ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE (Hong Sang-soo, 2017)

Yesterday the latest film from Hong Sang-soo opened wide here in Seoul (although with only one screening, at Emu Art Space, with English subtitles), coming off its win for Best Actress at the Berlin film festival last month. Normally, this release would be of interest only to a small group of people interested in Hong and/or art cinema more generally, but this time the controversy over Hong's affair with lead actress Kim Min-hee has led to a much larger popular interest, although we'll still have to see the ultimate box office numbers. As a long-time admirer of Hong's movies, I'm glad for the increased exposure, and the film itself is overall quite strong, although, as I'll discuss, I think the ending is rather misjudged.

(Spoilers ahead)

First, some aspects of the film I really loved. Kim Min-hee's performance is excellent, and Hong certainly benefits from having such a magnetic presence fill his movie. She is present in almost every scene, and combines the movie star glamour the role needs with an ability to convey deeper emotions and internal conflicts, a quality she also displayed in her previous Hong collaboration, Right Now, Wrong Then. Also, I find Hong is often at his best with a strong female protagonist, and this is one of his few films with a clear female lead, as well as a number of strong actresses in supporting roles. The typical Hong males are still around, but much more at the margins.

On the Beach At Night Alone is also, as one may guess from the title, considerably darker and more disturbing than Hong's more recent work and harkens back more to his earlier films in its tone. As has been often noted in early reviews, the movie clearly addresses the recent scandal of Hong's personal life, and this real-life context cannot help but impact the viewing experience. However, Hong has been making this story, of an older married man and his relationship with a younger woman, for many years now. Ironically, the relationship between Hong and Kim Min-hee is far less problematic than the professor-student transgressions of the earlier narratives. The scandal is not so much the adultery itself, but its acknowledgment. That said, because the film concentrates on the female perspective, there is a greater melancholy and even menace to the work. Hong includes a few surrealistic touches, as he often does, much as a man whose presence on the character's balcony is never really explained, but here the effect is not simply comic but more unsettling. This is compounded by the many references to death in the dialogue, particularly one sequence in which Younghee (Kim Min-hee) discusses facing her life's inevitable conclusion in words that seem much closer to those of an older man like Hong himself, who has suffered health problems in recent years. All of this combines to give the movie an emotional resonance often missing from his more recent. works.

My main objection to the movie is a long final sequence in which Younghee and the director whom she had an affair (played by Hong veteran and frequent surrogate Moon Sung-keun) finally meet. We have heard this character discussed throughout, and I think Hong makes a mistake in having the character appear (even if it is, we see, most likely a dream). Not that Hong necessarily uses the character to justify himself; the depiction is rather critical and pathetic, although there is a fine line between self-critique and narcissism. The problem is that the character works far better as an absence, an almost Godot-like figure whom we never meet. The movie is much more interesting because it is about the female perspective, and the intrusion of the character, even if it is in her sub-conscious, is an unfortunate reversal of that emphasis.

That major objection aside, this is a very good film and one I'm anxious to revisit, perhaps again in the next week. It is showing at Emu until at least next Wednesday, 3:30 on Saturday and Sunday (part of a whole day of Kim Min-hee films, all subtitled), and 6:40 Monday-Wednesday.

The UP Series

Over the past two weeks, I went through the entire eight film "Up" series from director Michael Apted. Beginning in 1964 with a short 50 minute television episode about a dozen or so British seven year olds from various strata of British society, Apted has returned to the group every seven years since, up to the most recent installent, 56 Up, released in 2012. From 21 Up forward, the documentaries became feature length, settling in to an average of roughly 2-2.5 hours. Watching the installements in a short, condensed binge had its advantages and disadvantages. The biggest downside is that the repetitive overviews that are necessary for viewers returning to these characters after a seven year absence are unnecessary, and I began to think that the movies could be usefully re-edited into a series of documentaries of each character. That said, the effect of watching the films all at once perhaps increased one's identification of the people on screen and made for a deeper understanding of how they evolved.

Ultimately, there is nothing special about the filmmaking here, as it is pretty straight forward expository style. In fact, this is a bit of a disadvantage, and the times in which Apted switches to the participatory mode are often the best moments. For this reason, I thought 49 Up was the best of the bunch, as it includes more moments when the participants challenge Apted and his representation. The series really depends on the gimmick of returning to these people every seven years, and benefits from the fact that each character is rather distinct, although some are certainly more compelling than others.

The star of the series is Neil, who we see as a happy and talkative seven year old but who between the ages of 14 and 21 clearly experiences some mental health diffculties and spends the years between 21 and 42 in various states of homelessness. However, by the time he reaches 42, his life has stablized, never to the point where he holds down a steady job or family, but much less dire than we originally feared. Next would be Tony, a working class kid from the East End of London who has a great deal of on-screen charisma (and even did some small acting roles in other series in England). Tony goes from his dream of being a jockey to becoming a successful London cabbie, getting married and having a family. What makes Tony compelling is his honesty and willingness to share his private life and troubles, including his infidelities as well as his raw emotion over losing his parents. One gets the sense that this is connected to his working class background and his desire to avoid any pretensions.

The class aspect is best exemplified in the reluctance of the upper class characters to participate as fully. There are three private school boys, John, Andrew and Charles. After the 21 Up program, John and Charles both refused to participate. John did return for 35 and then again for 49 and 56. The program seemed in some ways beneath them, or exposed their class priviledge in a way that made them uncomfortable. Andrew, the one who continued to participate, is also maybe the blandest person on the show. Maybe this is just his natural character and he is a boring guy, but it may also be connected to a certain reserve he has in front of the camera, a desire to not say anything controversial. John, by contrast, comes off quite negatively early on, but redeems himself in later installements through his charity work. However, some of the working class characters are also critical of how they are portrayed. The three working class girls, Jackie, Lynn, and Susan, for example, often challenge how they are seen by Apted, especially Jackie in 49 Up. Thorughout the series, these participants are aware of how they are being turned into characters, and thus character types, seen as representative, and they resent this and try to resist however they can.

My personal favorites of the series were Nick and Suzy, who interestingly are interviewed together briefly in the most recent 56 Up. They both grew up in country-side environments, although Suzy came from much more privilege. Suzy was fascinating in that she seemed to age in reverse. At age 7, she sounded like an adult, and by 21 was chain-smoking and had an edgy, cynical view of life. But from 28 forward, she became this very warm presence, much more open and child-like than when she was young. Nick, on the other hand, I identified with because of personal connections, since he is also a professor who moved abroad in order to do his research and teaching. I also found both Paul and Symon fascinating, the two boys who spent time in a state-run housing program because of family problems when they were seven. Paul struggled his whole life with confidence issues but found happiness in marriage and family living in Australia. Symon was the only racial minority of the group, and went on, in his second marriage, to become a foster parent and try to help children who were in a similar position to himself.

In 56 Up, there was the return of Peter, who dropped out after 28, claiming that his critical views of Thatcher in that episode led to a great deal of harassment. He returns partly out of self-interest, as he is a musician trying to promote his music, but also, one suspects, because enough time had passed that few would care about his past views. His story provides a microcosm of the series as a whole, as in many ways the participants have a type of love-hate relationship with the fame associated. Many complain about the burden and regret their parents' decision to allow Apted to choose them, but few fail to continue to participate. As Suzy puts it, it's like a bad novel but you still want to keep reading to find out what happens. There is a level of "Big Brother" style voyeurism to the series, but I believe it is deeper than that. The series goes beyond the characters on screen and makes one think about themselves and people they know. As someone now 42 and who has parents around the same age as these participants, I could not help imagine how I would have appeared if featured, and how much I would have been interested in seeing a similar series about my own family members. But, I also recognize that I am glad that neither myself nor people I know were chosen for such a project.

Are the Oscars and Critical Consensus Converging?

With last night's surprising upset of Moonlight over La La Land for Best Picture, I was thinking about how unusual it was for an independent critical darling to win the Oscar and if this has been changing over the past couple decades. Are Best Picture winners getting better, or, at least, more critically respectable? One way to examine this would be to compare the Academy Awards with a critical consensus website like Metacritic, which aggregrates critic scores to produce a number out of 100. Below are the results, with the number next to the Oscar winner indicating its Metacritic ranking for the year (if not #1) as well as the Oscar winner if Metacritic chose from the nominees (if different than actual winner) and the Metacritic # 1 of the year (again, if different).

Year    Oscar Winner                          Metacritic Winner                   Metacritic #1

2016    Moonlight

2015    Spotlight (4)                                                                            Carol

2014    Birdman (16)                           Boyhood

2013    12 Years a Slave

2012    Argo (11)                                Zero Dark Thirty

2011    The Artist (6)                                                                          A Separation

2010    The King’s Speech (8)            The Social Network

2009    The Hurt Locker        

2008    Slumdog Millionaire (6)                                                          4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

2007    No Country for Old Men (5)   There Will Be Blood              Ratatouille

2006    The Departed (13)                   The Queen                              Pan’s Labyrinth

2005    Crash (129)                             Capote                                     The Best of Youth

2004    Million Dollar Baby (9)          Sideways

2003    The Lord of the Rings 3         

2002    Chicago (23)                           The Lord of the Rings 2          Spirited Away

2001    A Beautiful Mind (80)            The Lord of the Rings 1

2000    Gladiator (122)                       Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

1999    American Beauty (8)                                                              Topsy-Turvy

1998    Shakespeare in Love (3)         Saving Private Ryan  

1997    Titanic (21)                             L.A. Confidential                    Maborosi

1996    The English Patient (3)           Secrets and Lies

1995    Braveheart (30)                       Sense and Sensibility              Toy Story 

Another alternative would be to use the Rotten Tomatoes aggregrate, which uses an Adjusted Score based on number of reviews (as well as a binary fresh/rotten grade). Here would be the results: 

Year    Oscar Winner                          RT Winner                              RT #1

2016    Moonlight

2015    Spotlight (3)                            Mad Max Fury Road                                                            

2014    Birdman (15)                           Boyhood                                                        

2013    12 Years a Slave (2)                Gravity

2012    Argo  

2011    The Artist (2)                                                                         Harry Potter 7 (Part2)            

2010    The King’s Speech (5)            Toy Story 3                

2009    The Hurt Locker (2)                Up      

2008    Slumdog Millionaire (8)         Milk                                        The Wrestler

2007    No Country for Old Men (3)                                                  Ratatouille

2006    The Departed  (6)                    The Queen                              Casino Royale

2005    Crash (101)                             good night, and good luck      Murderball

2004    Million Dollar Baby (15)        Sideways                                 The Incredibles                      

2003    The Lord of the Rings 3 (2)                                                    Finding Nemo

2002    Chicago (27)                           The Lord of the Rings 2                     

2001    A Beautiful Mind (71)            The Lord of the Rings 1          Monsters Inc

2000    Gladiator (47)                         Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon     Chicken Run

1999    American Beauty (11)            The Insider                              Toy Story 2

1998    Shakespeare in Love (3)                                                         The Truman Show

1997    Titanic (4)                               L.A. Confidential

1996    The English Patient (22)         Fargo                                      When We Were Kings

1995    Braveheart (30)                       Babe                                       Toy Story

Looking at the two charts, there does appear to be a slight trend towards critical favorites. There hasn't been a Best Picture winner not in the Top 20 of either the Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes list since 2005, when the now notorious Crash upset Brokeback Mountain (although interestingly Capote and good night, and good luck were the more acclaimed films). The most "controversial" winner since 2005 was Birdman from 2014, and even that film was critically respected if not adored. The consensus has turned against The Artist from 2011, but it was no. 6 and no.2 on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes respectively and was higher ranked than any of its fellow nominees. 

The clear down period is 2000-2002, with Gladiator (122 and 47), A Beautiful Mind (80 and 71), and Chicago (22 and 27) all much less respected by critics than the Academy. These are also the type of films, perhaps, that are becoming harder to make in the streaming, blockbuster franchise world, and need critical consensus if they are to thrive. Chicago and La La Land are an instructive comparison here, with director Damien Chazelle's indie cred and art cinema influences giving his film the critical respect needed to compete in today's Oscar race. Initial lukewarm reviews similar to those of Chicago, one guesses, would have sunk its chances. And even with its box office success and high critical notices (5 and 4), it still lost, to the type of small, seemingly niche film that would have only been considered a contender at the Independent Spirit Awards a decade ago. 

What is also intriguing is that movies that now have less critical respect, such as American Beauty, Shakespeare in Love, and The English Patient from the late 90s, were critical as well as Academy favorites at the time. Thus, the convergence of Oscars and critics is not to be exaggerated. They have always been closer than perhaps we collectively imagine or remember. But as movies recede in cultural influence and Hollywood can no longer pretend in the franchise age that its box office monster hits have middlebrow critical cred, we may see the critical favorites achieve more success. In other words, it seems less likely we will have another Crash again. And if nothing else, that's a positive. 

Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, La La Land, and the Modes of Modern Cinema

I recently finished reading David Lodge's The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, originally published in 1977 but reissued last year by Bloomsbury Press. I had previously known Lodge from his excellent collection The Art of Fiction, and enjoyed this book equally, admiring the attempt to incorporate structuralist theory into more traditional style criticism. And although it is now 40 years old, the ideas remain useful to think about in discussing how literature, as well as other narrative art forms, work. The central idea of the book is looking into the realist and modernist traditions in literature, and trying to show how they differ on a formal level. To do this, Lodge uses the linguistic theory of Roman Jakobson and the distinction between metaphor and metonymy. He quotes Jakobson's distinction as follows:

"The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or their contiguity. The metaphorical way would be the more appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively. In aphasia one or other of these two processes is blocked. . . . In normal verbal behaviour both processes are continually operative, but careful observation will reveal that under the influence of a cultural pattern, personality, and verbal style, preference is given to one of the two processes over the other." (99)

This preference for one or the other poles breaks down the difference between different styles (modernist versus realist), different forms (poetry versus novels) or even different mediums (drama versus film). 

While this distinction can seem overly schematic, Lodge is a sensitive enough critic to show how they are indeed poles along a spectrum rather than strict binaries, and generally, especially in his specific case studies, the two modes of metaphor and metonymy are quite useful in understanding individual writers and styles and even, more ambitiously, literature itself. 

As often happens whenever I read something, I tend to apply it to pieces of culture I encounter. Sometimes this is counter-productive and connections are made that are not really there, but there are points where I think it helps clarify certain thoughts and opinions. I just watched perhaps the two most critically acclaimed American films of last year: Barry Jenkins' Moonlight and Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea. Both are excellent, and in trying to think through them, Lodge's distinctions remained in my mind, as did his general comments on cinema, such as the following: 

"Underground movies define themselves as deviant by deliberately resisting the natural metonymic tendency of the medium, either by a total commitment to montage, bombarding us with images between which there are only paradigmatic relations of similarity and contrast, or by parodying and frustrating the syntagm, setting the naturally linear and ‘moving’ medium against an unmoving object" (107)

While discussion of medium "essences" is always dicey, I have to admit to an affinity with this perspective. Which is not to say that formalistic filmmakers are inferior or doing something perverse, but simply to state that they are working against the form of the medium. Lodge's literary examples are interesting for comparison. Wordsworth, for example, is considered a great poet, but does so by going against the metaphorical nature of the poetic form:  "A different kind of deviance results when the poet, especially the lyric poet, pushes his medium in the opposite direction—when he makes the metaphorical development of his topic subject to the kind of metonymic constraints that the realistic prose writer normally applies. This is a path likely to be followed by a poet reacting against what he feels to be a decadent metaphorical mode—for example, Wordsworth." (145) Likewise, the brilliance of an Eisenstein or a Warhol is connected to their challenging of the realist nature of the cinema. 

When analyzing Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea, both seem to fit broadly within the metonymic mode, not surprising given the overall critical consensus about their worth. That said, these are poles, and certainly neither is strictly trying to create pure realism. On first glance, Moonlight would appear to be the more poetic and thus more metaphorical of the two. with Manchester by the Sea attempting a more realist approach. The opening of the films offer a contrast in this regard.

Moonlight opens with the arrival of Juan, the neighborhood drug dealer and eventual father figure for the main character, Little. The eye is immediately drawn to the blue color of the vehicle, and when the scene eventually cuts to Little running away from bullies, we immediately notice the same color backpack. There remains throughout the film a certain heightened reality, which can be seen in its three-part structure of different time periods, in which we are not so much told a linear narrative as we are given a mood poem about this one person's life, which at the same time metaphorically represents both his race, gender, and sexuality. 

Manchester by the Sea, in contrast, seeks a greater naturalism in selecting various everyday images that suggest the routine of the main character, Lee Chandler. Even the shot near the opening of Lee, his brother, and his nephew on a boat, while having certain thematic connotations, is still meant to be absorbed as part of the setting of the story. On close inspection, everything being presented by Lonergan has significance, but its impact depends on the audience being absorbed into this world. Even the shifts in temporality are not presented as a structural device, but rather as a reflection of the main character's memories. Although Lonergan is known as a playwright, if one were to guess, this feels much more like an adaptation from novel rather than play (in fact it is an original screenplay). 

While I greatly enjoyed both films, my favorite of the year continues to be Damien Chazelle's La La Land. If forced to come up with a reason why, beyond contingencies like seeing the movie in the cinema as opposed to an online screener, I believe, strangely, that it may have something to do with its weakness as drama. La La Land really only works as cinema, and announces its unreality right away, existing in a very different space than the realist drama. In other words, it is very close to the metaphorical pole, especially in its structural similarities to the Broadway musical (see David Bordwell's detailed discussion here). It is the pure cinematic verve of Chazelle, and the movie's lack of reality, that I love, although even this film has long stretches where it shifts to the metonymic pole, such is the pull of realism in the cinema. This leads to a greater backlash (Chazelle is trying too hard, all style/no substance, etc), and in the era of Trump, Hollywood may decide to honor a more socially conscious drama like Moonlight over a movie that celebrates Hollywood itself (which it normally loves to do, of course). But despite the emotional impact of the heavy drama in Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea, La La Land was able to create a similar impact with much lower stakes, which leads me to value its artistic achievement more. 

Reading Chandler in Gyeongju

One of my goals for the year is to read more fiction instead of only non-fiction, so when I took a short, digital-device free trip to the city of Gyeongju in the south-east part of South Korea last week, I decided to bring along a few novels in paperback form. Although I love using e-readers for non-fiction and academic works, I have never adjusted to the form for fiction. I had a few options: American Pastoral by Philip Roth, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. But the book that ultimately gripped me and which I finished over a two-day period was The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, written in 1953, the sixth of Chandler's seven completed novels.

Most people today, I suspect, know Chandler (if they do) through film, both for his contributions as a screenwriter (co-writing the adaptations of Double Indemnity and Strangers on a Train) and for the adaptations of his novels (two versions of The Big Sleep, and one for each of the other novels except his last, Playback). The two most well-known are the 1946 Howard Hawks/Bogart-Bacall version of The Big Sleep and the 1973 Robert Altman version of The Long Goodbye. Neither is exactly faithful as an adaptation, but The Big Sleep is closer to the Chandler source and the Philip Marlowe character, with Bogart an ideal performer for the role. The film ends more happily than the novel and with the union of the Bogart/Bacall couple, but it feels like the hard-boiled detective genre for which Chandler was known.

The Long Goodbye, however, has very little relation to the original source. The setting is now the early 70s, when the film was made, and has only the bare basics of Chandler's original plot, and even makes major changes to these elements (especially the rather shocking finale). Most dramatically, Marlowe is played by Elliott Gould, who gives a comic and seemingly improvised performance that has little of the hard-boiled dialogue of the original, despite being written by one of the co-screenwriters of The Big Sleep, Leigh Brackett. Even the noir stalwart Sterling Hayden gives a very un-classical, Method-style performance that differs significantly from his tough-guy persona. In short, this is a Robert Altman film, and has little connection to Chandler, other than getting at, in its own way, the rotten core of glamorous Los Angeles. It is a great film, maybe even a masterpiece, and in its way even a great adaptation, but I think it is unfortunate that it now dwarfs the original novel, because this book is literature of the highest order.

I say this is great literature in the sense that, although this is genre fiction that is trying to tell a good detective story, it is also a finely crafted piece of writing and construction, with many poetic moments that equal F. Scott Fitzgerald, who clearly influenced Chandler's style. In terms of structure, there are 53 chapters over the course of a novel less than 400 pages. Thus, few chapters last longer than 10 pages and many are less than 5. Each chapter feels pared down to its very essence, with the language and voice reaching a kind of perfection. It is the rare novel where you are constantly highlighting lines and paragraphs because they are so striking. Partly this is because Chandler, for all his cynicism, is basically a romantic, and given to this heightened use of words (which is why a pure cynic like Altman eliminates almost all of them). But I think it is also something more, in which Chandler by 1953 had come to know this genre and this character so well that he can concentrate on working over the expressive use of metaphor to the point where almost every sentence is a delight to read. And beyond the single sentence gems, there are also paragraph fragments that evocatively convey a worldview, one that shows Chandler's distrust of promises of the American Dream and, even more radically, the Dream's emptiness once achieved.

As much as I love Altman's film, my love of the book is such that I would be very enthusiastic about a more faithful adaptation. Given that there has been no Chandler novel adapted in almost 40 years, perhaps the time has come.

As a way to give a sense of Chandler's writing and some of his ideas, here are the sentences and passages I found most memorable (I've bolded the best of the best):

It's excitement of a high order, but it's an impure emotion -- impure in the aesthetic sense. I'm not sneering at sex. It's necessary and it doesn't have to be ugly. But it always has to be managed. Making it glamorous is a billion-dollar industry and it costs every cent of it. (23)

Tijuana is not Mexico. No border town is anything but a border town. (37)

There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn't be a cop. (48)

He is the stage manager of a play that has had the longest run in history, but it no longer interests him. (53)

Like playing cards with a deck that's all aces. You've got everything and you've got nothing. (79)

It was exclusive in the only remaining sense of the word that doesn't mean merely expensive. (98)

The dialogue was stuff even Monogram wouldn't have used. (99)

There are one hundred and ninety ways of being a bastard and Carne knew all of them. (112)

His eyebrows waved gently, like the antennae of some suspicious insect. (125)

"There are more unpleasant ways to die," he said. "I think yours will be one of them." (148)

He could have twisted the hind leg off of an elephant. (154)

It seemed louder than before, if possible. About two drinks louder. (177)

Around here we only hit our wives in private. (178)

The house was leaking guests out into the evening air now. (180)

A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before. (181)

I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency. (187)

That's the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it's the only difference. (188)

There is something compulsive about a telephone. The gadget-ridden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone is a fetish. (200)

Chapter Twenty-Eight (203-207)

Idle Valley was a perfect place to live. Perfect. Nice people with nice homes, nice cars, nice horses, nice dogs, possibly even nice children. But all a man named Marlowe wanted from it was out. And fast. (220)

"Who built this place?" I asked her. "And who was he mad at?"

Mass production couldn't sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. (234)

I went on out and Amos had the Caddy there waiting. He drove me back to Hollywood. I offered him a buck but he wouldn't take it. I offered to buy him the poems of T.S. Eliot. He said he already had them. (237)

I might have even gotten rich -- small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city. (249)

A hotel room is a pretty sharp indication of the manners of the guests. The Ritz-Beverly wasn't expecting them to have any. (291)

There is a kind of silence that is almost as loud as a shout. (304)

Dead. What a cold black noiseless word it is in any language. (318)

I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don't want it anymore. (342)

In one way cops are all the same. They all blame the wrong things. If a guy loses his pay check at the crap table, stop gambling. If he gets drunk, stop liquor. If he kills somebody in a car crash, stop making automobiles. If he gets pinched with a girl in a hotel room, stop sexual intercourse. If he falls downstairs, stop building houses. (351)

"Do you have something against marriage?"
"For two people in a hundred it's wonderful. The rest just work at it." (362)

The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right.
To say goodbye is to die a little. (365)

I never saw any of them again -- except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them. (final line, 379)

Best in 2016 Non-Fiction

One of the few goals for the past year I was able to achieve was reading more (at the cost of film watching), so I thought I'd share my Top Ten books of the year (non-fiction only), since this is the first time I actually read enough to make such a list. I would also recommend The New York Review of Books, which I subscribed to for the first time this year (only 3.99 for the digital version). It allowed me to learn about the existence of many of the titles on my list, through both their reviews and advertisements. 

All books read in Kindle format unless noted as audio.

1 Jack Hamilton, Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination 

My favourite book of the year, a scholarly yet very readable analysis of popular American music from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the period in which rock and roll becomes rock and in the process becomes almost exclusively white. Each chapter explores the connections between two different sets of artists or styles, such as Sam Cooke/Bob Dylan, The Beatles/Motown, and others. Also includes a podcast series as part of the Slate Academy, six episodes in which Hamilton discusses each of his chapters with a different guest, a great supplement to the already rich original text. 

2 Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War 

Novelist Nguyen provides both a deeply researched and scholarly work on the war while also showing off his ability as a storyteller and imaginative thinker. Dense but rewarding and surprisingly non-dogmatic in point of view. Also one of the better meditations on the often discussed topic of memory, mixing in anecdotal material with historical content seamlessly. 

3 Branko Milanovic, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization 

Milanovic is the major thinker on the subject of inequality from a global perspective and his latest work is both a fine analysis of the current situation (growing internal inequality within states even as global inequality has decreased) as well as a warning about the consequences of inequality going forward: "Rising inequality indeed sets in motion forces, often of a destructive nature, that ultimately lead to its decrease but in the process destroy much else, including millions of human lives and huge amounts of wealth. A very high inequality eventually becomes unsustainable, but it does not go down by itself; rather, it generates processes, like wars, social strife, and revolutions, that lower it." (98)

4 Alice Kaplan, Looking for "The Stranger": Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic 

My favourite writer discovery of the year is the scholar Alice Kaplan, who specializes in French culture of the 1930s/1940s. Her latest book traces the creation of Camus's masterpiece, written during the war, and how these historical forces impacted its form. Also recommended highly is Kaplan's 2001 study The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach. 

5 Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo, The Greatest Comic Book of All-time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books  

5 Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, TV (The Book): Two Experts Pick the Greatest American Shows of All Time (audio)

A pair of great books on canon formation. Critics Sepinwall and Seitz set out to systematically rank American television shows and create a canon for the long disreputable but now culturally emergent art form, and make their case very convincingly while also providing a useful history of the medium. Scholars Beaty and Woo, however, examine the whole process of taste-making, using the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to examine what it means to call any individual comic book "the greatest," with each chapter taking on a different case study. The result is a great introduction to both comic books and their history as well as the sociological study of aesthetics. 

6 Todd McGowan, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Markets

A dense but thought-provoking text, reminiscent of Zizek in arguing for the counter-intuitive but overall more rigorous and coherent than Zizek usually manages. McGowan begins with the premise, taken from later Freud, that humans primarily desire loss and how capitalism as a system is particularly adept at providing this. Pure theorizing, which many can find off-putting, but with many ideas well worth considering on a wide array of topics, such as privacy, sacrifice, religion, romance, abundance/scarcity, and fetishistic accumulation. 

7 Katherine Zoepf, Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who Are Transforming the Arab World 

A wide-ranging journalistic account of many groups of women in the Arab world and their importance to the future development of these societies. Zoepf manages to express her perspective on this world while always emphasizing her outsider status and the difficulty of fully understanding these women's conflicted relationship to their, from a western point of view, repressive societies. Zoepf is neither an apologist for Islamic anti-female views nor for the "false consciousness" claims of many western feminists, instead seeking to describe and ultimately understand. 

8 Jay Beck, Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics on 1970s American Cinema 

A new take on the endlessly discussed New Hollywood cinema, this time from the often neglected perspective of sound design. A rare scholarly book of film studies that is also very knowledgeable about technical matters and the concrete particulars of artistic practice. It also provides a different set of criteria for artistic evaluation with sound as a more important element, leading to a rethinking of the New Hollywood canon and its auteurs. 

9 Lee Konstantinou, Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction 

A strange read for me in that many of the primary literary examples Konstantinou discusses (William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, various recent meta-fictions) I haven't read, with the exception of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and some of Wallace's non-fiction. However, Konstantinou does an excellent job of describing the novels and the character types (the hipster, the punk, the coolhunter) that form the basis of his wide-ranging analysis of irony and post-irony in American literature since the 1950s. 

10 Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past 

Maybe Klosterman's best book to date, taking his gifts for speculation and thought experiment and applying this to the perfect topic: the past as it was experienced at the time. Naturally, this also leads to a discussion of the future, and how our current time period will eventually be seen. Manages to be light and fun without being simply frivolous. 

Honourable Mentions 

David Bordwell, The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture  

Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (audio) 

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, The Only Rule Is It Has to Work: Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team

Dan Fox, Pretentiousness: Why It Matters 

Benjamin K. Bergen, What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves (audio)

Robert H. Frank, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy (audio)

Steven Hyden, Your Favorite Band is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life (audio)

A.O. Scott, Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

Frederic Jameson, Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality 

2016 in Film: Top 20 Discoveries

It is a bit too early to put together a best-of list for 2016, as being in Korea I have to wait another month or so to finally catch up on all (or at least most) of the prestige releases. So I thought I would put together a list of 20 (actually more, since I did some cheating) older films that I saw for the first-time in the 2016 calendar year.

1. Abbas Kiarostami's "Koker" trilogy: Where is the Friend's House? (1987); Life and Nothing More (1992); and Through the Olive Trees (1994)

Of all the celebrity deaths of 2016, Kiarostami's had the biggest impact on me personally. And although I love a number of his films, I had never seen the three films many consider his highest achievement, the so-called (rather inaccurately) "Koker" trilogy. Where is the Friend's House? is characteristic of so much of Kiarostami's greatness, a rather simple story, great affection for his child protagonist, and all within a formal structure that ends up being suprisingly challenging. The following two films return to the same area of Iran, but are more meta-textual, with a Kiarostami surrogate becoming the lead in Life and Nothing More, and a character from that second film taking over the main narrative of Through the Olive Trees, Both of the later films also take place in the real life aftermath of a devasting earthquake that hit the area and bare the imprint of Kiarostami's self-reflexive turn in 1990's Closeup. For some, like the late Roger Ebert, this formalism was a barrier to emotional impact, but I found the opposite to be true, showing how one can have both distance and genuine affect.

2. The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)

A rarity: an affecionate homage to a classical genre (the musical) that manages to also be something completely original. A huge influence on La La Land, my current favorite of 2016.

3. Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)

One of the few films that is a legitimate spritiual successor to the creeping paranoia and menace of classic Roman Polanski. Also, makes effective use of a fake "true story" frame to add another fascinating layer to its oblique tale of sexual repression.

4. The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges, 1942)

I'm not the world's biggest Sturges' fan, admiring Sullivan's Travels (1941) and The Lady Eve (1941) without really loving them, but this film is an absolute masterpiece, and further proof of the type of experimentation that was possible within the supposedly stifling studio system. One of a kind, with an amazing opening and closing sequence. The slapstick still is not really to my taste, but everything else works perfectly.

5. My Neighbour Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)

Another of my blindspots is Miyazaki, probably due to my lack of interest in animation. However, this film is so charming and quietly profound that I will need to watch his other films this year.

6. Too Late for Tears (Byron Haskin, 1949)

A rather forgotten noir from 1949, starring two icons of the genre, Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea. Unique in that the lead character is also the femme fatale, this one deserves to the discussed among the great crime films of the era.

7. News From Home (Chantal Akerman, 1977)

I caught up to this film early in the year following Akerman's death. A rather simple premise of Akerman's mother's letters from Brussels to her daughter in America being read over footage of New York City from the mid-70s. Watching today, the images from this period are truly captivating, and the experimental form enables Akerman to give the viewer two different perspectives of both mother and daughter at the same time.

8. Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)

Finally caught up with Tarkovsky's great sci-fi mind bender, inspired by discussions of the film by documentarians Adam Curtis and Mark Cousins. The parallels with the future event of Chernobyl only add to the strange power of the narrative.

9. 3 Women (Robert Altman, 1977)

Maybe the winner of the New Hollywood "How the Hell Did This Get Made?" Award, a truly unusual drama from Altman with two tremendous performances from Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall.

10. Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973)

The ur-text of Tarantino's Kill Bill films, and difficult not to think of those as you watch, but really works on its own terms as well, with a darkness and melancholy Tarantino is never able to re-capture. Meiko Kaji has as magnetic a screen presence as one can imagine.

11. Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)

Denis is another director I have long admired and I finally got around to the film many consider her masterpiece. Amazing images combined with a quite obscure story that re-imagines Melville's Billy Budd. I think I still prefer 35 Shots of Rum, her take on Ozu's Late Spring, but the final scene here is among the greats.

12. Ghosts (Christian Petzold, 2005)

After seeing Petzold's Phoenix, one of my favorite films of this decade, I was able to track down a number of his previous films. This one is my favorite, a truly heart-breaking story of a outcast teenage girl and a woman suffering from the loss of her child. Difficult to shake its impact.

13. Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993)

I watched Kieslowski's Red, the third of his Three Colours trilogy shortly after its original release but never returned to earlier Blue until this year. Very much within the art cinema tradition and thus lacking a certain originality, but one of the best performances of Juliette Binoche.

14. Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle, 1958)

Great pre-New Wave noir from Malle starring Jeanne Moreau and featuring a great Miles Davis jazz score. Not much substance perhaps but high style.

15. Macbeth (Roman Polanksi, 1971)

A bit of a cheat here since I had seen this one previously, but through a combination of high school English screenings and catching parts on television. Seeing on the big screen on 35mm was a real highlight and it remains a contender for best adaptation of Shakespeare, both in its filmmaking and its unique interpretation on the text.

16. Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet, 1988); The State I'm In (Christian Petzold, 2000)

Two films with a similar premise of former radicals on the run, each with teenagers who are being negatively impacted by the sins of their parents. Petzold's is the darker take, but Lumet's drama holds up well, mostly due to the late great River Phoenix.

17. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978); The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982)

Two remakes from end of the New Hollywood era, rarities in that both are close to (in the case of Kaufman) or superior to (in the case of Carpenter) the 50s sci-fi originals. The endings are both are particularly memorable.

18. Repast (Mikio Naruse, 1951)

My second Naruse film, following When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), seen as part of a Naruse retrospective at the Seoul Cinematheque. Not as strong as the later film, but Setsuko Hara is great as always in the lead, and the understated story of an unhappy young couple gains strength as it builds to its conclusion.

19. The Man Who Fell to Earth (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)

Following the death of David Bowie, I finally decided to catch up with one of his larger film roles, as the title character in Nicolas Roeg's bleak sci-fi adaptation of the 1963 Walter Tevis novel. Like most of Roeg's work, visually striking and puzzling, but for me less satifsying than his best work, such as Bad Timing (1980). Bowie, however, is really great.

20. Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)

A former professor of mine once dismissed this film as a "profound film for shallow people" (an insult he did not reserve for only this example). I can see the point, as Wenders' meandering approach feels at times unfocused and purposeless, but there are enough arresting images and a great Peter Falk performance to recommend.