Category: Uncategorized

This semester, I’m glad to take an introductory film class with professor Cohen. One of the most awesome parts of this course is that every Tuesday night, we have a film screening section during which the whole class watch a selected film together, and the film would be discussed in class on the following day. Last week, our first showing was Chinatown, a 1974 film directed by Roman Polanski based on the screenplay by Robert Towne.

The large context of the story of Chinatown was drawn from the true historical event, California Water Wars. However, Polanski and Towne smartly chose a small angle by telling the story from the point of view of a private detective, Gittes (Jack Nicholson). In the process of investigating into an extramarital affair, Gittes gets involved into a mysterious murder and he consequentially finds out a huge conspiracy behind the drought of the city.

The cinematography is great. My favorite scene is the one in which Mrs. Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) looks out of the window while waiting for Gittes, leaving her back to the audience. As the widow of the murder victim, she is wearing an appropriate black dress, impatiently folding her arms and holding a cigarette in her right hand. Her elegant silhouette stands out from the horizontal lines of the blinds. This scene is so breathtaking and the silhouette immediately reminds me of the Montmartre star, Jane Avril, depicted by Toulouse Lautrec in his poster Divan Japonais.

The acting is also noteworthy. Mrs. Mulwray would light a cigarette every time she feels nervous or disturbed. This detail is not quite noticeable, but it helps articulate the personality and inner state of the character and makes the character much more credible. An interesting counterpart could be found in a driving scene in the latter half of the film, where Gittes fails to light a cigarette four times as he was talking to Mrs. Mulwray. This detail, similarly, accurately portrays the anxiety of the character.

Overall, this film is marvelous. I’m impressed by the fantastic technique and impeccable performance, and some meaningful lines and scenes really gave me pause. I would like to watch it again in the near future.

Well I’ve been reading about Dharma Bums, which are actually different than your everyday lazy hopeless bums; these ones hide in shacks near the feet of mountains and live intentionally and somewhat modestly and quite studiously, with big orange crates full of wise books, crates that double as low tables to kneel on straw mats at. Occasionally they take up towering backpacks with pots and pans and spring run whistle up the mountain, not a care in the world but for falling off (which is impossible), and therefore staying away from cliffs and following the true gleaming river up to its deep lake source. Past the lake, up to where you can see infinite pits of blackish indigo within the big still pool of fresh and clear blue water, where its depths stretch to buried geyser springs, up to the mountain’s plateau to yell and dance in the howling music wind. And not a second after they’ve gotten their kicks it’s back down the rock face, leap-running in bounds over thickets and rolling tumble stones at a fairly steep but not deadly incline.

The other day, as I roiled over a missed opportunity for good karma I contemplated whether passing up good karma is bad karma and I looked mostly down to keep the snow shards out of my eyes (I was outside in blizzard) and noticed on either side of me was a small white mountain range, an endless scale model of valleys and peaks and white sediment, jagged cliffs and vast plains that stretched for small miles. I felt large and swift as I traversed the horizon in bounds, occasionally hurdling summits to cross the street or stepping right into them leaving monstrous craters in the untouched frontier and I felt like discovering something. It was at this exact moment that I came across the largest snow mountain of them all in my squinting giant eyes which were now wide open and full of snow crystals going supernova on the surface of my contact lenses and before I knew it I was up the side, messy climbing and my steps sinking in to the soft clean frigid rock but after about twelve lunges I was at the top, up on the roof of the world, my world, or at least Ann Arbor which is a bubble, and the air was definitively crisper and a little sweet and very dry. I looked around from my cold shining precipice and there was a furtive man in the distance, probably a hundred small miles away but I could see him clear as day with his leather jacket and one of those plaid lumberjack caps with the earmuffs attached. Thinking he was a fellow adventurer I yodeled to him what I thought his name might be which was Johnny Dean and he looked around scared and didn’t even see me I was so high up. I said it again, this time waving my arms and jumping off the ledge, not a reckless jump but more a jump-step, a Dharma Bum jump descent is what I had in mind and I made it a good half-three quarter way down in this manner when I hit a soft spot and my foot sunk up to the knee in cold rock powder. I swayed and fell in a large poof of fallen frozen stars, which aren’t as sharp as you’d think, and it didn’t even hurt and I laughed the whole way down. I made a sleeping angel laying right where I had landed and looked around for Johnny Dean to help me out so that there’d be no handprint in the middle, but he was long gone so I harrumphed and said so long to my brief memory of him and his frightened eyes, and bounced on down the slick sidewalk while my angel slept on, a little marred, but I didn’t mind and neither did he.

Before I knew it I was passing the southern range of small white landscapes, open empty fields bordered by spinal crags that spilled their excess stardust in little flowing tributaries down to rolling flats. It was almost a shame to step inside the echo stairwell into steaming hall of strange odors, I wasn’t cold at all in fact I was sweating, into my apartment where I promptly disrobed and lay on the floor face down, arms up meditating on my journey for exactly twenty one seconds. I felt certain that my Dharma Bum pals would be proud of this enlightenment which I didn’t even plan or meditate for, it just happened and such are the juiciest fruits of this dry life.

Our family has always been moving—not necessarily as in changing homes, but moving as in constantly in motion. Each of the places we lived in was little more than a base camp we would return in between trips. This is mostly my mother’s influence—her previously occupation as a flight attendant had made her aware of her instinctive love for finding herself in new places, a trait that I inherited.

Our base camp is filled with evidence of this shared love, but it is most present on our door because the inside of our door is covered from head to toe with magnets we’ve acquired from various places and times. Welcome to our home—be careful not to slam the door! Yes, we know that the steel door is heavy. It’s made heavier by the weight of the pieces of us it carries.

The Yosemite magnet in the top left corner reminds me of the comic resourcefulness our family mustered when our car ran out of gas in the middle of the mountain road at 4 a.m. I remember being scared witless of the pure darkness, surrounded by nothing but nature sounds. The Cancun magnet? The best things in the world don’t come from books, even if they are highly recommended travel guides that speak well of a certain 5-star hotel. Even though our hotel was right on the beach, it’s the view from the top of the Chichen Itza that will be forever imprinted in my memory.

I haven’t yet picked out an Ann Arbor magnet that will one day take its place on our family’s eccentric version of the world map. I’m still working on building the meaning it will carry, shaping the parts of myself it will come to represent. Meanwhile, I’m building my own welcome map on my dorm door, filling it with pieces of my college life. My college map is a little different from our family map back at home in that it has much more than just places—it has people, events, changes…and the random things that just sort of stuck. Each day as I walk out and in this door, I think about all the experiences I’ve already collected, and take in all the empty space yet to be filled. My doors are visual representations of all the things I am made of. As I journey in and out of our door each day, it gives me the courage to keep exploring, to keep adding new magnets on the door that leads to the place I call my home.

Going in to see The Wolf of Wall Street on Christmas day was something I had been looking forward to since I had first seen the trailer (any movie trailer that thumps along to a Kanye song usually gets me pretty pumped). Unfortunately, my beloved Matin Scorsese let me down on this one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m by no means a prude. I love Breaking Bad, Tarantino, and even zesty dramas like good old Cruel Intentions, but The Wolf of Wall Street lacked a substance that even fluffy Cruel Inentions pulls off. I understand that the point is to depict the ultimate self-destruction of an individual so consumed by his own greed that he completely deteriorates, but this story has been done before in films like Wall Street and its inevitable sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. So, to make it stand out, the writers chocked this tale full of graphic sex, drugs, and party scenes to the point where even I was uncomfortable.

The climactic demise of the protagonist culminated in an almost too casual domestic rape scene. This moment is extremely underplayed compared to the excessive explicit imagery appearing throughout the film. To me, this was the worst thing this criminal had done the entire movie and it was left completely ambiguous and uncontroversial. This may have been an intentional choice by the production team in attempt to make this final horrific act stand out against the earlier glorified and glamorized depictions of misbehavior. However, if that is truly the case, they were unsuccessful because most viewers were left unsure whether it was a rape at all, myself included. Instead of standing out, this deeply important scene fell by the wayside.

As a filmmaker,  if you’re going to make a three hour movie, you better be adding moments that are really worthwhile. Scorsese just lost me at so many points in the film and I walked out of the theater feeling like I had made no connections with any of the characters. The writing was shallow, the characters were not relatable, the soundtrack didn’t make sense with the scenes. Overall it was really disappointing compared to Scorsese’s usual quality of production shown in some of my favorite films like Goodfellas and The Departed. These movies included excess sex and violence, but this was balanced out by the quality of the story.

Despite my overall disappointment with the film, I will say that the acting and cinema were very well done. Unfortunately, the writing failed to deliver the quality promised by the trailer and thus the shining acting went mostly unnoticed in my eyes. I’d be really interested in reading the autobiography of the real Jordan Belfort, which served as the inspiration for the film, to see if it contains any redeemable elements of good storytelling that are missing from the film.