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.