Press "Enter" to skip to content

Author: Bryant

LA Weekend

December 4, 2004
1 Comment

“What is there to do on a Friday night in LA?”

Go to a trendy Thai restaurant somewhere in West Hollywood. Flirt with the waitress, who turns out to be the lead in a new indie film directed by some guy who was discovered three months ago by Stephen Soderberg; she’s waiting to get experience so she can get further into the character. She invites you to an after-hours party thrown by Parker Posey. You get there, with her, but it turns out that Parker Posey lost all her indie cred when she appeared in Blade: Trinity so you and the waitress and a guy you meet at the party who plays bass for the best post-punk melodothrash band in Serbia all take off together in his original VW Beetle and wind up at a permanent floating poker game slash rave run by Wil Wheaton down in Venice Beach. He really digs finding out what you do and you and the waitress and the bass player and a hitchhiking chick who you picked up and who turns out to be an activist poet from Venezula on a speaking tour to raise money for the cause, you all go play some D&D with Wil as the GM. It rocks a lot. You fall asleep in the middle of the game and wake up sometime Saturday in a box at the Staples Center. There’s a cigar on your chest with a note — “You can play a rogue in my game any time, love, Wil!” You smoke the cigar while watching some kind of existential circus preparing for the evening’s show; while wandering out of the building later, you run into Arnold, who is smoking the same kind of cigar. He likes you because of this and offers you a job as an aide, but you turn it down because of moral qualms about the Kennedy family. As you make your way back home, you realize that the cigar was laced with some obscure hallucinogen, or maybe the street really is filled with mimes reenacting the siege of Stalingrad? It’s so hard to tell in LA. Finally you get home, where the waitress is waiting, and she made some soup in a really grounded down home kind of a way and it seems like the beginning of a beautiful friendship that will last at least for the rest of the day. Saturday night? Well, that’ll be a completely different story.

Forbode

December 2, 2004
2 Comments

“This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.”

Landscape of Thorns

Whip and chain

December 1, 2004
Leave a Comment

The Red Cross says conditions in Guantanamo Bay are problematic, but won’t confirm a New York Times report that said the Red Cross claims prisoners were effectively tortured.

The official White House response is not exactly conclusive: “We strongly disagree with any characterization that suggests the way detainees are being treated is inconsistent with the policies the president has outlined.” Well, that’s all very well and good, but it’s not entirely clear that it is inconsistent with the Red Cross claims. The President’s policies may or may not authorize actions that are effectively torture, after all.

Go back a few weeks, and you find official US reports regarding abuse at Guantanamo which mesh fairly well with much of what the Red Cross is saying. The parties responsible for events reported therein have been disciplined. The question boils down to whether or not that discipline has been sufficient to curb the problem or not; seems like the Red Cross is saying not.

Who’s telling the truth? Well, the actions described in those reports do not violate the recommendations in the Gonzales memos.

Get it right

November 28, 2004
Leave a Comment

Given the current state of the Ukraine, it is enlightening to look back on the history of Ukrainian nuclear weaponry. The Ukraine doesn’t have nuclear weapons because Senators Nunn and Lugar worked hard to convince Ukrainian leaders not to have nuclear weapons, backed up by government funding.

Funding for Cooperative Threat Reduction peaked under Clinton in 2000 at $475.5 million. In 2001, it dropped to $433.4 million. In 2002, it dropped to $403 million. More on this here (PDF).

Confessional

November 28, 2004
Leave a Comment

Embarrassingly, up until very recently I had not seen a lot of Wong Kar Wai. By which I basically mean none. But I am determined to correct my cinematic errors and last night, desperately needing something to clear my brain from the mediocrity that was Alexander, I dug around and came up with Days of Being Wild. It was the right choice; it’s haunting me.

It reminds me of the Bayeux Tapestry. Wong flattens out the passage of time, deliberately eschewing conventional sequential techniques. There’s no build-up, no climax to the scenes. Things happen, flat against the backdrop of the world. The four protagonists shuffle around, touch each others lives, talk in pairs, and shuffle again. Time passes like a metronome, without emphasis.

It reminds me of the 60s, not just because it’s set in the 60s, but because it breathes cool with every understated frame. Wong’s camera, aided and abetted by Christopher Doyle, glides from shot to shot. He has an unerring eye for the significant angles of everyone’s face. Maggie Cheung’s in particular, of course, but he doesn’t stint on Leslie Cheung’s spoiled handsomeness either. Set the pop star actors against Christopher Doyle’s superb cinematography, and you’ve got the most elegant movie in the world.

There’s this fine line Wong walks there: the actors are filmed as beings of glamour, but their characters are bit players living out ordinary lives. Which does not, mind you, deprive them of importance. That’s another underlying truth to the world Wong creates: people are important because love is important because connections are important. They recur, no matter how much one might hide from them. Wong’s a romantic.

In the end there’s a climax to the movie. It only resolves one story, though. Maggie Cheung and Andy Lau and Carina Lau and Jacky Cheung, they’re still floating in 60s Hong Kong, looking for ways to connect, finding little hope.

Days of Being Wild will be playing at the MFA in Boston, February 25 through March 1, 2004. Or cut to the chase and get it from Kino, either alone or as part of their Wong Kai Wai box set.