stand up stand true stand down stand around
2009-12-13 ~ 9:08 p.m.
Last weekend I went to see The White Ribbon, the new film from Michael Haneke. It's shot in beautiful black and white, and has a rich novelistic texture with lots of multi-dimensional characters, some of whom are sympathetic, others gradually revealed to be evil.
Despite this, it has essentially the same theme as the other Haneke films I've seen, Funny Games and Hidden. It's mainly about middle-class people having bizarre horrors inflicted on them, which are possibly motiveless but equally possibly just retribution. There's a bit more closure than with Hidden, both in terms of resolving the plot, and in the way it ends with World War One and Austria-Hungary getting crushed and nothing being the same ever again.
It's consistently interesting, with a stream of revelations and some moderately funny moments - in contrast most of the violence is hidden off-screen. At the same time, it lacks the visceral immediate quality of Funny Games, though it's less pointless than Hidden.
More recently I saw the Coen Brothers' latest, A Serious Man. It's better than the feeble, pointless, spluttering Burn After Reading, but less coherent and powerful than No Country For Old Men. It seems like a pastiche of the American Jewish novel (Bellow, Roth, etc). It's probably the most Jewish film ever made, way more than e.g. Annie Hall or Schindler's List or The Golem, from its opening scenes in Yiddish on. It's about a Jewish quantum physics lecturer facing divorce while waiting to hear if he gets tenure, and his son who's had his transistor radio conviscated by his schoolteacher and tries to get it back.
Britain's Leading Jewish Novelist Howard Jacobson wrote a thing for the Times attacking it for lacking emotion or heart or whatever, which is exactly the same criticism you could make of Jacobson, but it's fair. It also continues from Burn After Reading (and to a lesser degree No Country, which got very off-kilter in its second half) a refusal to have a proper narrative resolution, although you could read the ending as offering symbolic closure.
While it's hailed as the Coens doing something dramatically new, a lot of the film feels cliched: the main character ogling the sexy neighbour, the enigmatic rabbis, the other redneck neighbours, the sinister east-Asians. The school scenes could almost come out of The Simpsons; it recalls other suburban films of the period, like The Graduate and The Ice Storm. If it wasn't for the Jewishness it would be utterly generic (though that didn't hurt American Beauty).
It's not a bad film; there are funny moments and the production design is great, and good use of Jefferson Airplane. Fred Melamed gives a brilliant performance as the smug, manipulative suitor of the hero's wife, the sort of part you expect from the Coens, and I hope he gets a supporting actor nomination at least.
Midway through the film, there's a long, involved parable about a dentist, which turns out to not have any point at all, and that's pretty much the same way the film turns out. "God moves in mysterious ways" seems to be the message. Indeed he does. But unfortunately the ways the Coen brothers move are less mysterious.
I can't believe Paul McCartney is on X Factor. Surely he doesn't need the money (record sales, acclaim, etc). Maybe he fancies Dannii Minogue. But in the absence of any outstanding contestants, doubtless they need to up the celebrity contingent and having only JLS wouldn't cut it. I have no opinion on Joe winning it.
I tried to make baklava last week, but I didn't put enough nuts or sugar in it so it mainly tasted of butter, salted butter at that. I also bought cooking sherry, which I've used to good effect in making quick pasta sauces. Watch the way it sizzles!
I'm really not working very hard for my OU work. The exercises for this part are particularly ridiculous. We had to write 50 suspense-filled words about someone standing by a window, then (possibly in preparation for a career in modern cinema) write an inconclusive story about somebody looking for their dream home, and now it's write a story that's centred on a shopping list. After ruling out cucumber/condoms/KY jelly, or the ever-popular steak/Cava/Canestan, I think I'm going for some kind of kidnapping (duct tape, sandwiches, vodka, bandages, pickled walnuts). I don't know where the pickled walnuts come in, but I bought a jar of them and I don't know what to do.
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