking relentlessly, with his wife beside him. I pulled up the window glasses but my ears could still feel the blaring horn. Did he think that I was a retard who couldn’t tell red from green? It got on my nerves. I wanted to step out of my car, walk to his, and bang his head against the steering again and again while viciously looking into the eyes of his wife. I was scared. I turned up the stereo and clenched my fists around the steering.

I felt the constant presence of the movie at the back of my mind for the next couple of days. I felt its presence when I read about another bombing. I felt its presence when I encountered a reckless salesman in an electronics store. I felt its presence when I was chopping vegetables with the knife. A few days later when I sat down in front of the laptop to write about the movie, I quickly skipped it after a little pondering and instead watched a rerun of South Park to distract my thoughts.

Among all the movies that I watched during PIFF 2010, Dominic Murphy’s White Lightnin’ is the one that haunted me the most. It is in black and white. It is probably the movie that haunted me more intensely than any other ever. I hoped that I would be able to write about it some day. It took me this long. I wasn’t processing it all along. I was only stalling.

White Lightnin’ is a movie based on the life of legendary “dancing outlaw” Jesco White. It opens with young Jesco huffing – glue, paint, gas, booze, anything with a distinct odour – and living through phantasmagorical nightmares and horrifying fantasies. A few minutes into the movie, he has already snuffed coke and too many other things, fought with too many kids, been to the juvenile prison too many times, and spent a good deal of his life in a mental asylum. Jesco lives with his large redneck family, including his famous father Donald Ray, in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. All his escapades are despite his father’s desperate attempts at thwarting them (which to me seemed weak), and the only thing that brings him sanity is when his father teaches him mountain dancing.

The father gets murdered in a gruesome manner, and this greatly worsens the already sensitive psyche of Jesco. It is an event that haunts him for the rest of his life. The doctor tells his mother that he will never be able to live without someone looking after him.

Within the first twenty minutes, while Jesco is having a meal in the asylum dormitory another ward show

I won’t tell you more about what happens. It might come across as only a spiral of violence which you must have realized by now anyway. While detractors may look at the movie as an ill-connected string of one gratuitously violent scene after another, that they all happen throughout a single man’s life, and that they are shown along with the rest of the events through his perspective make a great difference. There may be many lives like this, but this one is his.

Jesco is a character with surplus energy, an energy that is very well conveyed by the music and sound effects. He never finds a reliable way of releasing it regularly. He is content while mountain dancing on an eight by four piece of plywood while wearing his father’s shoes. He is on the edge of sanity while partying with his crazy girl. He has a slippery switch in his dark grey matter. It goes on without his consent, and then all hell breaks loose. He is aware of that switch. He struggles to find it, to control it, and finally to remove it. He gets increasingly religious. He quotes the Bible. He solders fine religious woodburnings. But something elusive keeps stepping on that insidious switch. As I saw him oscillating between hope and madness, I was acutely aware of my own ignorance of that chaos and the emptiness of my empathy.

It is a bold script by Eddy Moretti and Shane Smith. I guess it comes with the territory for someone who founded the Vice magazine. The movie works because of the excellent performance by Edward Hogg who gets under the skin of Jesco White with his big expressive eyes. Clearly the movie has been overlooked. I hope that at least the fans of Carrie Fisher will be tempted to give it a try. When Edward Hogg becomes the star that many are hoping he would, the movie might get a few more patrons. I see the movie as a rare thorough (and necessary) documentation of violence through the eyes of an anguished perpetrator.

I read all I could about Jesco White, including a fine essay by Jeff Stover and a fan’s day out with him. He is very much alive, and very much seems to be the character that he was portrayed as. The eighteen-year-old documentary “Dancing Outlaw” must have helped as well. I can’t find the resources that I’ve previously read, but I remember reading that Jesco White himself helped while writing the script. As a man who truly struggled (struggles) with depression, addiction and other “distorders”, I wonder if most of the events in the movie are his attempt at exorcizing the demons in his head.

Image Source: Amazon

Amazon Ads:

The day after the big night. The day after a decade of Oscars. This is a better time than most other to air my mixed feelings about awards in the acting categories (hereafter called acting awards) given my interest in fiction.

While the deservingness of awards are eternally debatable, awards play a role in reminding us of some notable events of any year. I tend to remember the acting awards more than any other awards. Because I love and root for the stars who bring those characters to life. Because I can appreciate and prefer character-driven stories to plot-driven and drivel-driven ones. Because I can more easily imagine myself having a conversation with them than imagine myself pondering great ideas or themes or crowds or angles.

I have watched 32 of the last 40 performances that won acting awards. The ones that I haven’t watched yet — including three that were announced last night — are from the movies Iris (2001), Monster’s Ball (2001), Dreamgirls (2006), La Vie en Rose (2007), There Will Be Blood (2007), Precious (2009), The Blind Side (2009) and Crazy Heart (2009). I have watched many others that won just the nominations, but it would overwhelm us all if we went into those statistics.

Anyway, as I thought about all those 40 characters it struck me that only 4 each from the leading actor and actress categories are fictitious. The remaining 12 characters are based on real people. Why is that? What does it mean? Every year Hollywood makes several biopics. Several, but a minority. Then how come some of these not only manage to get nominated but also win?

Apart from the given fact that the actors must have acted well, real characters have a great advantage. The writers and the actors start with a lot of material, from costumes to quirks to voices to unexplored depths. The actor can push limits to a great extent, lose or gain a few stone, grow hair or go bald, spend hours with the real fellow learning to play the piano, wear the underwear of the same brand that the real one did, do outrageous things that they wouldn’t normally do for a fictitious character. This gets the actor and the audience to believe that he or she has immersed into the character. The actor and the audience alike are willing to accept that there is something about this character that is unique, that is inexplicable, that is the way it is. And if you get it right, you get the award right?

I don’t mean to suggest that this is undeserving. Hollywood has got that part right about making biopics, about making in-depth character studies. Whether it is the writers’ inability to identify worthy protagonists, or the lack of freedom for them to do such things without getting into serious troubles, I haven’t yet seen that culture of making biopics take off in Indian cinema. I only wonder whether the award has been given to the actor because he or she has acted better than all others or because the actor has successfully delivered what we knew and expected from the character.

On the other hand, only 5 supporting characters of the last 20 that won are based on real people. If an original screenplay writer has a great character, they should probably write it as a supporting one.

Amazon Ads: