The Month That Was - October 2021

Another month passes into the mist.  Cognitively, I think I look at a year as about the same amount of time I would have thought of as a month when I was a wee lad.  A lot will happen, but once it's over, it just slips into an indistinct time frame of the past.  As a child, if I needed to know the month something happened in the past, I would probably try to relate it to things like summer vacation, who my teacher was, something that happened on a TV show, and from there figure out the more specific time frame.  I now do that with years.  If I have to remember when a certain event occurred, I will try to remember things like what car I was driving, or what tech I was using, or what happened on a TV show.    

Actually, most everything from the past 30 years has blurred into something like "grown up lifetime" and it's really hard to timeline the events in that era.  Apropos of nothing except that it's fall again, and I'm beginning to think I'll survive another year.

[Movies] Flick Check: Roundup

[Books] Book Look: Piranesi, by Susanna Clark

[Arts] Go Van Gogh

[Movies] Flick Check: Roundup

Many Saints of Newark 

Da hell?  That was awful. How did this steaming pile emerge from perhaps the most celebrated and renown TV series in history?  The tone is inconsistent; the motivations vague and unjustified; the acting (with the exception of the mighty Ray Liotta) was lame.  An entire subplot (maybe 30-40% of the film) was a misguided paean to social justice. It even fails as wanton fan service. Just a top-to-bottom disaster.

A month back I speculated whether any of the pantheon TV from the aughts could get made today.  I think this is the clear answer: no.  This is what The Sopranos would be in the current cultural atmosphere. It is a sad, sad time for the arts. My advice: do not watch this.  In fact, let's all agree it never happened.

Black Widow 

Not bad.  Nothing revelatory.  As seems to be common in movies of late, the tone is haphazard and the motivations contrived.  But then, it's a superhero film, not high art.  It's saved by likeable characters and engaging portrayals. Middle-of-the-road MCU fare. In the grand scheme it would probably have seemed more relevant had it come out a pre-Endgame.  

Dune

It's gotten to the point with movies that my first expectation of anything is that it will suck. Filmmakers generally have so many priorities that supercede dramatic quality (social justice, sequels and universe building, the Chinese market) that if you end up with a coherent, humanistic story you can count yourself lucky.  In that way, Dune was a pleasant surprise.

I read Dune as a youth and was left uninspired.  Perhaps I should read it again, but it strikes me as an odd story to have gathered so many admirers.  It is effectively an allegory of an aspect of late twentieth century cultural interaction between an advanced civilization (The Empire in Dune; The West in reality) and an un-advanced civilization (The Fremen in Dune; Arabs/Muslims in reality) where the un-advanced have a resource that the advanced need and will fight for (The Spice in Dune; Oil in reality).  From this we make a gumbo out of with imaginative tech and paranormal people and organizations as de rigueur for speculative fiction.  The elemental narrative is the bog-standard trope of The One.   

Saying Dune is visually impressive is an understatement.  On my 65-inch plasma it was mesmerizing; I can only imagine how good it would look in Imax.  It could have trimmed a bit of excess running time, but it never bogged down for too long.  To director Denis Villenueve's credit there was minimal wokery in a story line that is ripe for it.  To his discredit there was virtually no humor or light hearted moments to offset the rather grim tone and story.

Still it set the stage very well for the upcoming sequel (this movie only covered the first half of the book) and carried my interest enough that I am looking forward to the next installment.

Here's a question:  If Dune is an allegory for West/Islam relations in, say, the 1970s and '80s, why not make a contemporary movie of it.  Reset it in Riyadh in 1975, where Duke Leto is a British Petroleum exec assigned to Saudi Arabian production and the Bene Gesserat are, oh, I don't know, al-Jihad or something, and Ollie North is Baron Harkonnen.  I am only half kidding.  It could be the stuff of serious adult historical drama if handled correctly, which of course it would not be. It would require cliched, narrow, Aaron Sorkin-level viewpoints if it was to be greenlit.  Sigh.  But mix in some blasters and mind-control and you're golden.

[Books] Book Look: Piranesi, by Susanna Clark

This is a delightful book in so many ways.  Briefly described, a man is trapped in a sort of alternate reality which consists of a building of some stripe with an infinite number of cavernous rooms filled with gargantuan statues.  The building is such that it has its own sky, its own ocean, its own ecosystem.  The man, Piranesi, has completely acclimated to reality such that he never seems to question its existence or the existential contradictions of it.  Through his interactions with the only other person in the reality, a man he refers to as The Other, the mysteries surrounding the building resurface and he must face a disturbing new reality.

Yes, but.  The unravelling of reality is not where the beauty of this book is found.  The loveliness here is in the descriptions of the building (referred to as the House) and how Piranesi has adapted not only to survival in the House, but building a belief system and a scientific philosophy out of it.  It is both beautiful and, to my mind, quite realistic.  The house contains dangers, but also great beauty; natural rhythms and random surprises.  Confronted with this Piranesi has created both a scientific outlook -- he assiduously maps his world, tracks tides, observes causal connections -- and religious beliefs -- he has faith the house will provide for him, reveres the dead, accepts the fate the house grants.  Clark's prose builds a beautiful aesthetic for all this, as one would expect from the author of Jonathan Strange & Dr. Norrell, so much so that I was somewhat disappointed that actual reality had to intrude on it.

The other blessed aspect of this book is that it is short.  Clark offers no fluff, no padding, nothing to skip over.  My hobby horse over the years has been that books are almost universally 30%-40% too long.  Not Piranesi.  God bless Clark for that.

Should you read Piranesi? Yes. You may not be as touched by it as I was, but I can;t imagine you regretting it. If there is a larger moral to the story I can't see it, it's just a lovely and intriguing way to spend some time.

[Arts] Go Van Gogh

I had a spontaneous opportunity to see the rather popular Van Gogh immersive experience that is touring the country.  It was pretty cool (that's my deeply considered, intricately reasoned opinion).  The entire experience takes just shy of an hour.  I suspect the installations may vary in their processes. In Houston where I was, you are ushered into a  large room, roughly the size of the gymnasium and are seated on the floor on cushions or, if your entry is well timed, on one of a handful of benches scattered about the room.  You can get a feel for it from the website.

Various famous Van Gogh paintings are given subtle and quite lovely animations then projected onto the walls so you feel surrounded by the paintings.  The motion is gentle and the details of the paintings really get highlighted well.  Of course it is set to music which ranges from ambient to lo-fi to pseudo-classical.  Photography is encouraged, and the result is a room full of backlit people shaped images angling the brightly colored screens to get brief snippets of videos.  The net effect is to almost embed the audience in the animated presentations of the paintings.  Like I said, it's pretty cool.  Certainly worth a trip if it comes to your neck of the woods.  (It's been in Detroit, but I don't go to Detroit.)

I would love to see more of these sorts of shows.  Even more interesting would be to embed them in commercial areas.  There is a tunnel in the Detroit Metro Airport that connects terminals wherein they try to pump calming music and have a '70s era light show.  One of these installations would be much cooler.  Or better yet, how about a bar/restaurant.  It would beat the hell out of having a crummy guitar player with synthesized back-up. I hereby copyright that idea. Hit me up if you want to buy the rights.