Journey From The Fall

I don't know what took me this long, but I just finished watching Journey From The Fall directed by Ham Tran a few hours ago. It's probably a bit premature to write about it, because I'm still in the process of unpacking what I think about it.

But it's pretty clear just from the opening shots that Ham Tran isn't just making your average movie. The storytelling seems to be a turn off for some people, since it skips and jumps through different points in time. Perhaps I'm just pretentious but this type of storytelling works well for me, it adds complexity to my response to the film, since often I know what's going to happen. It may make the film a bit more difficult to follow, but I kind of like having to piece things out for myself. And I think that Ham Tran also manages to craft a pretty convincing and effective narrative out of such a complex and challenging way of telling it.

The movie is pretty unrelenting, but none of the violence or plot developments seem unnecessary. Each character works according to their own type of logic but none of them seem forced or improbable. At the same time, Tran definitely tells the story by showing rather than telling. There's one particular scene that sticks in my mind, he never explicitly shows two characters being intimate, but simply the way that they interact in the scene speaks volumes about their relationship.

I've been on a run of horrible movies, the low low point being the totally awful Iron Man. So discovering Journey From The Fall, albeit belatedly, I heard about it on Angry Asian Man, was doubly a pleasure. Go find this movie and watch it.

James Baldwin

Recently I've been reading James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, which is pretty awesome. It's rare I find a book which makes me want to underline everything in it, but that's definitely what I'm feeling here. I like essays sometimes because it's kind of like listening in at the most witty person at a dinner party expound at length on things. However, in Baldwin's case, sometimes it's depressing how little has actually changed in America since the time he wrote the book.

"one cannot help but observing that some Negro leaders and politicians are far more concerned with their careers than with the welfare of Negroes, and their dramatic and publicized battles are battles with the wind. Again, this phenomenon cannot be changed without a change in the American scene. In a land where, it is said, any citizen can grow up and become president, Negroes can be pardoned for desiring to enter Congress."

Another passage that really struck me

"They face each other, the Negro and the African, over a gulf of three hundred years--an alienation too vast to be conquered in an evening's good-will, too heavy and too double-edged ever to be trapped in speech. This alienation causes the Negro to recognize that he is a hybrid. Not a physical hybrid merely: in every aspect of his living he betrays the memory of the auction block and the impact of the happy ending. In white Americans he finds reflected--repeated, as it were, in a higher key--his tensions, his terrors, his tenderness. Dimly and for the first time, there begins to fall into perspective the nature of the roles they have played in the lives and history of each other. Now he is bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh; they have loved and hated and obsessed and feared each other and his blood is in their soil. Therefore he cannot deny them, nor can they ever be divorced."

It's probably one of the clearest articulations of what I've sometimes felt myself in relation to race relations and diaspora in America. Go figure, James Baldwin just said it first.

I'm clearly procrastinating at this point

Some film thoughts

You know how 2046 was a kind of mediocre mashup of every theme Wong Kar Wai had played with in his entire film career? A sort of self referential exercise in narcissism?

I just got done watching Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Retribution, which I, uh, found, on the internet. And although it's less self indulgent, simply because I don't think Kurosawa is as successful as Wong Kar Wai, so he gets less money, it's a similar sort of concept. Essentially it's a rehash of some of his old themes: the power of dreams, delivered no less by Jo Odagiri who starred in Bright Future, a meme of violence coming from some undisclosed source of discontent lodged in the past like in Cure, ghosts as figures of human loneliness, like in Pulse, an angry detective with tendencies towards police brutality played by Koji Yakusho, practically every movie Kurosawa has ever made. Interestingly, I felt that his dislike of women came out more strongly in this film. Women have always been disruptive or malevolent forces in his films before, but there's never been so much violence against women as there is in this film. It's pretty clear from this review that I have seen a lot of Kurosawa movies and I also didn't really like this one. I really wanted to, even when the film is less than successful, his films are generally pretty interesting and I'm glad I said this one.

That said, the ghosts were really silly. I'm a wimp and I wasn't even scared by them. Kurosawa can scare the shit out of you when he really wants too. A woman dressed in red being wheeled around on a dolly doesn't scare me at all.

I like seeing Kurosawa movies, because strangely when I'm feeling depressed, they make me less so. I'm not sure why watching Japanese horror movies that are really about the human condition make me less depressed. But I'll take what I can get.

Conversation from a visit

Friend whom I haven't seen in 6 years on seeing each other in person for the first time: Can I see your tattoo?
(I show it to her.) Okay, that's reassuring.

Pittsburgh

The Are You A Racist quiz

So apparently there's this big to-do about the test of black men w/ guns vs. white men w/ guns and reaction time. There's apparently been some rending of garments about whether in fact the test takers are racist. I was kind of curious to see if I was racist or not. I guess I've watched TV as much as most people and grown up in urban/suburban areas, and heard enough stories that I should be fairly subconsciously racist, I thought. Imagine my surprise when I saw my results:

Black Armed:874.92ms
Black Unarmed:1020ms
White Armed:849.68ms
White Unarmed:1015.24ms


If I understand these figures correctly. I am slower to react to unarmed people of either race, although slightly quicker to recognize white people as not a threat. However I seem to be comparatively quicker to shoot white men with guns than black men with guns. Go figure. Someone help me interpret this data.

New roommates

We've had some people come and go around my house. One is apparently an Iraqi veteran with PTSD. (Hooray.) She's pretty annoying, but I don't think she's necessarily a bad person.

The other person, is, well, ok. She's very nice, but um, you know, dammit, I'm fairly damn open minded, but really smoking pot at 6 AM is a little early. That's all.

Jesus Christ

Random man: You look like you had a hard day at work!
Me: (laughs)
Random man: Are you a secretary?
Me: No...
Random man: You speak good English.
Me: Thank you, I was born here.
Random man: (awkward silence)
Me (inwardly): Ha, ha, ha.

Yet more pretentious pictures of Seattle

Conversations from the house

"You know what I bet you would be good at, teaching ESL to Chinese people, you have that whole school teacher thing going on." New roommate, also Iraqi veteran, far too old for her age at 21, while also being kind of annoying.

Conversations from AmeriCorps

"In Bellingham, they have a whole club for white people who want to be Asian."

Also in other news, my roommate's cat threw up in my room. Needless to say, I was not thrilled.

Far East Movement- Satisfaction

FM doesn't necessarily make my world a better place, but they're eminently listenable. I'm glad that they've graduated from girls who look like they have naked pictures out there on the internet to women that look like car show models since their last video.

A hilarious moment

Walking behind four punk-ish teenagers, a car drove by blaring bad trance-ish dance music. Simultaneously all 4 of them started dancing on the sidewalk. And as the car drove out of earshot, they kept walking. All without saying anything.

More pictures from the neighborhood

Pictures of the neighborhood

My new boss or Conversations from work

Me: How do you like Seattle?
New Boss: Oh it's great. There aren't very many blacks or Hispanics here. I feel very safe.
Me: (resisting urge to just leave the room).........I don't think that all black people or Hispanic people are criminals. To self (Just think about the PhD, in only 5 months this will no longer be your problem.)

There are no fucking words sometimes. There just aren't.

This looks really cool

Sometimes movie trailers can be an art. I think no matter how good the movie is, the trailer is exceptionally well put together. Honestly sometimes trailers are better than the movie itself. You can always imagine a better movie from the best images and excerpts. Also trailers have their own certain flow to them. I feel this one flows very well.

Apparently

I'm whiter than I thought. Ouch.

Anyway, for the people who actually know me in real life, yes, I am going to go get a PhD. And live in the middle of nowhere and tell everyone how uncultured they are apparently. I will be going somewhere in Southern California. That much is certain. Most everything else is not certain, which would explain a 2 month bout with insomnia.

More later.

地下婴儿 -觉醒