Of stones and spires

Historian Kenneth Clarke said, "Architecture is the most human of all arts." I am not so sure about that. Like a landscape which forms the backdrop, gorgeous but a backdrop nonetheless, to nature's center pieces – the leopards and elks, architecture is a fabric on which the crucial arts of painting, theater and human drama play out. Or so I feel.

That is not to say that a winter landscape isn't immensely fascinating. And the same goes for the Cambodian architecture. To me, architecture at its best has always been a naturalistic form of art. Something that clefts through the earth, sprouting deep roots.

As someone entirely non-religious, I am drawn to abandoned places of worship that have been partly reclaimed by nature. Cracked walls, shrubs, a moss cover – that sort of thing. I don't know why. Maybe a sense of history and antiquity. And a bit of irony.

Yesterday, I visited the St.John's Cathedral in the upper west side of New York. It's not abandoned, far from that. But it's incomplete and partially burned. And it's so massive – from the outside it looks like a small hill, the pillars and facades carved off a cliff.

The garden outside, to the left of the cathedral, has a massive statue of an angel slaying an upside down devil, whose head is dangling two feet from the ground. But instead of making it grim, the artist added a smiling sun, a giant crab and a bunch of animals into the fold. Pagan elements, I wonder. The whole scene is absurd in a sweet way, complete with a deer standing on his hind legs to nibble at the angel's wing tip.

Around the statue are numerous rough bronze figure, inches tall – works of a high school project. Further into the garden, on one side are gray stone buildings – elementary school, residences and library. On the other side is the fortress like wall of the cathedral. And in front of it are construction cones, brightly clothed straw figures and peacocks – multicolored and albino whites.

Inside the cathedral, most of the nave, the walkway leading to the center, was blocked off due to the construction. Yet, just the end of the nave in front of the altar, where we stood, was colossal. I looked around, taking in the magnitude of everything – the pillars surrounding the altar, the organ and the golden cross. Fantastic but not too different from the other cathedrals I have seen.

Then I looked up, expecting a steeple raising above my head or a ceiling covered in murals. What I saw was a flat ceiling with curved edges. It was so high, the light faded out and a hint of reddish brown, the color of the earth, was all that was visible. And walls were rough cut stone. I felt I was underground, in a deep cavern. It was as if the cathedral was build by digging out the earth.

In the semi circle behind the altar were an array of seven small chapels. Each dedicated to a group of immigrants – German, Italian. The design of each chapel varied in layout and texture – smooth ceramic, dark wood. The lighting was so stark that even a randomly placed chair seemed like the most aesthetic arrangement.

Back in the nave, on the far ends, flanking the rows of brown wooden chairs, was photo exhibit by a Romanian artist featuring the priests of an orthodox monastery. The black and white photographs, with its human faces and humble dwelling, was an interesting juxtaposition against the mighty granite walls.

(click to view the entire photo album)

No Country For Old Men

At the beginning of No Country For Old Men, Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem) is arrested on a desert road in West Texas. In the police station, he throws his handcuffed hands around the neck of the cop and strangles him. They fall back on the floor and for more than a minute, the cop thrashes about like a fish gasping for water. Too familiar with Hollywood action films, I munched my popcorn unflustered by the mayhem, enjoying it. Finishing the job, Anton washes his hands, bloodied at the wrists. Then they frame a top shot of the cop's still legs, all around him on the linoleum floor are streaks of black arcs. Marks from the soles of the cop's shoes. I sat up and put away the popcorn.

Numbed by decades of action films, what viewers crave is to still feel something, something beyond mere amusement. Walking out of many films, I say to myself – yeh, the fight choreography was neat and so was that car chase. But where is the pounding heart, and the sweaty palms that I remember from teenage days? Like increasing the dosage for addicts, the filmmakers make action sequences bigger and louder, which only makes it more fake. I think the key is to focus on the little details, the subtle moments that make us forget it's just a movie. That's what the Cohen Brothers do in this film, over and again – through great dialogs, lingering camera shots and silent scenes.

The plot is simple. A welder Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), during a hunt, chances upon a drug deal gone bad – dead bodies everywhere, trucks strewn with bullets and a box of two million dollars cash. He takes the money and runs, and they send a ruthless killer after him. The local sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones), a melancholic aging man, tries to help Moss.

Javier Bardem is a master Spanish actor who owns every role he did, particularly the one in the brilliant film, A Sea Inside. Here he plays a guy who is the "greatest badass" or put another way, "someone who has no sense of humor." Bardem bring his own sophistication and subtlety to the role. Walking out of a house after his most heartless killing (we don't know if he spared or killed her), he stops in front of the doorway and lifts up his legs to see if there are any blood stains on the sole of his shoes.

But the film is not just an intense Western that is all style and panache. Sure there are many high-octane actions scene but the movie doesn't indulge the viewers entirely. It constantly shifts from the theatrical – chased by a dog, Moss dries his gun, loads and fires at the kink of the time – to the real. And from the real to the absurd – one cop says to another, "He kills a man and goes back to the place two days later to shoot another. Who walks into a crime scene? How are we supposed to catch a man like that?"

The Cohen Brothers are primarily storytellers, great ones at that. Maybe that's why, many characters in their films, staring at their comrade or straight into the camera, begin to narrate anecdotes and little stories.

Film is a visual medium and these anecdotes sometimes pose a problem. In The Big Lebowski, we begin with a big narration on The Dude. But the narrator is off-screen and on camera, an active Jeff Daniel keeps our eyes busy. That worked great. No Country For Old Men takes three long forays into monolouges, two with a tight close up of the narrator. I spaced out during these moment – maybe it was the stark contrast to rest of the film (visual & fast paced) or maybe it was the Southern accent.

Later, I read up the monolouges online. The prose is brilliant, but I don't think it has a place in film. When I character in a book describes his dream, we visualize it in our minds. But when someone narrates it in a movie, we are left staring at his sullen face. I think the film would have worked better without those diversions. Everything expressed in those words have already been shown through the photography and acting. This is a recurring issue with movies made from novels. There is so much good stuff in the book, you just can't leave out enough.

To use the cliché, the film is loaded – with a cascade of stunning imagery, great acting, and ironic dialogs. And some how it manages to hold up under all that weight. I can't wait to see it again.

George Clooney & the Modern Melancholy

The first time I saw George Clooney was in the cloying romantic comedy, One Fine Day and the next year, he ruined my favorite film franchise with Batman & Robin. Naturally, I hated him for a long time. The Ocean's 12 & 13 movies didn't help either (I enjoyed Ocean's 11 though).

Last Friday, as I sat at the movies in Union Square and watched his latest film, Michael Clayton, I realized, George Clooney might be one of the most vital figures in cinema today.

Cinema at it's best, just like any other art, explores the human condition. But most of the filmmakers avoid the present day - it's monetary obsessions and plethora of technology - when doing this. They escape into the absurd (like Being John Malkovich or Fight Club), where they can define their own rules. Or they go to the past (like Gladiator or Saving Private Ryan), where the good and the bad are clearly defined.

The main reason for this is the subtility needed in the study of the human condition. You can't have the hero sit in a corner claiming to wonder about what it means to be human. The characters have to go through their lives with more immediate, pressing needs and conflicts. And in that process, through metaphors and allusions, the filmmakers have to bring out a larger theme. It is easier to do this with familiar motifs. A lone man on horseback riding into the horizon makes us feel a strong sense of solitude. Compare that with an image of a man sitting in his cubicle. Through our lives, we have been tuned to respond to certain metaphors and images. These films use that pre-conditioning.

The films that do stay in the present, to take advantage of these metaphors, position themselves in the fringes of modern society - places where the well established sensibilities can still resonate. In the wilderness (Brokeback Mountain), a prison drama (Shawshank Redemption) or a mobster drama (The Departed).

Meanwhile, the complexity of the modern world is left for the television genre shows - CSI, Practice, NYPD Blues & Grey's Anatomy. Shows that pack DNA testing, legal jargons and car chases as a way of being cutting edge. It's all about clever plots and melodrama for quick entertainment.

Very, very few filmmakers have taken on the challenge of confronting contemporary themes, creating new motifs and teasing viewers with fresh metaphors. These films are not easy to make and not easy to watch - hence not as rewarding to either the filmmaker or the viewer. Rather I should say, not immediately rewarding. Because, what happens is a widening of artistic expression and artistic interpretation. Which in turn provides a richer palate for understanding and experiencing our own contemporary times.

This is precisely what George Clooney has been doing in his films (the ones he acts and/or directs) - Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck, Syriana, and The Good German. His new movie Michael Clayton is another step in that direction.

Michael Clayton takes an unflinching look at the conflicts we face, and the choices we make or the choices we get pulled into by the under currents of modernity. It doesn't gives us a hero who is invincible or virtuous (most heros are one or the other, think about it). We see a man who get by through his unscrupulousness but is still left with a strand of virtue that makes him pause, if only for a second. We don't get a villain who laughs hysterically. We see a woman practicing her press interview on her bed, like a kid practicing her first recital. We see her washing the sweat off her armpits in the bathroom, before signing a settlement.

The writing is unrestrained and yet taunt. The camera work and pacing make it difficult to stay engrossed, because they are unorthodox. But they serve a larger purpose and the attention it demands from the viewer is worth giving. All the characters and the acting are good, Tom Wilkinson is great.

It's seems like the writer-director Tony Gilroy got so scared of alienating his viewers too much that he chickened out at the end of the movie. Michael Clayton has such a typical Hollywoodish ending that even a talentless cliched filmmaker will be ashamed of. But inspite of not going all the way, Gilroy deserves a lot of credit for the distance he went. Hopefully, in the next lap, he or the next filmmaker can take things further.

HBO's Rome

Many films adapted from novels fail because the forms are different. The shape of a movie, in its structure and pacing, resembles a short story. They are both typically experienced in a single sitting and stay focused on a single dramatic arc.

In that respect, a TV show is more like a novel than a movie is. And hence, TV shows have immense potential for storytelling. But that potential has hardly been used, because shows are rarely developed with a long vision. They go from episode to episode improvising based on audience reception.

Thanks to HBO for rising upto the challenge. They are the only channel with enough clout and guts to develop shows with conviction (there are exception like Babylon 5 and I haven't seen Showtime shows). In recent years, HBO tackled many difficult literary works, like Empire Falls and Angels in America, through mini-series. With the show Rome, they took on a project of entirely different ambitions and proprotions.

People often ask the question, if you could have the super-power of flight or invisibility, which one would you pick. Apparently, poets are more likely to pick flight and prose writers invisibility. As much as I would love either of the two, more than any other power, the one I crave the most is unintrusive time travel. If I had a time machine, one of the first dates I would spin on the dial is Rome 25 BC (along with Florence 1500 and London 1900). The closest to that experience is the show Rome.

Till now, the only people who had the kind of money needed to make historic city sets were action filmmakers. And naturally, they focused their resources on battle sequences and chariot races. So on screen, we had a more accurate depiction of the Middle Earth (from Lord of the Rings) than Rome or Athens.

This show is the first instance where one can really see the everyday city to this detail – the pillars, colors on the walls, grafittis and cobblestones. Just to be able to breathe and smell the scenes is worth every minute of it. Of course, the story development, the characters, acting, music, everything is top notch.

My only problem is that it's too manupulative. They have two semi-fictional men as the central characters and move the story forward using them as the guiding eyes. Which is brilliant. But we are already in the dramatic backdrop of Rome's politics, with events cascading. On top of this, they fill the lives of the protagonists with constant dramatic twists and turns. Good for addictive TV but I feel it dilutes the lasting impact.

Going back to the historic events of Rome's politics and power play, I knew it was bloody and dramatic, but I assumed they took the core events and shaped them for the visual medium. When I started reading up on specific events, I was surprised at how accurate most of them were. History has given us such a dramatic story, the showmakers didn't even have to enhance it. I am assuming here that the people who wrote the Wikipedia articles didn't base them on the show.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig is an Austrian writer from the first half of the twentieth century. He was a pacifist who advocated for a pan-Europe. And to that effect, he focused a lot of his writings on biographies and translations. Most of his fiction are short stories and an occasional novella.

In his stories (The Royal Game, Invisible Collection, Buchmendel) Zweig demonstrates a great flair for language and keen insights into human characters. In its literary quality, Zweig's writing is second to none. It's sad that in the English speaking world, Zweig is entirely forgotten.

To me, what make Zweig so special is his sensitivity and optimism. When I read stories exclaiming how wonderful life is, the cynic in me scorns. It sure is easy to be positive when one cares about very little. The suffering of the world is a burden for the sensitive person to bear. Like Woody Allen says in Annie Hall, "I can't be happy when someone's starving in Cambodia."

Personally and in my readings, I have witnessed many passionate and sensitive people throw up their hands and give up, because it's all too much to take. And I can't blame them.

The lines from the Modest Mouse song The View haunts me,
If life's not beautiful without the pain,
well I'd just rather never ever even see beauty again.

While beauty is the most important thing to me, can I say that I would never give up on beauty no matter the pain? I don't think so.

But when a writer like Zweig presents his characters with so much sensitivity for their pain and yet provides optimism through human compassion, I can't help being moved. How can such a sensitive man like Zweig see so much suffering through war and loss of ideals and still be able to write like this?

Another author who moved me with his sensitivity and optimism is Kurt Vonnegut. A Man Without A Country is so beautiful.

While his characters stood tall, Zweig himself wearied. At the onset of world war 2, he left Austria for England and then moved to the US. In 1942, he committed suicide despairing at the future of Europe and its culture. He wrote, "I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labor meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth."

Is that the fate of sensitive authors? Provide transfusion to their characters at their own cost. While Mrs.Dalloway lives on, Virginia Woolf falls.

Capote & Infamous

For a film student or just any film lover, the films Capote and Infamous are a big pot of gold.

This happened in real life. In 1959, two young men shot down a family of four in a Kansas small town. Reading about it in the papers, the famous New York writer Truman Capote travels to the town with his friend Harper Lee. Capote wishes to study the psychological effect on the town. And when the killers are caught, Capote meets them and develops an emotional attachment to one of them, Perry. For years, Capote visits and corresponds with Perry. And during that time, he write his non-fiction novel about the killing, In Cold Blood.

Both the movies, Capote and Infamous, tell this story. They start at the exact same moment in Truman Capote's life. Goes through the same series of events and end alike. So we have two films with an identical story made parallely. Doesn't that render one redundant? Absolutely not.

The two films couldn't be more different. Capote is theatrical with a tragic hero played brilliantly by Philip Seymour Hoffman. The character of Perry is subdued and coy. And Catherine Keener does a great Harper Lee. Capote is a drama that is intense and relentless.

Infamous is almost a fake documentary. Half the time, the characters just look at the camera and talk. The drama unfold subtly, with slow pacing, realistic scenes and humor. The Truman Capote played by Toby Jones is softer and nicer. Perry, played by Daniel Craig, is dominant and demanding. The camera, music and pacing are a world apart from Capote.

Each of the films is a masterpiece in it's own right. But together they demonstrate the scope and vast possibilities of film making. A scope that's almost shocking. Never again can someone say, "Every story has been told" or "Every film has been made." Not at all.

Lives of Others

Let's say you are watching a movie and you are at the halfway point. Unlike life, a movie isn't a series of random events (scenes). A good movie needs to have a specific story arc and an aesthetic structure. Let's say this movie is one of those, with a good solid story told in a straightforward way. Now, if you are a writer or someone who has watched a lot of movies and has a good artistic sensibility, you can figure out the rest of the film at about halfway into it. And that would be disastrous because the whole experience would be lost once you predict what's going to happen.

This is a huge catch-22. The more aesthetic and solid the story, the more predictable it becomes. It's true from The Godfather to Star Wars. From My Fair Lady to The Pianist. These are great films, classics. But just the fact that they have been made, makes it difficult to make films like them. Viewer aesthetics are constantly getting honed into a finer and finer state.

Many writing guides say that a story's ending should be both surprising and inevitable. But those two things don't easily go together. For most good stories the ending is only inevitable and not at all surprising.

So what to do?

One lame approach is to have a twist ending, in the likes of The Sixth Sense. That ends up still being predictable or breaks the entire structure of the film.

The other is a post-modern solution. Use non-linear editing and jumble up the order of the sequences, like in 21 Grams and Memento. Or build a complex bizarre story, with so much going on it's impossible to foresee, like Being John Malkovich.

Not surprisingly, the top film of this decade on IMDB are City of Gods, Memento, The Departed and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (not counting The Lord of the Rings).

On this list, there is also the German film Lives of Others. Set in the communist '80s of East Germany where everyone was under observation, the film revolves around a Stasi officer spying on an influential writer. This is a pitch-perfect story filmed in the most straightforward linear fashion.

The film was so intensely engrossing that it was impossible for me to sit back, think and figure out the tale. At the end of every scene, I exclaimed, "Of course." But not once could I predict anything. The movie grabbed me and millions of other cynical 21st century viewers, and made us emote to its whim, moment after moment. That's some achievement.

What is this about..

One wintry evening, I walked out of the movies and stood on the empty sidewalk, breathing out visible puffs of air and waited for the trembling to subside. I had watched the last hour of Capote in total stillness, my hands clasped tight.

Over dinner, I couldn't hold my excitement. "The movie was amazing," I said to friends who hadn't seen it, "Two men shoot down a family in a small town in Kansas. Truman Capote travels there to understand the psyche of the scarred town and the killers, and writes a book."

"I didn't think you would be interested in that," came the reply. And it was true. The book Capote wrote, In Cold Blood or the movie they made out of it doesn't interest me at all. I just don't find the psyche of the townsmen or the killers intriguing the way Truman Capote did. But this movie is about that intrigue of Capote. Which I find immensely interesting.

I am fascinated by Capote's fascination.

Another time, I was reading Matthew Pearl's novel The Dante Club and raving about it. It's about a few Boston poets (Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell) translating Dante during the eighteen fifties and how they deal with crazy events that happen in the city exactly as described in Dante's book.

A friend said, "I can't believe you read The Dante Club and not Dante." No disrespect intended, but I just can't get into Dante. Yet I couldn't put down The Dante Club – though I am not a fan of mystery novels – because of the poets' fascination of Dante. I was fascinated by their fascination.

This theme began to recur over and over again. In Movies – Shawshank Redemption, Lives of Others, Almost Famous. In Books – Flaubert's Parrot, The Great Gatsby, Old School.

I want to explore my fascination for the theme of fascination by critiquing and talking about these works one at a time. Also, when does fascination become an obsession?