The Incidental Hotness

I have spent the last couple of weeks anticipating seeing this film and mixing the title up in my head with The Accidental Tourist, and often coming up with The Accidental Terrorist, which is a horrible testimonial to our North American mass media and how it has infiltrated my thoughts. I’m trying to recover with the title of this post, but that, too, is somewhat misleading. There was nothing incidental about the hotness. It was right there, out front, in almost every scene and answers to the name Riz Ahmed (Changez when answering on the set).

The story starts out like a classic American tale. Brilliant foreign student shines his way through an ivy league school into a corporate job in New York City. He is unfortunately good at his work, which is pretty much about downsizing the labour force of companies to squeeze out every ounce of value for the “investors” (read vultures). He’s off on a field trip with colleagues to eliminate an entire section of an auto plant in the Phillipines when the planes fly into the World Trade Centre in New York.

It doesn’t take long for the American dream to start turning into a nightmare. Returning to New York, pulled out of the arriving passengers and strip searched by customs. Another arrest on the street emerging from work after another man, either mentally ill or driven to ranting by his own treatment, says scary things to passersby and then runs into the subway, leaving our hero to be arrested by the zealous cops arriving on the scene.

Given his corporate role, I was unwilling to chalk up the slashing of his car tires outside the plant he was actively downsizing to anything other than appropriate class warfare, until the redneck in a pickup fired up his engine and took time to drive by, call him “Osama” and spit. There were also brief references to attacks on others across the US, especially Sikhs targeted by people who didn’t understand the difference between Islam and Sikkhism.

Our hero finds solace in the arms of the niece of his boss. A chance encounter at a skateboarder photo shoot, a second at a cocktail party at the boss’ house, and a long journey to overcome her own past loss. She’s an artist, and eventually working on an exhibit that will take away his last feeling of belonging in a strange land.

But wait! We’re not there yet! Against the backdrop of the xenophobic hostility in his adopted home, a crisis of conscience on the job. A Turkish publisher, important in the history of making the literature of the region available to the world, is assessed as valueless. The son of a poet (yes, our hero) can’t bring himself to do the deed and quits on the spot. His mentor is not gracious about it and he gets the “security guard escort out of the building with a box of your personal effects” treatment in New York. It’s that evening that he manages to push himself back out the door to attend the opening of his lover’s exhibit.

The installation is a regurgitation of their relationship. Images and phrases, taken out of their original context and put into a form that he sees as an objectification of his identity. Not good for a relationship. It doesn’t take long for him to be packing for a return to Pakistan — a foreigner with a work visa and no job doesn’t get to stay for long, a Pakistani one in the hysteria post 9-11 even less.

We see him as a professor in Lahore, sought out and pressured to talk by a writer turned CIA agent (Liev Schreiber) after the kidnapping of a fellow professor, also a CIA agent, as it turns out. The story is actually his recounting of his history in this meeting, with flashes back and forth to the interview and his American dream life. We get to see the misinterpretation of facts and events that cast our hero as a radical and a terrorist and his unwillingness to dignify those accusations with a rebuttal.

Let’s just say that the situation doesn’t end well for the kidnapped professor or for our hero’s brother. But this latter casualty gives our hero the chance to speak poetically at the gravesite. His speech and he are both rather beautiful in this scene.

Two other aspects of the film I would like to laud. The title sequence pictured above was really quite interesting (all those tiny squares of colour are actually head shots of individuals), and the traditional folk song at the beginning of the film was truly lovely. I think I’m going to have to track it down and listen to it again and again. Kangna, it was called, and I could only find a version removed from the images of the muscians performing it. UPDATE! I found a better version of the song with the musicians in studio:

 

Star Trek: Into Predictability

Don’t get me wrong here: I love the whole Star Trek franchise (and I’m disgusted that I am using the word franchise for something that I like). I generally love science fiction and who could go wrong casting Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto, not to mention Zoe Saldana as a much more assertive and independent-feeling Uhura. So maybe I should have said “Into Delightful Predictability.”

There was some fun to be had with the references to the past. A balk (and some laughter from those in the audience with enough Star Trek history under their belts) when someone is asked to put on a red tunic. (In case you don’t know, the nameless guys in the red uniforms were always the ones who died in the original series.) There were some expected lines and affectations from the more familiar minor characters, including Chekov and his endearing inability to pronounce the letter “v”. (I’ll drink a wodka to that!) What I’ll really drink to is the range of uniforms and other outfits that the main characters get to wear — gotta love that form hugging underwater suit from the beginning, no girdle required!

Sometimes, though, those nods to the past erode what could be the originality of the new take on the story. Chekov’s accent is only cute for a limited time and don’t we all think that it might be a good idea to have the part of the Sikh superhuman Khan played by someone whose origins might be traced back to a part of the world a little closer to where a Sikh superhuman might come from? (As an aside, you did manage to sign Harold, why not Kumar, too?) And please, if you really believed in the Prime Directive you wouldn’t play so fast and loose with it.

Of course, the special effects are light years ahead of that ancient TV program. One of my favourite little touches was the displaceable hole in the brig forcefield that allowed them to take a blood sample from their prisoner without actually lowering the forcefield. Fabulous! The slight changes in some of the characters’ behaviour was also welcome: Spock and Uhuru hooking up! Kirk — that notoriously randy starship captain — roused from a bed he was sharing with two females of a humanoid species with prehensile tails. This last one might have been more surprising against the backdrop of current American moral norms.

It’s also the first time I have seen Star Trek characters wearing military-like hats. That scares me a little against the backdrop of our own government’s attempts to glorify the military and military history, but a good hat can definitely hide some pointy ears, if you need it to. I suppose I should be a little less sensitive on that issue for a science fiction show that has always involved a lot of shooting.

After all of that, I did enjoy it, but I also saw lots of ways it could be better. And UltraAVX 3D? Good, but I’m not sure that the reserved seating (and consequent ability to arrive late and still have the seat you chose) is work the $17 it costs.

Can’t wait to see the next one.

Astounding Sphinx

My opera evening didn’t start as it usually does. I had forgotten that this was the night, so I ended up not being able to remind my companions in time and taking the world’s fastest shower and taxi ride to get there on time. That I made it was a miracle; that I had the world’s most expensive coat chair next to me — with a spare on the other side — was just a shame.

Panting, I was in my seat in enough time to read the synopsis before the lights went down and the curtain went up. I was still shaken enough, however, that the name of the substitute tenor did not register with me. I’m left wondering how the bed scene with a shirtless des Grieux might have been with Portuguese tenor Bruno Ribeiro (below) who couldn’t make it. As an aside, the substitute, who was apparently filling in on a mere three days’ notice, was excellent. It’s only too bad I can’t seem to find his name on the Opéra de Montréal website!

The other thing I will comment on before getting to the performance itself is the promotion. You might remember the uproar I wrote about in a previous post about using models versus using the actual singers for the promotion. At the top of this post is the actual soprano of this production, Marianne Fiset, and below is the model photo. It seems that the Opéra de Montréal has learned from the controversy and is using the images in parallel, but with somewhat more prominent use of a better thought-out photo of the star. I actually prefer the star’s photo, wearing something other than one of the costumes used, but conveying the feel of the promotional model photo quite well. We will see if next year is parallel imagery or a focus on the stars, but this one was very well done and the Opéra de Montréal deserves kudos for it.

I always enjoy the plots of operas. This one — Manon by Massenet — is no exception. “A litany of poor choices and regrets,” I tweeted during the first intermission. And indeed it was, from leaving your sixteen-year-old cousin waiting at the equivalent of the bus station while you go to drink and gamble with your friends, to running off with a stranger you just met, to throwing yourself at your ex-lover when he is about to take his vows as a priest to the real kicker: telling your penniless lover that if he really loves you he will gamble to win a fortune for you both. Let’s just say that the character of Manon might inspire admiration for her beauty, but she will not encourage feelings of empathy. Not from me, anyway. (My title is a name she gets called in the libretto.)

So by the time we get to the end everyone is quite unhappy, except Manon, who is dying in her lover’s arms, so as usual you can’t really be happy and live. But that’s why opera is such a refreshing form of storytelling that compares favourably to our usual Hollywood movie fare.

The music was lovely — many catchy tunes to draw you in — and the singing was good (this coming from a non-expert, so don’t take my adjective as a slap in the face or a kudo too far). I especially liked Marianne Fiset in the role of the detestable Manon, and Gordon Bintner in the role of Lescaut (cousin who leaves her outside while he gambles.). Bintner, pictured above, has been singled out by Barihunks as “opera’s new Golden Boy” and his voice is a joy to listen to.

They seem to paying a good deal of attention to the acting aspects of productions, too, and the comic timing in certain parts of this was most excellent. We had some good laughs and they were intended!

I usually remark, too, how much I want to appropriate the sets of the Opéra de Montréal productions as apartments for myself to live in. This set didn’t so much make me want to live in it, but I started out a little skeptical about the visibly flat trees in many layers that appeared in a number of the acts, but they really grew on me and left me feeling the depth and lushness of the foliage. A lot of the other parts of the sets had a similar “flat, but grew on me” feel, and then the mist at the end was quite good. It must have been a real feat to keep such a good layer of fog around the feet of the singers throughout the last part of Act 5.

Oh, and one other touch that kept amusing me: blowing bubbles in the crowd scene in Act 3. They weren’t intrusive, just little hints of bubbles floating up from various parts of the back of the crowd…and I didn’t see them being blown! It definitely added to ambiance of the chaotic outdoor scene with vendors hawking wares and such. It somehow felt summery.

One last aside with respect to the Opéra de Montréal. When I got to my seat(s), there were stickers on the backs reminding me to renew for the next season. I do find that they tend to go into renewal overdrive rather early (got the form in the mail weeks ago!), but I had to admire the extra effort involved in putting the stickers on my seat(s) so that I would see them upon my arrival. Well played.

Now I have to decide if I will renew (probably, and probably soon, so stop calling me!) and if I will expand my little zone by also buying the seat that my friend has decided not to buy for next year. His reason is one that merits some attention, too: there is an inexcusable dearth of women in important positions in these productions. We’re not talking about the performing parts, but roles like Director and Conductor. Far too rarely are these roles filled by women and that ought to be fixed.

Methinks

Let me paraphrase Shakespeare to explain my lovely creation above: Methinks the government doth profess too much.

I have to say that I have been extremely annoyed with the sales pitch at feverish levels for quite some time. Endless TV ads, the giant signs that go up (and stay up for a long time) at sites where there has been some government investment. At times – most times – it seems that there is more trumpeting of action than actual action.

I suppose it's reasonable that they would want to really sell their budget bill. After all, they have rolled all the other legislation into the budget bill for each of the last two years, so they really have nothing else to sell. Curious, though, that they aren't gleefully announcing the gutting of environmental review mechanisms or out-of-control military procurement programs as being the way of the future for the economy. Oh, that's right, they do believe that.

I don't know why the general population seems to operate under the impression that the right wing party will be the best manager of the economy when they are proving themselves again and again to be rather challenged on that score.

It must be the advertising that makes us feel that way.

To be fair (or to crow about my creativity), here's the original government logo that is pasted on anything that doesn't move these days:

Challenges of Prevention

My editor over at Positive Lite asked me to write about the future of prevention. In taking up that challenge, I am discovering that I probably have more questions than answers, but I do have some ideas of the challenges we must meet if we are really going to stop HIV transmission.

Motivation.

Scary "death" and "doom" messages will not motivate people to take measures to avoid contracting HIV. Fright messages sometimes have short-term effects, but these truly lack credibility in a context where a lot of people (particularly in the gay community) know someone living with HIV and living quite well with treatment. We need to be realistic talking about what it means to live with HIV today. I personally don't look like I'm about to die (not of HIV/AIDS anyway!) and I have a fairly active life, but I wouldn't wish my HIV infection on anyone else. We need to learn how to share our experiences of living with HIV in straightforward, honest ways if we want people to understand why they might not want this virus.

Risk Assessment.

In all health issues, the quantification of risk is problematic. I have a friend who, in the course of his internship, was sometimes called upon to deliver a prognosis to an ailing patient. "How much time do I have left?" rivalled "What are the chances of the operation not working?" for tops of the unpopularity contest. He was reticent to tell the elderly patient that there was a 4% risk of death in an operation because it was so unlikely to occur and so likely to panic the patient to hear and try to interpret the words.

How then do we explain that a single act of condomless anal sex with a person with a high viral load might have a transmission rate somewhat less than 1%, but that people still get infected with HIV? I know there has been some degree of reticence to share those percentages of risk because they are so very difficult to wrap our heads around, but that is an attitude that smacks of paternalism. If it is difficult to understand, then our challenge on this point is clear: learn to explain risk in a way that helps people to make informed decisions about their actions.

A Full Toolbox.

There are many approaches to prevention these days, ranging from motivational counselling all the way to pharmaceutical intervention. We need to figure out which tools work best for which people in which situations. Then we need to be able to make sure that those people have access to the tools they need, understand the strengths and limits of those tools, and know how to use them. With budgets for prevention stagnant and some new approaches taking up a lot of virtual space, those who make decisions about what to fund might be tempted to put all their eggs in one basket. We have to continue to recognize that there isn't a single approach that will work for all and fight to preserve the diversity of the available tools even as we work to understand them better and to improve them.

The Pleasure Principle.

Most of the time – if we're lucky – sex is about pleasure. When our prevention messages are peppered with words like "safe" and "secure" or "protection" it shouldn't surprise us that not everyone wants to hear them, or even listen to them. We need to talk more about what to do, and not as much about what not to do. This goes beyond how our messages look (we've learned to make them sexy) right to the core of what they say.

Since I am given to wild and sometimes inappropriate metaphors, let me just charge headlong into this one: Waterskiing is not all about the life jacket. That life jacket might be an essential tool in the end, depending on how you go about the sport, but the waterskiing is about hanging onto the rope, getting up on the skis (and staying there!), and it's even more about the sun on your face, the wind in your hair and the pure exhilaration of skimming across the water behind a powerboat. We need to focus on that approach when we talk about sex.

Autonomy.

We need to trust people to make choices for themselves. That means sharing all of the information in the best way to ensure that it is truly understood and letting people determine how they will act on it in their own lives. I would hasten to add that one person's autonomy doesn't trump another's. I'm trying (and probably failing) to make this point not be about disclosure, but if we lived in a world where people wouldn't face unreasonable discrimination after disclosure I would be happy to include it. And when I talk about discrimination, I'm not talking about getting turned down by a potential partner, but about losing a job or not getting one, or about losing all semblance of privacy when the person trusted with the information decides it needs to be shared.

Back to the autonomy part. People will not necessarily make logical or sensible decisions when it comes to sex and pleasure. We wouldn't be human if we always acted logically and based on the best available evidence. Humans have issues like self-esteem, desires, fears, urges…these all push logic out the nearest window from time to time. Sometimes we make bad choices for ourselves and sometimes we make good ones. Sometimes good and bad are a little difficult to sort out. That doesn't mean that someone else gets a licence to tell me what to do with a willing partner; it means that the prevention challenge is to try to ensure that I have all the information and tools I need to make the right decision for myself, and that my partner has those too.

I don't know if we'll find the ideal approach to prevention or the means to make sure that the multiple approaches that work the best for now are fully available. I only know that we can't stop trying. One new infection is one too many.

Check out this article at Positive Lite here (with its own set of comments, if there are any).

To the Wonderbread

By my cheeky headline, I am surely not suggesting that this latest œuvre of Terrence Malick lacks substance. Not that, Just plot. It lacks plot.

You will howl that I am just some kind of unsophisticated rube (is that redundant?) with no appreciation for the art of this especially talented director, whose work stretches back to the 1970s with large, but rapidly decreasing breaks between them. It almost seems like he's putting out one every few months now, a far cry from the twenty-year break between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line.

When I went to see The Tree of Life, I didn't necessarily find more coherent plot lines, but I got chills from the familiarity of the feeling of a neighbourhood – even a suburban neighbourhood – teeming with the life of kids playing elaborate and distinctly non-electronic games together. I found a dearth of those warm and fuzzy familiar feelings in this film. Maybe the little glimpses of the Paris Métro, but those were really not the focus of the film. I suppose for someone more familiar with the feel of today's small urban decay and sterile suburbia those warm and fuzzy feelings might arise, but I really think that one is an anathema to the other.

We see the woman moving from her familiar Mont-St-Michel and Paris with all their history, richness and life to a suburb so sterile that even the sod has not had a chance to take hold and become green lawns. The interiors are lovely, but barren. The exteriors oddly hunkered down under big roofs and high fences look like an outpost expecting an attack at any moment. Needless to say, there are no sidewalks, let alone sidewalk cafés. She parachutes into this strange land where nobody speaks her language and all is unfamiliar. There's a little bit of the shy joy of discovering each other, but how can it be that your sterile new suburban home still looks as sterile and new after you have lived in it together?

It's enough to drive you to outside distractions, and it does for both of our main characters. An old girlfriend, an unsurprisingly available handyman – those will throw a wrench into your relationship, especially when you already can't communicate very well. I'm not even sure the language difference was the biggest barrier to communication.

So I might not be loving the substance of the content I saw in the film, and that might well have been a part of Malick's point, but there is no disputing the beauty of the cinematography, and the reactions I had to certain scenes. Sweeping vistas of the prairie surrounding the suburban outpost, thundering horses and bison, rushing waters: all very beautiful. Horrible and badly disguised poverty and small urban decay, brutal prisons, sterile suburbs: also very beautifully presented, if disturbing. I was a bit annoyed by the blatant symbolism of the cross in the form of intersecting jet trails that appeared following a bunch of voiceover religious symbolism, but my annoyance at that was a short-lived as the image itself. And the most delightful image of all? Two women walking through the small town, speaking French and Spanish, the Spanish-speaking one shouting at the top her lungs, and neither getting any reactions or fitting in for that matter.
 
***

How about some fun notes about the cinema experience itself? An odd one, to be sure. We were the first to arrive of the ten people who were there for this screening. Considering it has only been out for a week, this doesn't bode well for box office receipts, but perhaps that is a consideration too pedestrian for the artist.

The two older women who arrived after us chose some nice seats…right behind us! You have the whole cinema to choose from and you must install yourself in the seats behind the only other two people there when you arrived? That's just odd. Not quite as odd, however, as the two people sitting down in front, about three rows back from the screen. They commented back and forth during the whole film and the one guy's voice really carried more than I think he knew. I almost thought it was a part of the soundtrack and a distracting part at that.

And then there was the guy in my row who kept making little sounds like he was waking from short naps and hoping to cover up any sounds of possible snoring. Oh. That was me. Now I guess we all have an alternate theory about the decipherability of the plot.

Beyond the Pining

Was there something about the month of April that encouraged filmmakers to make pretty actors ugly? First it was James Franco's scary mouth hardware in Spring Breakers, and now some truly awful and excessive tattooing on Ryan Gosling in The Place Beyond the Pines. (I am classifying this film in April although my review will appear in May.)

This film is really a story about people trapped in their fates, as determined by their economic classes. Ryan Gosling's character is poor, with few prospects (think about that before getting that many bad tattoos, especially facial ones!) and the only way he can attempt to get ahead is by breaking the law in ways that are not tolerated by those in power.

Bradley Cooper's character is at the other end of the spectrum. Son of a judge, law school graduate who has passed the bar, he has decided to become a police officer, and that's how his path crosses with Ryan Gosling's. We get to see how a scared new police officer can be swept up in the camaraderie of the force, paying little attention to the rules being broken. At least for a while. The veiled coaching about how he will respond to questions around his shooting of Gosling's bank robber morphs into explicitly illegal and off-the-books seizure of ill-gotten gains and he starts to have second thoughts.

Is it the guilt of having killed some child's father, or some malaise about the "search" of the mother's house? Whatever the source, there are a couple of feeble attempts to right that wrong and other future ones by ratting out those who are breaking the rules for their own benefit. He uses his revelations to buy himself a safer place in which to pursue his career, to the displeasure of his new boss, and then we see him later on using his position and influence to bend the rules for his son. Learned nothing from his past experiences, or learned everything from them?

Of course, the paths of those two sons – of shooter and shot – will cross tragically, if only to underline the repeated pattern that will emerge in how those boys deal with the world. Spoiled rich kid using others and breaking the rules, without consequences, of course. Poor but well-meaning kid driven to break the rules and suffer the consequences, at least until he is saved by the guilt of his father's shooter.

Maybe the most important lessons to retain from the film are that Bradley Cooper looks lovely in any outfit or position (jeans, uniform, suit, kneeling in the forest….) and that it looks like motorcycle-riding ability is genetic (the poor kid gets on for the first time and rides off into the sunrise like he's been doing it all his life).

The hanging question comes from the credits (yes, we are those people who stay to watch the credits). There was an item labelled "stunts" listing only two names: Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper. Did they do all their own stunts? Or, more likely, which stunts did they do? How will I stand not knowing the answer to this nagging question?