Aesthetic Achievements

I watch six feature films, a three-part documentary film and an opera. I read two children's books, three books of philosophy and a comics collection. I start reading a classic novel.

It’s been an interesting few weeks of reading and watching! After reading some other books I’m finally making good on my threat to read the Tolstoy novel that I mentioned back in August, which we’ll come to presently. First let’s do the round-up of what I’ve been watching since filing the lengthy previous entry. I kept it to seven films (and one opera!) this time.

August Sonata, directed by Ingmar Bergman, 1978. The skilled actor and screen icon Ingrid Bergman performs her last film role in this great “Bergman/Bergman” (“Ingmar/Ingrid”? “Ingmraird”?) collaboration as a world-renowned classical pianist with a troubled personal life and dysfunctional relationships with her two adult daughters, one of whom suffers from a degenerative condition and lives in the care of the other and her husband. Bergman’s character pays them a visit and the opening of old wounds and excavating of buried memories ensues. Bergman (the director) always seems to regard himself as operating just slightly outside of the rules of conventional narrative filmmaking and free to bend, break and rewrite them, usually in the service of playing with and exploring the tricky aspects of time, memory and regret. In August Sonata he marauds through different kinds of narration as a means of shifting about in time — the husband character indulges in some early fourth-wall-breaking narration which mysteriously never reoccurs, while the troubled pianist matriarch and her confrontational daughter played excellently by Bergman regular Liv Ullmann transport the viewer to other gut-wrenching moments in their messy lives through tempestuous exposition and sometimes through voice-over narration paired with gorgeously-composed, static, diorama-like flashback sequences. All of this unfolds in a succinct-yet-expansive ninety-nine minutes of tense, raw, well-paced storytelling. This movie was as outstanding as I was expecting; in fact this is my current favorite Bergman film (and also my current favorite Bergman film).

They Shall Not Grow Old, directed by Peter Jackson, 2018. One of two Jackson documentaries I watched recently (see below), both involving previously-unseen archival footage that Jackson assembled into a novel elucidation of the events in question. In They Shall Not Grow Old it’s the experience of English boys joining the military and shipping off to fight in World War I, with Jackson and his team taking the old footage and meticulously restoring and tastefully colorizing it to bring wartime experience to life in a way that a contemporary viewer can relate to, using cinema to create a fascinating and powerful aesthetic and emotional link between history and the present. He also uses interviews with English combat veterans relating their firsthand experiences to comprise most of the film’s soundtrack and contextualize what the viewer sees onscreen, and with regards to this audio I’ll tell you what a fucking idiot I can sometimes be and why the foul taste that a misbegotten earlier viewing of They Shall Not Grow Old left in my mouth had caused me to grouchily put off giving it the attention it deserves until now.

What happened was that some time in 2020, before I started this newsletter, I decided to finally get around to watching They Shall Not Grow Old because I had been hearing dynamite things about it for two years and found that it was available on the HBO streaming service that I was accessing through a family member’s account. When the movie started there was no sound, so in confusion I paused it and checked the volume on the television, finding that it was set appropriately. Rather than do some quick research online and figure out what was really happening, for some stupid reason I shrugged and assumed that the film was meant to be silent, that Jackson had intended all of the restored and re-edited footage to be experienced without sound, I guess because it was silent footage to begin with. So I sat dunce-like through the entire documentary in silence, only figuring out afterwards that the problem was not with Jackson’s directing choices but with my own abject lack of common sense and with that godforsaken HBO streaming platform that never quite works properly. This was frustrating enough that I couldn’t bring myself to reengage with the documentary for a time, but then I saw a copy of the Blu-ray on the library shelf here in San Francisco and determined to give it another go in anticipation of Jackson’s new project The Beatles: Get Back, which I also then watched in due course.

All is now well between me and They Shall Not Grow Old. If the movie was a person I would owe it an apology, would have to take responsibility for my own personal failings and would tell it “Hey buddy — you’re alright. Once I could hear what you had to say, I liked you.”

A Quiet Place Part II, directed by John Krasinski, 2021. For a few years I was picking up shifts at a cool vintage movie theater, more for how many new and old movies I got to see with state-of-the-art sound and projection than for the money. Among them was the original A Quiet Place, the 2018 science-fiction-horror-thriller Krasinski co-wrote, directed and performed in about life after the Earth is overrun by invading space monsters who have superhuman hearing and will eviscerate (and, I guess, eat) anyone who makes the slightest sound. It worked largely on the strength of the deceptively simple premise, tightly-wrapped structure and a great performance from the excellent actor Emily Blunt. This sequel is a conservatively-realized holding pattern for the expanding franchise, picking up where the previous film left off and widening the footprint of the fictional universe only as much as Krasinksi and company need to sniff out mildly novel environments and situations, including a cool new character played well by Cillian Murphy, who always seems commendably interested in pursuing different types of roles. They also took care to assemble both movies in such a way that you don’t strictly have to have seen the first one to enjoy the second, and wouldn’t have to watch a third installment (if there ever is one) to get a sense of relative closure (although both pictures end just a tad too abruptly). This isn’t groundbreaking cinema but it is certainly a good time at the movies.

Prospero’s Books, directed by Peter Greenaway, 1991. Weird even by Greenaway standards, which is really saying something. And I mean enchantingly, frustratingly, transcendentally, head-scratchingly, eye-dazzlingly weird. I’ve had a big thing for Greenaway for about two decades, respecting his ambition and loving his stylistic eccentricity even when his films are boring to sit through, which they are about half the time. His genuinely provocative, hard-to-parse experiments in avant-garde alchemy are not like anything else in the history of cinema, at least not of which I am aware. He loves symmetrical compositions, Brechtian theatricality, campily decadent design, grotesque imagery, healthily-proportioned breasts and penises and unconventional narrative constraints (list-making, bibliophilia and an obsession with image-production itself show up in almost everything he does). While Prospero’s Books is not overall his best film, it does the most thorough job of bringing all of these elements together in one article. The narrative content, such as it is, involves Greenaway plucking the island-bound wizard character Prospero from the Shakespeare play The Tempest, imagining and exploring the contents of the books Prospero studies to learn his dark arts through experiments in editing and picture-in-picture composition. The legendary Shakespearean actor John Gielgud plays Prospero. To say that there’s a noteworthy amount of content having to do with urine in this picture is to mention one of the comparatively less-strange things about it.

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, released in its original version in 1990 and re-edited and re-released in 2020. When a movie title (and its director, who makes an on-camera statement before the feature rolls on the Blu-ray) has this much explaining to do before the opening credits, you can make inferences about what you’re in for. The Godfather Part III is widely viewed as a creative misstep that marred the theretofore unimpeachable reputation of The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, two of the best films ever made which did a paradigm-shiftingly brilliant job of telling several enthralling stories about an immigrant family’s rise in organized crime in America and their commensurate moral collapse. This reaches its logical and appropriate narrative terminus at the end of the second film when the family business becomes more business than family, when the skilled but tormented Mafia Don Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, is forced, or chooses, to order the murder of his own brother. The Godfather Part III, which Coppola apparently always wanted to call The Death of Michael Corleone and supposedly produced largely out of a desperate need for money at the time, offers to tell us what happened to Michael Corleone after that, which is something we never especially wanted to know.

Where can you go with a character after he’s chosen between two impossible alternatives and succumbed to one of the most well-written tragic endings in the history of cinema? Coppola endeavored to find out in The Godfather Part III, and he didn’t do himself any favors by casting his daughter, the cringily poor actor Sofia Coppola (before she became a successful director in her own right) as Michael Corleone’s daughter. It doesn’t help that she has to perform against Pacino in a signature role he wears as comfortably as a tailored suit and alongside a surprisingly good Andy Garcia as a thuggish member of the Corleone family who represents a far more vicious and uncompromising future for the troubled dynasty.

Thematically the film has some interesting ideas to toy with, specifically involving Michael Corleone trying to finish his lifelong project of legitimizing the family business and spiritually unburdening himself by forging an alliance with the Vatican, only to suffer the bitter irony of finding that the Catholic church is even more of a corrupt racket than the Mafia. This is a fascinating idea that might have served well if Coppola had been able to carry across the “coda” concept, the idea to produce a meditation on the fate of Michael Corleone that stood well apart from the Godfather films. This pruned, remastered and clumsily-titled new recut of Godfather III is supposedly meant to reorient the film in relation to the first two — basically to excise it from the “trilogy,” redeem its reputation and launder the stain that one of the greatest filmmakers of all time perpetrated on arguably his own best work. But no one, not even the staggering genius F.F. Coppola, can edit around Sofia’s ghastly acting or the several other crippling fumbles in this dreary greatest-hits (of which there are plenty of bloody ones) of a Godfather installment. It was always more of an afterthought than a sequel or conclusion, and thus it remains.

Garcia is great in this movie. Of course Diane Keaton is back to round out the series, and her presence never hurts a project. And Joe Mantegna looks to be having fun hamming it up as a gangster character with a voice and intonation that appear to have been the partial model for Mantegna’s mafioso character Fat Tony on The Simpsons. Mantegna is apparently on record disclaiming this possibility but I have my suspicions to the contrary.

Mission: Impossible, directed by Brian De Palma, 1996. I mentioned in an older entry having seen most of the films in the Tom Cruise-starring Mission: Impossible film franchise, now up to six films and counting. This was my first time watching the first one in its entirety since I saw it at a theater back in 1996 with a handful of other adolescent boys for a friend’s birthday. A while back I watched De Palma, the 2015 documentary about the life and work of the director, a Coppola contemporary and fellow veteran of cinema’s visionary outlaw era of the Seventies. The documentary made me want to revisit the original Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible film not as a Mission: Impossible film but as a De Palma film, and it was interesting to note that most of his signature obsessions (with duality, surveillance and the all-seeing eye of the camera) and techniques (point-of-view shots, split-screen compositions and suspenseful long-takes) are on abundant offer in this adaptation of a well-known Sixties television program.

When I saw this movie as a kid I had only just recently discovered the perverse pleasure of hating a movie, but since this power was new to me I hadn’t yet learned to wield it honestly and responsibly. I remember deciding before Mission: Impossible was over that I hated it and pretending to my friends that this was at least in part because it was a spiritual betrayal of the original series, which in point of fact I had (and have) never seen. Funnily enough, research shows that apparently some of the cast of the original series actually felt exactly the same way when the 1996 movie came out, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was just being strident because it felt good, and if I recall correctly my friends mostly went along with this and we collectively decided that the movie was terrible and had fun disparaging it as a piece of garbage on our way home in someone’s mom’s car.

After years of watching a number of interesting films by De Palma and reflecting on the fact that I had been unfair to it at the time, I came to suspect that the 1996 Mission: Impossible film was probably actually a good movie. I don’t know quite what to make of this, but it turns out my phony assessment from back in ‘96 was much closer to the truth as I see it now: Mission: Impossible is pretty fucking dumb stuff from top to bottom, silly to the point of being not entertaining. The plot isn’t nearly as complicated and incomprehensible as people say, but it definitely has a level of density disproportionate to its paltry emotional payoff, not to mention the cartoonish implausibility of just about every set-piece and plot twist along the way. The legendary central sequence in which Cruise’s character is silently suspended on dangling wires high above a burglar-proof CIA safe room is justly venerated, even if it doesn’t make much sense; almost everything else in the movie is thoroughly insipid and has some painfully dated CGI effects thrown in for good measure. The lesson is clear: all of the life experience and personal growth I’ve undertaken in the last twenty-five years has been a waste of time and I should just assume that everything I thought or said when I was about twelve holds up perfectly.

The Beatles: Get Back, directed by Peter Jackson, 2021. Similar to They Shall Not Grow Old, Jackson was given access to dozens of hours of archival footage of The Beatles ensconced in their late-period creative process behind closed studio doors and surrounded by their intimate inner circle of collaborators, friends and family members. The result is this lengthy three-part documentary that does a great job of finding new things to express about four of the most-discussed people in human history and sheds light on one of the most personally challenging and creatively fertile periods in their storied career. The whole program unfolds at a stately, self-assured pace that I could see some people finding quite boring (especially those who dislike or are indifferent to The Beatles, categories into which I don’t fall). But I think that’s key to what Jackson accomplishes here — the feeling of what it really was like to be in these rooms with these people at this time, including all of the unpredictable oscillations back and forth from tedium to fury to passion to creative triumph. I’m biased as a big fan both of The Beatles and of (some of) Jackson’s other work, but I really enjoyed this project, which enlivened and illuminated my appreciation for one of my favorite musical acts.

Parsifal, a recording of a 2013 staging of Wagner’s 1882 opera, performed in 2013 by the Metropolitan Opera and directed by François Girard. This was my first time sitting through an entire opera and I picked a pretty darn strange one. My friend whose apartment I’m subletting had the Blu-ray on his shelf and I read the booklet before settling in to give this a try, and of course I watched it with the subtitles on. In the opera an order of Arthurian knights are guarding the Holy Grail; they also used to possess the spear that pierced the side of the Lord while he was being crucified. Their leader has a painful wound that won’t heal from a battle with a neighboring wizard who stole the sacred spear. A naif named Parsifal wanders into their territory while hunting game and determines to go into the wizard’s den to retrieve the spear, which ultimately leads to him assuming his destiny to become the leader of the Knights’ order and basically turn into Christ, though this appears to be ambiguous and perhaps to require a deeper understanding than mine.

Also a woman who has been wandering under a curse for centuries because she laughed at Christ on the cross is stuck in a Buddhist cycle of death and rebirth where she is a bad version of herself in the wizard’s den and a good version of herself in the knight’s circle. Pretty wild stuff which is interesting enough in concept, though in Wagner’s opera every single thing takes about half an hour of singing and scowling to transpire. I made it through, though, with a number of breaks to use the bathroom and go outside. I can maybe imagine why this medium was considered engaging before the dawn of moving pictures, but sitting through four and a half hours of Parsifal even in 1882 doesn’t sound like fun to me, even if the story is genuinely really crazy, sexy and cool, which it certainly is. Girard’s 2013 staging recontextualizes the premise in a kind of post-apocalyptic and possibly interplanetary setting, as if the arc of human redemption that Parsifal’s quest represents was unfolding against the backdrop of a new dark age that hasn’t arrived in earnest just yet but that we all feel coming.

I took advantage of the at-hand Blu-ray edition of the 2013 Parsifal performance because I’ve been reading a book called On Human Nature by the recently-deceased conservative Oxford University professor and scholar Roger Scruton. I’ve heard Scruton interviewed several times but had never read any of his books before. This one is short, stimulating and thought-provoking. There were parts that at this first glance seemed plainly wrong to me and others that I simply couldn’t quite understand, but there were also some illuminating insights and incisive articulations of concepts I’ve rightly or wrongly tried to formulate for myself in the past, particularly with regards to an argument for personhood as an emergent property of humanness that potentially distinguishes and elevates one’s individual subjective experience beyond that of the merely physical or biological.

Anyway, in the last paragraph of On Human Nature Scruton aims to buttress his earlier assertion that “the religious posture, and the rituals that express it, provides” a “kind of support to the moral life” by referring to “the two great works of art that have attempted to show what redemption means for us, in the world of modern skepticism: Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Wagner’s Parsifal. In the wake of these two great aesthetic achievements, it seems to me, the perspective of philosophy is of no great significance.” This led directly to my taking the Parsifal Blu-ray down from the shelf and subsequently being able to say that I’ve endured at least one complete viewing of an opera in my life.

I’ll check out The Brothers Karamazov one day, but at the moment I’m reading the other heavy-hitting nineteenth-century Russian novelist. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy is one of the four paperbacks I found in Little Free Libraries before I left Seattle to travel across the USA by train and then made my way back west to California. I have read all of the other three, but when I finally determined last week to crack into Tolstoy’s novel, I was still annoyed that my copy said Anna Karenin on the cover instead of Anna Karenina. In the notes the translator explains that she did this because it is technically correct, having something to do with the proper deployment of Russian patronymic naming conventions, but I couldn’t track down a single other reference to the book being called anything other than Anna Karenina, including in the case of the 2001 translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky which several online sources claim is the go-to version for the English-language reader. As it so happens, the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation was the exact edition on the shelves of my book-enthusiast host here in San Francisco (I’m not kidding: literally right next to the Parsifal Blu-ray), and so it was decided: the Anna Karenin edition that had traversed the country with me and back again with nary a word read would return into the Little Free Library ecosystem from which it sprang, and I would start reading Anna Karenina. Which I have, and so far so good!

The Scruton book was something I picked up at the public library on a day when I went there in search of some books of ancient Stoic philosophy, and also of a new novel by Lionel Shriver called Should We Stay or Should We Go. I ended up taking from the shelves editions of On the Shortness of Life by Seneca and How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life by Epictetus, both of which I consumed in a matter of days. Because I stumbled across and decided to also take with me the Scruton book, I forewent Shriver’s novel for the time being — until later that same day, when a perusal of a Little Free Library turned up a copy of the selfsame book! I couldn’t believe my luck, kept the copy of Shriver’s novel for myself and was contemplating reading it right after Scruton’s. Now that I’m on to the very lengthy Tolstoy book, my first dalliance with Shriver’s work will have to wait, and this won’t be a problem since I have a copy of her book to hold onto for as long as I want. The literary gods had taken me for a pet. If the question was “Should we stay or should we GO for a WALK and check out a LITTLE FREE LIBRARY,” I can tell you that their answer would be a proud and resounding “Yes.”

I’ll round out this round-up by mentioning in the interest of completeness that I also read two children’s books about prehistoric life, Ultimate Earth: Dinosaurs with text by Miranda Baker and illustrations by Amanda Shufflebotham and Once upon a Mastodon: All About Prehistoric Mammals by Bonnie Worth with illustrations by Aristides Ruiz and Joe Mathieu, the latter being part of the Seuss-branded “Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library.” The concept and illustrations were a lot of fun but Worth has little knack for Seussian scansion and cadence.

And since I never tire of revisiting the great underground newspaper comic strip Life in Hell by Simpsons creator Matt Groening, I pranced through the Life in Hell collection Akbar & Jeff's Guide to Life. I’m not sure just where on the spiritual and geographical map I’m destined to end up with guides to life, redemption and human nature like Epictetus, Scruton, Tolstoy and Akbar & Jeff, but so far I’m having one heck of an interesting time getting there. Stand by for further updates.