I Seem To Watch A Lot Of Movies

Here's a list of my movie views so far this year, in the order I saw them (foreign names rendered in English):

Pulp Fiction (USA, 1994)
Rope (USA, 1948)
Mandabi (Senegal, 1968)
Lawrence of Arabia (UK, 1962)
Water (Canada/India, 2005)
To Be and To Have (France, 2002)
Pan's Labyrinth (Mexico, 2006)
Zorba the Greek (UK/Greece, 1964)
Identity Pieces (DR Congo, 1998)
An American in Paris (USA, 1951)
The Last King of Scotland (UK, 2006)
Osama (Afghanistan, 2003)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (USA, 1975)

So that's 13 movies, nine of which are foreign. Five total are from foreign countries outside of Europe. Two are African (and due to my African cinema class, I'm sure there will be tons more.) Only two of them were seen as a theatrical release. Some are old (1948) and some are brand new (2006).

I will take all of this info to mean two things:

1) I am rather well-rounded.
2) Free Blockbuster coupons sure pays off.

The Last King of Scotland

Was a brilliantly disturbing film. It's based on a novel of the same name by Giles Goden, which chronicles the life of a young Scottish doctor seeking adventure away from his home. He ends up in Uganda, where by chance he becomes a close adviser to Idi Amin. The man, who the film and novel name "Nicholas Garrigan" is loosely based on the real life story of Bob Astles, an Englishman who fell both in and out of favor with Amin while serving him, and lives in London to this day. In the film, Garrigan becomes captivated by Amin's legendary charismatic and excessive personality, causing him to ignore the disturbing realities of Amin's regime, which by 1979 was responsible for the deaths of over 300,000 people.

Forest Whitaker makes the movie. His ability to capture Amin's mood swings, which went from anger to amiability in matters of seconds, was simply fantastic. Whitaker has something of a reputation for being cast as the strong silent type, but after seeing an interview with him it struck me how much this role also differs from his actual voice and personality. His gestures, his accent, and his personality (which apparently never left Whitaker during the filming) were captured perfectly. Give the man an Oscar.

But the film's true power lies in its ability to take you in to Garrigan's mind, along with him as he becomes swept up in the exotic excitement of a regime change to a charismatic ruler a continent away from home. Some critics have been displeased with the film for not showing the more human aspects of Amin's killing spree, which we only become aware of through photographs shown to Garrigan about 3/4 of the way through the film. But as an audience, I don't think we need to see it. The recent influx of films chronicling past sub-Saharan African genocides and violent conflicts (Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond) gave us that already. This film shows us how it happens. How personality faults in a new ruler become open sores in the nations they govern, and how it is so very easy for us to turn a blind eye. You watch Garrigan through the film and realize that he never truly did anything wrong, he was just young and naive. The ease with which these problems can occur is the true disturbing point of the film, and the filmmakers do a great job of pointing it out. This fact was only emphasized as I left the theater, when I quickly realized how the slow procession toward the door had turned into a somber funeral march. Families and couples marched through the theater aisles, heads turned toward the ground in what I could only assume was a combination of pity and guilt. No, we didn't create Idi Amin. We didn't create Africa's problems. But after seeing this movie, you realize how easily any of us could.

Matt Learns About Buddhism

Shewara and I went on a small pilgrimage outside of Madison to the Deer Park Buddhist Center, one of the first Buddhist monasteries in North America and now conveniently located in Oregon, WI. I learned about the center from a few friends in grad school, so we went on a sojourn to check it out. When we arrived we four buildings: a large center currently under construction, the main temple, the residence quarter for the monks, and the stupa (pictured at left). The stupa sits on the location where in 1981 the Dalai Lama performed the kalachakra initiation for the first time in the western hemisphere. Right in the middle of a Wisconsin dairy field. The white stupa is crowned with a figure of the Buddha and surrounded with those colorful prayer flags you can find for sale in every Buddhist and hippie store in America. But I can tell you from personal experience they make great wall decorations.

Soon after arriving and making our presence known with the loud chatter and photography flashes of annoying tourists, a friendly young monk named Chogyam came out to greet us. He introduced himself and took us inside the main temple for a small tour. The single room was decorated wall-to-wall with thangkas, Buddha statues, and other Tibetan Buddhist decorations. We chatted about religion, art, and the apparent christmas lights on the stupa (visible in the picture and actually there for the Buddha's birthday celebration). Chogyam invited us back for a Buddhism class the following Thursday, where I did some meditation and learned about the Buddhist concept of consciousness. Buddhist theory seems very philosophical and complex, but also keen to incorporate new scientific findings into their own religious understandings. If only other religions could do that. (I'm looking at you, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism!)

Perhaps I'll hit up more classes later, but for now I am booked on Thursdays. I've had a fun Buddhist experience so far anyway.

My Blog Is 2 Years Old!

And with 167 posts, is updated on average every 4.3 days. Not too shabby.

Happy BDay bloggy!

Shewara And I Decide The Worst Movie Of All Time

Shewara and I each had our pick for the absolute worst movies we had ever seen. And we consider ourselves, especially her, to be rather well-informed critics of contemporary cinema, so when we say a film we each refer to as "one of the worst movies we ever saw" we think such a movie would be similarly lambasted by critics. And after years of investigation, it came to pass that each film we decided was the worst ever were both critically-acclaimed masterpieces. A good portion of the reason we both hated these two films were that they seemed to be so universally-beloved, and that we could not figure out why anyone enjoyed them.

And so last Saturday we decided to take three hours of our respective lifespans and watch, back-to-back, each of our picks for worst movie ever. Mine was a major motion picture by a noteworthy American director, hers was the highest-grossing documentary in the history of France. And for the first time in five hundred years, the French have won a war.

. . . .

Until I went to see A History of Violence in the theater, I had never seen anyone walk out on a movie. But halfway through the film when Maria Bello and Viggo Mortensen have rough, rug-burning sex on the steps in their house, a saw a family of four leave the theater. It wasn't the sex that was bothersome - it was the context. Mortensen plays Tom Stall, an unsuspecting Indiana restaurant owner whose secret history of violent organized crime in Philadelphia comes back to haunt him. Old friends return to kill him, but Mortensen does the opposite, alerting his family to his former life. His wife, furious at the lies upon which their family is based, gets into a fight with Mortensen, who then chooses to calm her by having sex with her. Of course she obliges, as all good women being raped should, and afterward she gets up and slaps him.

A History professes to make a point where there is none to be mad. I get it: violence can be a problem. Secrets can be a problem. I could have figured this out without the over-acting, utterly disjointed narrative scheme, endless succession of film and literary cliches, and typically unnecessary sex and violence. Everything about this movie forced me to mold my face into a disgusted, quizzical look which thereafter became anger when everyone began to praise this film for making the world's most obvious point by simply crossing the line of good (many critics here used the word "acceptable" or "typical" in a praiseworthy way) film-making. Too much sex, too much violence, too much acting, and too much ... I want my money back.

. . . .

Generally, documentaries are supposed to "document." Events, people, places, ideas, whatever. To Be And To Have did just this, to the extreme. The film opens with a view of a farmer harvesting some grain. We don't know where, or when, or why, but he continues to harvest that grain for about the next six minutes. Then suddenly - we're in a classroom! Watching cute little turtles walk across the floor around the empty desks. For a few minutes. Turtles. Walk. Desks. By the time we here people talking, they are small children sitting in the back seat of a van, being driven to...we don't know. Nobody tells us. But they're speaking French. Perhaps Quebec? Ooh, maybe it's France. Ah yes France. Oh, and now they're arriving at school! The one with the turtles. And by this time you realize that the turtles are a metaphor for the film: they don't talk, generally are rather uninformative, and move ridiculously slow.

There are certain expectations in modern cinema about how long a single shot should last. If you have a camera planted on a tripod, filming a cow walk across a field during the sunrise in a movie about school, you're probably letting us know that it's morning. Five seconds will do. Sunrise = morning, got it. But damn if that cow doesn't walk the entire way across the screen, taking his good old time while you are forced to watch. You are then subjected to watching five year olds make drawings of bears and whatnot, for about twenty minutes or so, all the while having intellectually fascinating conversations:

I love to paint.

I painted a bear.

How amazing! I've never seen this! And now I get to watch this and similarly analogous activities for the next 104 minutes of my life. I found out later that according to the filmmakers and many critics, the children's problems with painting and math are supposed to be laugh-out-loud funny. Perhaps they would have been if this film had some sort of emotion to it, but sadly it tended to mimic the infectiously stagnant personality of the schoolmaster. What's best is that the movie's cover screams that it is "One of the most emotionally gratifying films about teaching ever made!!!" I find this hilarious since at the end of the film we discover that the vast majority of the students have failed out of their secondary school, most likely as a result of the education they received at their one-room rural French schoolhouse.

Just like the kids in the film, boy was I happy to get out of that place. A History was bad, but this was far far worse.

To Be And To Have, a film which received a 96% rating on RottenTomatoes and is to this day the highest grossing documentary in French history, we officially declare to be the worst movie of all time.