Cows and Atrocities

Six pictures and four books.

Been all over the shop lately and it feels just fine.

Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy, directed by J. Stuart Blackton, 1909. A five-minute short film about a smoker and two tiny fairies who play with his pipe and matches. Innovative early use of special effects. I love freewheeling, inventive, trailblazing old silent-era films from a time when technological constraints and the drive to explore the frontiers of a novel medium provided an opening for creative types with a flair for lateral thinking to sketch out the contours of a burgeoning art form.

The Terminal, directed by Steven Spielberg, 2004. Demonstrates that it is feasible, though not necessarily advisable, to set a feature film almost entirely inside an airport terminal and that a beautifully-designed and well-acted picture can be undone by shitty writing. Tom Hanks is quite good as a stateless person who can neither enter the United States of America nor return to the recently overthrown country from which he came. Catherine Zeta-Jones does as well as can be expected performing severely overcooked dialogue for a character who seems to have a significant personality disorder. The narrative stakes get switched out late in the picture, which makes it hard to know what we’re meant to care about. Great-looking, over-long and self-satisfied movie that makes astonishing use of lighting and color and is mired in incorrect structure, thin characterization and implausible dialogue. Skip it, or watch it with the sound off if you are a nerd for the technical aspects of film craft.

Colectiv, directed by Alexander Nanau, 2019. Engrossing, adroitly-assembled documentary about the aftermath of a mass-casualty nightclub fire in Bucharest in 2015 (a subject about which I was completely ignorant going in). A scrappy team of keen-eyed journalists from a small sports gazette establishes that multiple victims of the devastating fire died unnecessarily while in hospital care because the Romanian healthcare system was buying diluted disinfectants from a shady pharmaceutical contractor, which leads to a public indictment of corruption and incompetence endemic in the upper echelon of Romanian government. This is one of those stories like Spotlight or the great 2003 BBC program State of Play in which an enterprising team of underdog reporters follow the unsavory truth down whichever corridors of power it leads, but is arguably more interesting for being a hard-hitting documentary depicting real individuals and events without fiction or fictionalization (as far as I know). Noteworthy for a mature sense of restraint and lack of sentimentality; the filmmakers know that the story and the journalists covering it speak for themselves and don’t need to add any bells or whistles to tell the viewer how to feel about these shocking and unsettling developments in Romanian politics and society. Highly recommended, first-rate documentary.

L’Age d’Or, directed by Luis Buñuel, 1930. Buñuel co-wrote this absurd surrealist picture with the painter Salvador Dalí. It’s a short, genuinely funny and deeply bizarre movie, full of anarchic nonsense with a healthy injection of (relatively) conventional narrative, characterized throughout by inventively discordant use of sound and a number of kooky laugh-aloud gags. There’s a guy getting sexually aroused by thoughts of diarrhea churning in a toilet, a woman shooing her pet cow off the bed (somehow filmed with a live cow), a man shooting himself in the head and blowing his body out of his shoes and onto the ceiling and a romantic scene interrupted by a profusely bleeding eyeball. For obscure reasons a closing scene makes an extended reference to the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. An entertaining, surreal, profoundly strange and funny experimental picture with a low-budget aesthetic and great set-pieces and performances.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, directed by Brad Bird, 2011. This was the first live-action picture directed by Bird, a brilliant writer and director of animation who worked on the classic years of The Simpsons and made outstanding features like The Iron Giant for Warner Bros. and The Incredibles and Incredibles 2 for Pixar. This pedigree seems to make Bird suited well enough for the responsibility of handling the fourth film in the ongoing Tom Cruise-starring Mission: Impossible film series, cartoonish espionage pictures in touch with their own silliness. But I found this installment surprisingly limp and lifeless. I’ve seen most of the others in the series and they’re not my favorites; I usually end up watching them whenever a free opportunity to do so presents itself. The elaborate, ambitious action sequences are what make them worth the sitting-through, and the ones in Ghost Protocol didn’t do much for me. The whole affair has a dreary, obligatory feel to it.

Quo Vadis, Aida?, directed by Jasmila Žbanić, 2020. Excellent movie; everyone should watch it. It’s about the plight of a fictionalized individual named Aida working as a translator for the United Nations during the Srebrenica massacre of the Bosnian War in 1995. Most of the film revolves around Aida working in and trying to negotiate a place for her husband and sons inside of a refugee compound maintained by maddeningly inept UN peacekeeping forces while Ratko Mladić’s military and paramilitary forces maneuver into a position of control to enact their campaign of ethnic cleansing. During the bulk of the story’s action Aida, played by Jasna Đuričić, uses her extremely high levels of confidence, resourcefulness and intelligence to attempt to balance her irreconcilable responsibilities to do the right things for her country, her family and herself. Important scenes set before and after the War are thematically connected to one another and bookend the longer sequences depicting the siege of the compound and the massacre. The filmmakers intelligently and compassionately engage with these weightiest of issues without resorting to the kind of sentimental bullshit that a Hollywood studio would have to have used to make a product like this salable. This is a serious, sober, clear-eyed dramatization of a bleak moment in recent history, executed with economical skill and restraint by capable artists and technicians.

Recently I’ve read two Dr. Seuss books, including one from 1982 that was new to me called Hunches in Bunches, which somewhat awkwardly dips in and out of some metrical constructions that depart from the Seuss-standard anapestic tetrameter but nevertheless delivers a very well-drawn children’s book about the problem of feeling indecisive about what one wants to do with one’s time and being accosted by personified “Hunches” with competing ideas. I really liked it, even if it would make for clunky reading aloud. The colors have a garish intensity I quite like that came out in Seuss’s later work.

I finished re-reading Very Good, Jeeves!, the first P.G. Wodehouse book I ever read back in 2017 and the one that inaugurated my ongoing obsession with Wodehouse’s work. Wodehouse is the only fiction writer I’ve ever read who regularly makes me laugh aloud while reading alone. Very Good, Jeeves! led me to reading (and sometimes re-reading) all fifteen of the “Jeeves and Wooster” books, as well as several worthwhile Wodehouse books outside of the “Jeeves and Wooster” cycle. For anyone who wants to learn what the Wodehouse fuss is about and why he’s one of the greatest writers who ever lived, this is a fine place to start. Very Good, Jeeves! comprises a sequence of discrete but interconnected stories about the rich, idle, well-meaning blunderer Bertie Wooster and his intelligent, worldly, imperturbable valet Jeeves who can always be relied upon to get Bertie out of whatever social trouble Bertie inevitably stirs up for himself. At this point in his career Wodehouse had the characters of Jeeves and Wooster fully formed, while the individual stories in this collection make the book easily digestible and compulsively readable, the perfect rate of consumption at which to get a feel for Wodehouse’s ingenious and subversive sense of humor and masterful sense for clever plotting.

Finally I’ve been re-reading one of Gary Larson’s collections of his legendary comic strip The Far Side entitled Cows of Our Planet. I read this book several times as a kid when it was brand new, and looking at it today in the context of the complete arc of Larson’s comics career I find that I really like the late-period Far Side on display in this volume. His draftsmanship and use of shading and contrast are far less amateurish than in the early years of the strip (which was never his strong suit), which gives him room to play with even more verbose, left-field gag-writing (which always was). In his later books Larson started to utilize the format for things he couldn’t do in the newspaper pages, instantiated in Cows of Our Planet by a full-color fold-out spread in the middle of the book comprising multiple panels with each one depicting a different kind of weird, hypothetical cow.

Above all else, what I love about late-period Far Side is how often Larson makes recourse to giving his characters large, round, blank, dumb eyes. They come up again and again in Cows of Our Planet, as if the characters in the Sisyphean single-panel situations in which Larson deposits them wouldn’t be able to keep it together if they were wise or intelligent enough to come to grips with the horrors of their predicaments. The joyless but determined thousand-yard stare of benighted Far Side characters is a grotesque, pitiable, mirthful leitmotif of these Beckett-like nightmares of the Nineties newspaper pages.