The End of the Tour

Original theatrical release poster

I watched The End of the Tour few days ago.

I loved the movie and it also left me quite pensive. Turmoil’d.

Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg are both great, with Segel being absolutely, hauntingly awesome.

Hauntingly.

I have this trouble with knurd, can’t seem to suspend it for the duration of some things. I do not dislike that, in fact I usually revel it, but I acknowledge it is sometimes impractical. Like while trying to believe an actor is a character. In this case Segel was so perfect and so persuasive it was extremely hard for me to believe he’s not just reciting somebody else’s words - but THAT would be just the point of him doing an awesome job of being an actor transformed to a character. But the character in this case is a biographical sketch, likeness, a ghost of the person once existing and now deceased. Crazy. And beautiful. And crazy. Convoluted stuff.*

Segel’s Wallace is haunting.

I am not much of an expert on David Foster Wallace. Most of the things I know about him come from This Is Water, from opinions, reviews and obituaries. That really is not much, and yet … yet I acknowledge we share a few characteristics and many of them were the axis of this movie.

I used to be somewhat of a prodigy. I used to write a lot and to stir things up with my writing. I drank an awful lot and medicated myself to assert control over my life. I committed suicide.

That was 20 years ago and I was 18 at the time. In a month I will be 38 and later still, somewhen beginning autumn, there will be 20^th anniversary of my second life; life of practicality, moderation and adamant exclusion of television entertainment.

I loved the movie. I loved how we are only jumping on that train just for one final station. I loved how we are making the jump with bundle of conventional-ness and insecurity (Lipsky). It is well-paced movie and also a movie with definite feel of prose; few interactions brought to the top of the stream of life, to be noted and to be representative of writer’s impression of things. I loved the natural feel of happenings; the hanging out, the smoking, the stuffing of bellies with treats facilitated with being in company - to comfort and ease social awkwardness - sacred ouroboros of misfits everywhere.

In many a scene I could not help taking it personal and being moved, borderline insulted, with… how things are. It poked me right into my sense of appropriateness, that notion of people taking for granted that author is known through his work, implying we only write the things we are. We do not. Sometimes we write the things we most definitely aren’t, sometimes we write things we wished we could be, sometimes we write the people we loathe. That is the magic of creation. This need to attain security through elimination of ambiguity I find...

tiresome.

* Opposite, yet also knurd-unsuspensing thing happens when people are presenting themselves in movies, never really being persuasive enough to fill in the expectations.

Birdman

I've seen Birdman today.

I did not just stumble upon it. It was recommended to me.

Some time beginning this year (on January 22nd to be exact) Killing Time posted about it on his blog. I love reading his stuff. I love watching the movies he recommends and I love comparing our notes, even when I'm not writing them down. Usually I see where he's coming from but our views differ dramatically and it seems we appreciate completely different accents of the same content. I do not actually know the guy but I've grown to respect his style and his mind. It is a kooky bag of crazy if there ever was one and I admire it tremendously. We'll return to this.

So, Birdman.

I absolutely loved the movie. Sat smitten in the dark, even when the credits rolled into nothingness and there was only the fan of my computer whirring through the sound of my thoughts. I love how beautiful it is, each scene so saturated and beautifully lit. Motion. Following the characters around. Close-ups. Not so much claustrophobic as much as engaging. Personal.

It actually felt like the inside of my mind.

Yes, the chili pepper Christmas lights. This movie definitely feels like the inside of my mind.

I loved the veneer of the movie, the parallels it extends to real life (which the Killing Time so aptly describes in his review here) but I love its feel of transcending experience, of a shared common woe much much more. Boldly written dialogues of things being said in a transparent way, way we can mostly only dream about in the real life. I love desires boiling over the pots of characters's minds, over and out into the world. I love how the scenes inside the scenes behave in a beautiful and compact way, void of triviality.

One example of this is how all the people around the reacting dyads are just... scenery. Or, in the best case,  props to advance the action. This is also true of real life, that we give our attention to few things in our surroundings, and are mostly completely oblivious to the rest. Usually filmmakers try to create sense of normalcy by giving roles to these props, but this one filmmaker did not go that way.

I love how it is accented that each person lives in his/her own mind even though they live through same life situations (the taxi scene, last anniversary party scene). I love how the difference in their experiences is translated into words subtly but directly ("Two years and he never told me something that beautiful."). I love how they are beautifully surprised with sudden overlaps ("Look at all these roses. And you hate roses" plus "I hate roses.").

Sudden overlaps.

Lately I've been thinking about our idols, my idols. People living or made up whose existence and/or endeavors I hold in high esteem. I've noticed that people often pick for idols someone who in one way or the other has something that they themselves do not have. I, on the other hand, seem to enjoy immensely picking idols that I already share something with; crazy persistence (Tite Kubo, Harrison Wintergreen), fascinating adaptability (empress Teodora from The Female), signs of usable intelligence (Killing Time) to name a few.

My mind is in love with sudden overlaps.

Like the overlap of Birdman's common woe with mine.

Warm Bodies

Sometimes I feel that every time I’m having a bad day the Universe just gets up, off its ass, and cranks out personalized calm-bringer. Like Warm Bodies.

Original movie poster

I absolutely love this movie and now, after reading through a throng of very silly reviews, I thought to add my two cents to the pot.

Why do I love this movie and what is so special in it?

Well, three things: presentation, intelligence and emotion

Presentation

This is not a zombie movie.

Warm bodies is a story of zombies for just as much as Star Trek is a story of aliens or Cars is a story of automobiles. They are all stories of people, of humans presented in different packaging material to accentuate one or the other aspect of humanity.

Exceptional thing in Warm Bodies is that such a powerful iconography is used to prepackage our humans one has to actually get involved with a story to be able to accept that there is no suspension of disbelief to be used in regard with creatures. Movie is filmed beautifully, with great photography, color, costumes and scenes. It all looks fully saturated, rich, beautiful and - effortless. There is not a scene or minute in this film that does not stay in the pace of the movie and that has any kind of atmosphere but that of perfect sync. It flows beautifully from scene to scene never losing momentum and showing great cohesion.

Intelligence

There is nothing in this world I love as much as intelligence. Understanding the mechanics of the world and using this understanding to put selection of parts in new organizations to showcase understanding the mechanics of the world - can there be any more beautiful way to celebrate intelligence?

This is not a zombie movie.

It already says so in the promotional blurb: “After a highly unusual zombie saves a still-living girl from an attack, the two form a relationship that sets in motion events that might transform the entire lifeless world.”

There is a part in Pratchett’s Thief of time where Susan, grade school teacher and Death’s granddaughter interacts with her pupils:

Miss Susan held up the cardboard clock and said: 'Who can tell me what this is?'
A forest of hands shot up.
'Yes, Miranda?'
'It's a clock, miss.'
Miss Susan smiled, carefully avoided the hand that was being waved by a boy called Vincent, who was also making frantically keen 'ooo, ooo, ooo' noises, and chose the one behind him.
'Nearly right,' she said. 'Yes, Samuel?'
'It's all cardboard made to look like a clock,' said the boy.
'Correct. Always see what's really there.'

Always see what's really there.

Both the writer and the director have gone to great lengths to put everything we need to understand this movie right in front of us and - more often than not - to verbally confirm it. This movie is an allegoric presentation of current society, biased commentary advocating particular way of life as functionally better than other options. Humans, corpses and boneys are not different species. They are all humans and the thing in which they differ is - caring (or empathy, as many existing psychological and philosophical theories already postulate). Further away people get from sense of empathy, less human they become. If you are unsure how this looks and works just have a look around you and you will surely see all of these three “species”.

Emotion

What I love most in this movie is relationships. I was already impressed with director’s view of relationships in his previous movie 50/50 and Warm Bodies show similar, even nicely profiled connectedness. There are no crazy plot twists, no unexplainable behaviors defying logic, no stupid tricks to fit square pegs into round holes.

Just life.

Friendship, longing, concern, overwhelm-ness, pride, shame, attraction, care - they are all shown just like they appear in life and through them the story is progressed. We do our best, in real time, and we hope that our best will be enough. Other people still have to notice, understand, interpret our behaviors and react to them for any interpersonal action to happen. It is pure bliss seeing how meticulously this mechanics is shown - and how effortless it looks. Voiceovers not being narration but a stream of thought works miracles in making this story engaging, understandable and warm.


It seems that empathy, just like romance (and punk! :D), is still not dead.

" Every moment you spend wishing you were someplace else is a moment you can't get back."

… and that point is comfortably situated within short review (just opinion, really) of a movie so if you do not appreciate spoilers do return AFTER you have watched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

This is original movie poster

“Stop Dreaming. Start Living” says the advertisement billboard.

I like Ben Stiller. I find him small-framed but exquisitely beautiful and well-proportioned and I can imagine his good looks being a disadvantage in life. I like the impeccable timing of his jokes and his trademark “sarcastic deadpan disposition” displayed in many of his roles. In a way, this movie, one that both features him as a lead and as a director stands in this place of the time continuum as a lovely milepost in a crossroads of reality and fiction.

And  standing for fiction here is Walter Mitty, but there is not much fictional in Walter Mitty when regarded from this place in sociocultural milieu of western civilization. In fact, there are so many Mitties around us today he is so average he’s boring. Middle-aged, unattached, run-off-the-mill, conformist, anonymous male, still connected only to the nuclear family of his origination. This has become so common it is unsavory. In contrast with Walter Mitty of Thurber’s original short story, one that invents his secret life to escape the routine of married middle-age life of accomplished citizen Walter Mitties of today create secret lives to escape insipidness of their lives of un-accomplishment. As Killing Time, fellow blogger I follow and enjoy reading has recently summarized:

"I think I'm growing old.

I admit - this sounded quite silly, of course I'm growing old. We all are. What I wanted to say is that I think I'm old already. I do not feel old, but there are indicators I cannot ignore. One of them is that I'm less wise than few years ago. This is the sign of my generation aging. We do not have time to wait fortieth birthday to enter midlife crisis, we want to act like idiots now! And that is not because we feel we haven't experienced enough, just the opposite: we behaved like idiots our whole lives and suddenly we arrived at an age when we should stop. Our version of existential crisis manifests in a decision to continue behaving like idiots. That is also the reason why we cannot afford Maybach or jet-propelled motorbike so we could have bare minimum of style in our living through this premature crisis."

So we watch our Walter going on and on with his existence. Going to work, paying bills, taking care of things, having relationships, connecting with people, being a good person, being a good boss, being a poster employee, accomplishing things... and yet - daydreaming of a different life, of noteworthy life, life of meaning and substance and passion.

Waiting for things to happen not realizing that things are happening already and have been happening all along.

We hear Walter insisting, more than once, that he hasn't really done anything or that he hasn't really been anywhere but just mere minutes later he is describing his life and magnifficent things he accomplished him not even realizing their value. Forever waiting that his life actions are ascribed value from the outside. For world to weigh his endeavors and convince him that he's worthy, but not accepting this judgement if it really happens.

This is the real predicament and disease of Today. In a world where you can easily share your accomplishments with 6 billion people with an action as simple as tweet, reality of the fact:"You are unique, just like everyone else." can easily devalue anything one accomplishes instead of being social adhesive and adding to one's self-worth. So we go through life feeling inadequate and mend the holes in our souls with stupid escapism. Earth continues to revolve and we continue to breathe, to breed, to put one foot in front of the other never seeing the quintessence.

The quintessence.

There is a scene in The Secret Life of Walther Mitty in which he manages to attain unattainable all the while not giving himself credit for what he accomplishes and at the very same time he witnessess somebody else having a moment of simmilar success - but that success being somebody else's accoplishment makes that he easily recognizes it as special and treats it as such. Walter, against all odds, finds his photographer in the Himalayas and the photographer manages to get the long sought snow leopard into the focus of his camera. There is a small exchange of words:

Walter Mitty: When are you going to take it?

Sean O'Connell: Sometimes I don't. If I like a moment, for me, personally, I don't like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it.

Walter Mitty: Stay in it?

Sean O'Connell: Yeah. Right there. Right here.

And THIS is my point connecting this review with my prevoius post, my nook in which I currently reside enjoying a moment in my life.

Movie continues a bit, shortly after that revealing the quintessence...

... which happens to be a keyhole view into Walter's life, noteworthy life, life of meaning and substance and passion, just what that life always has been.

Beauty of that moment of Walter's life finally being a flow-through space, and not an inflamed apendix that ultimately dissolves him is a beauty of a fulfilled life; not only priceless but beyond cost.