Well, this blog idea hasn’t gone according to plan. Full disclosure? I’ve started a number of posts about various pieces of media and all of them are lingering as drafts without adequate resolutions. I have never been able to summarize, resolve, or generally tie everything together at the end of a piece, but I have many and sundry thoughts and feelings that need to be set down and organized. So let’s take a brief look at a cross-section of the types of stories I’ve been consuming this year.
Impolite (1992, dir. David Hauka)
This movie is, in the words of podcasting’s Lani Diane Rich, made specifically to delight me. It is a meandering path through humanity and history via symbolism and philosophy, asking more questions than it bothers to answer by invoking religious mysticism I cannot decipher. So, of course, I love it, because it is a slice of emotional questioning by way of various cultural beliefs and I am a sucker for the combination of the universal and the personal.
The plot, such as it is, doesn’t move that much. Our protagonist Jack ends in much the same practical situation that he started, perhaps even worse, but is emotionally prepared for the work of living now, and that’s really what the whole story is about. Discovering oneself through the life, words, and impact of another, stories in stories in stories. The dialogue is heightened and beautiful.
The Sermon-on-the-Mount scene with Christopher Plummer serves as the pivot by which the plot and the protagonist turn. (In the commentary with the writer and director, they each discuss the ways in which they took that concept on and it’s well worth listening to once you’ve already watched it once.) I could quote that whole scene (and most of this movie, tbh), but here’s the bit I love the most.
JACK: The truth is a matter of opinion. [pause] Was your brother a good man?
NAPLES: I believe goodness was his ultimate destination. Are you a good man?
JACK: [chuckles drily] I lost my ticket.
NAPLES: Perhaps that’s how we begin to find a state of grace, losing one’s ticket.
JACK: What is grace?
NAPLES: You’ll know when you don’t have to ask.
Recommended if: you like sinking into a story, letting it guide you to questions without answers, luscious scenery, and poetry.
Best sample: the scenes with Christopher Plummer’s Naples and the climax in Kenny Lum’s morgue.
The Shadow Land (Elizabeth Kostova, pub. 2017)
Loose summary: a woman who lost her brother travels to Bulgaria and finds herself embroiled, not only in another family’s loss, but in political intrigue surrounding the history of post-WWII communist labor camps.
It’s incredibly beautifully written, as well as being powerful and effective. (Her word choice! She conveys powerful moments very simply, starkly, shortly; but when she describes, she allows the words to be just so pretty. The allowance of poetry for beauty, while being economical in pain or revelation is both effective and remarkably true to life. Melodrama is reserved for later.) The characters are immediately real and yet realized in such a subtle way that, although you know Alexandra’s emotional arc has to be dealt with, it gets dealt with in the background, along with the story’s rise and fall. The plot and character arcs are interwoven, such that when one character speaks a simple line, it’s a mirror to another lifetime from 200 pages earlier.
Since part of the story is the memory of being forced to work in a labor camp, I have to caution any potential readers. Perhaps it is not gratuitously gruesome like a slasher movie, all blood and gore and sharp weaponry, but it does reflect the mental, physical, and emotional torture real humans have undergone. It does so respectfully, but Kostova does report the horrors that happened only half a century ago without embellishment and with great understanding of both the survivors and those who perished. This must be faced. Unlike the other two stories on this list, this one doesn’t sugarcoat the depths to which humanity can sink; like the other two, it manages this with hope. Where there are bad people, there are good ones; where there is weakness, also strength.
Recommended if: you want to face a part of history that should never have been forgotten and the emotional catharsis of loss and rebuilding, all wrapped up in beautiful literature.
Best samples:
“Politicians who talk about purity usually end up deciding who is pure and who is not.”
“The kitchen had a complicated aroma--cold, earthy, as if the house had been built into the mountain.”
“She seemed a little tired now, with the first signs of age around her eyes. Alexandra though this gave her the air of a saint in an icon, weary from the persistent evil of the world, although it would have made most people look merely run-down.”
“It was the beginning of that long bifurcation that became my life: Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish.”
“It was the beginning of that long bifurcation that became my life: Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish.”
Paramour (Cirque du Soleil, Broadway 2016-2017 season)
Lights, smoke, music, camera, action! Paramour is a gasp-inducing combination of some of my favorite things: glittering costumes, jazz, romance, and fate-defying stunts.
Cirque du Soleil’s first (and likely only, for a while) Broadway musical is a bit of a liminal space: neither fully Cirque nor musical, it takes the best elements of both and places them one inside the other. Unfortunately, this was not enough for hardcore fans of either, but it was more than enough to catch my fluttering heart. Most of the criticism leveled at it centers on the story being cliche, but I, for one, am tired of this obsession with novelty. What matters isn’t how original the story is, but how the story is told. A love triangle between an obsessive auteur, a classic ingenue and a yearning musician isn’t exactly new, but the show does what it sets out to do. Paramour isn’t trying to bring something new to that table; it’s trying to extract an optimistic ideal of love and art from the mired layers of The Business We Call Show. And while that optimism rankles the cynics more than the audacity of lacking originality, it was something I dearly needed.
The strain of cynicism that says nothing matters, not even what we do, and demands we accept it and bow our heads to Fate is tiring. The world is dark and gloomy; the people in it are strained to breaking, with knives at each other’s throats. Being reminded that love may not conquer all, but does conquer some, is necessary and timely. Love cannot heal all, but it can break you open to where you can begin to heal, begin to repent. Success and love are not always so diametrically opposed, but neither are they the same thing. These are themes that should be repeated more often, especially when they come clothed in glitz and glamour and shine.
Recommended if: you love purple, glitter, theatricality, and a catchy soundtrack.
Best sample: the hand-to-trapeze number in Love Triangle; the opening number The Hollywood Wiz; AJ’s Blues off the soundtrack.
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