Inception
Review by John L. Ng
August, 2010
As visually stimulating as Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” is, it is not a gratuitous action-thriller movie. You cannot watch it while munching on popcorns. You have to stay alert, pay attention, keep up and take mental notes. Like reality, the narrative is complicated, layered and not always coherent at first glance. You just have to let the story run its two-and-a-half-hour course; glean what you can for later musings.
The plot is simple enough. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a corporate espionage specialist. He and his team are hired to pull off a heist. But instead of robbing a rich man’s casino like the plot in “Ocean’s Eleven” or stealing back from a traitor’s stolen loots in “The Italian Job,” Cobb and company are engaged to raid a man’s subconscious. There are two types of subconscious raids. Extraction is the type that enters the subconscious and extracts secrets from it. Inception is the other type that posits ideas to control the victim’s subconscious. Taito, a wealthy tycoon (Ken Watanabe), wants Cobb’s team to plant an idea in the subconscious of a young heir who is poised to inherit a conglomerate of Taito’s old rival.
But you don’t have to read Freud, watch Hitchcock or take Psychology 101 to know that the subconscious is an unruly space – a labyrinth of desires, hopes, sins and fears. One’s entry can cause havoc in your cognitive and emotive. Cobb’s team enters the subconscious through induced dreams. Dreams, unlike boundaries of reality, are limitless. In dreams, Ariadne (Ellen Page) envisions an entire Paris neighborhood enfold on itself like an origami paper or Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) flows through hotel corridors like a weightless astronaut.
As liberating as dreams may seem, probing the subconscious can be a dangerous game. Suppressed emotions and inadvertent memories can run amuck when in dreams. Cobb’s unresolved guilt toward his neglected children and haunting memories of his deceased wife, Mal, (Marion Cotillard) threaten to unhinge his sanity and sabotage their cerebral heist.
No doubt the movie’s subtext is control. Can one control reality by controlling dreams. There are several layers of our desire for control. On one level, we want to control our circumstances – Cobb’s team wants to control the young heir’s situation by attempting to orchestrate his dreams. On another, we are anxious of losing control – in dream sequences, Cobb’s team experience the common sensation of helpless free falls. Still another, we seek to change our past from effecting our present – Cobb wants to build a bound space to keep his wife in his memories so they can be and grow old together. Finally, we want to control how our narrative will end – Cobb dreams at last he would go home to his children.
Ultimately, to have total control over our circumstances is but a day dream.“We plan, God laughs,” so goes the Yiddish saying. We can try all we want, only the Creator is truly in control. Even Cobb with his dream controlling machine is not really effectively in control of his past or future
August, 2010
As visually stimulating as Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” is, it is not a gratuitous action-thriller movie. You cannot watch it while munching on popcorns. You have to stay alert, pay attention, keep up and take mental notes. Like reality, the narrative is complicated, layered and not always coherent at first glance. You just have to let the story run its two-and-a-half-hour course; glean what you can for later musings.
The plot is simple enough. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a corporate espionage specialist. He and his team are hired to pull off a heist. But instead of robbing a rich man’s casino like the plot in “Ocean’s Eleven” or stealing back from a traitor’s stolen loots in “The Italian Job,” Cobb and company are engaged to raid a man’s subconscious. There are two types of subconscious raids. Extraction is the type that enters the subconscious and extracts secrets from it. Inception is the other type that posits ideas to control the victim’s subconscious. Taito, a wealthy tycoon (Ken Watanabe), wants Cobb’s team to plant an idea in the subconscious of a young heir who is poised to inherit a conglomerate of Taito’s old rival.
But you don’t have to read Freud, watch Hitchcock or take Psychology 101 to know that the subconscious is an unruly space – a labyrinth of desires, hopes, sins and fears. One’s entry can cause havoc in your cognitive and emotive. Cobb’s team enters the subconscious through induced dreams. Dreams, unlike boundaries of reality, are limitless. In dreams, Ariadne (Ellen Page) envisions an entire Paris neighborhood enfold on itself like an origami paper or Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) flows through hotel corridors like a weightless astronaut.
As liberating as dreams may seem, probing the subconscious can be a dangerous game. Suppressed emotions and inadvertent memories can run amuck when in dreams. Cobb’s unresolved guilt toward his neglected children and haunting memories of his deceased wife, Mal, (Marion Cotillard) threaten to unhinge his sanity and sabotage their cerebral heist.
No doubt the movie’s subtext is control. Can one control reality by controlling dreams. There are several layers of our desire for control. On one level, we want to control our circumstances – Cobb’s team wants to control the young heir’s situation by attempting to orchestrate his dreams. On another, we are anxious of losing control – in dream sequences, Cobb’s team experience the common sensation of helpless free falls. Still another, we seek to change our past from effecting our present – Cobb wants to build a bound space to keep his wife in his memories so they can be and grow old together. Finally, we want to control how our narrative will end – Cobb dreams at last he would go home to his children.
Ultimately, to have total control over our circumstances is but a day dream.“We plan, God laughs,” so goes the Yiddish saying. We can try all we want, only the Creator is truly in control. Even Cobb with his dream controlling machine is not really effectively in control of his past or future
Disgrace
Review by John L. Ng
June, 2010
Disgrace is not an easy movie to sit through. Much of its many scenes and dialogue is difficult and ruffles our shared sense of jurisprudence. The film is an adaptation of J. M. Cortzee’s novel of the same title. The story centers on David Lurie, a professor of poetry in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa. David (played hauntingly by John Malkovich) recites fine poems and sips finer wine. He likes to believe that he is refined man. He also likes to bed women, irrespective of whether they are prostitutes, other men’s wives or his students. His sexual instinct is indicative of his unbridled arrogance that no one can fault a human for pursuing his primal desires.
After he is exposed for seducing a troubled student, David pleads guilty to the charges but unrepentantly refuses to defend his behavior. Humbled by his dismissal but not ashamed, he retreats to the farmhouse of his estranged daughter, Lucy. In the countryside, soon his self imposed solace and amoral conviction are shattered when three black youths viciously attack him, sexually assault his daughter and brutally shoot her dogs. (Dogs are prominent in the movie. Perhaps a pervasive reminder throughout that if their primal instinct is no different from that of human’s, then humans are no different from dogs.)
The converging reactions of people near David to the gang crime are a meditative study of morality and being human. Lucy accepts the thugs’ violation of her body as justifiable for the injustice caused by those long years of her country’s apartheid. She refuses to report the crime to the police. Petrus, Lucy’s handyman, waxes incoherent platitudes about a new world order in post apartheid South Africa without acknowledging that the incident is criminal, admitting that one of the youths is a relative. Bev, who runs an animal clinic and sleeps with David, shows sympathy for Lucy but passively resigns to things as they are in a world she has little say.
As David struggles to come to terms with their reactions, especially Lucy’s rationale, he retreats within to the question of his amorality. If there are no right and wrong in human instincts, then why is he so morally outraged by the youths’ crime against him and his daughter. The mere notion that David is capable of righteous anger means that he is above primal desires. Toward the end, there is profound but ambivalent self awareness that leads to personal remorse. He inexplicably visits the family of the student he has wronged. The father lets him in his home but only to warn that ultimately it is God David has to face. David kneels with his head bowed before the mother seeking forgiveness in utter humiliation and repentance.
After a long sweaty walk along the dirt road back to his daughter’s farm, David quietly resigns to accept his new country and consequences of his personal action. “How humiliating, to end like this,” he laments, perhaps rendering a commentary of what it means to be ‘disgraced’. Human behavior has both personal and societal consequences. David’s uncontrolled lust has ruined his personal honor and communal respect. Lucy’s choice to escape the privilege of urban living in white Cape Town to a simpler life style in the barren plains of East Cape has its own risks. Apartheid has reaped what it sowed. Much of the violence in the movie is off screen (in contrast to the novel’s graphic details), as if to suggest that we can look away but not avoid. It does not negate the personal and social consequences of being an inhumane humanity before God. The psalmist acknowledges that God has made us a little lower than angels and has crowned us with glory and honor (Psalm 8). With that glory and honor comes moral responsibility.
June, 2010
Disgrace is not an easy movie to sit through. Much of its many scenes and dialogue is difficult and ruffles our shared sense of jurisprudence. The film is an adaptation of J. M. Cortzee’s novel of the same title. The story centers on David Lurie, a professor of poetry in post-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa. David (played hauntingly by John Malkovich) recites fine poems and sips finer wine. He likes to believe that he is refined man. He also likes to bed women, irrespective of whether they are prostitutes, other men’s wives or his students. His sexual instinct is indicative of his unbridled arrogance that no one can fault a human for pursuing his primal desires.
After he is exposed for seducing a troubled student, David pleads guilty to the charges but unrepentantly refuses to defend his behavior. Humbled by his dismissal but not ashamed, he retreats to the farmhouse of his estranged daughter, Lucy. In the countryside, soon his self imposed solace and amoral conviction are shattered when three black youths viciously attack him, sexually assault his daughter and brutally shoot her dogs. (Dogs are prominent in the movie. Perhaps a pervasive reminder throughout that if their primal instinct is no different from that of human’s, then humans are no different from dogs.)
The converging reactions of people near David to the gang crime are a meditative study of morality and being human. Lucy accepts the thugs’ violation of her body as justifiable for the injustice caused by those long years of her country’s apartheid. She refuses to report the crime to the police. Petrus, Lucy’s handyman, waxes incoherent platitudes about a new world order in post apartheid South Africa without acknowledging that the incident is criminal, admitting that one of the youths is a relative. Bev, who runs an animal clinic and sleeps with David, shows sympathy for Lucy but passively resigns to things as they are in a world she has little say.
As David struggles to come to terms with their reactions, especially Lucy’s rationale, he retreats within to the question of his amorality. If there are no right and wrong in human instincts, then why is he so morally outraged by the youths’ crime against him and his daughter. The mere notion that David is capable of righteous anger means that he is above primal desires. Toward the end, there is profound but ambivalent self awareness that leads to personal remorse. He inexplicably visits the family of the student he has wronged. The father lets him in his home but only to warn that ultimately it is God David has to face. David kneels with his head bowed before the mother seeking forgiveness in utter humiliation and repentance.
After a long sweaty walk along the dirt road back to his daughter’s farm, David quietly resigns to accept his new country and consequences of his personal action. “How humiliating, to end like this,” he laments, perhaps rendering a commentary of what it means to be ‘disgraced’. Human behavior has both personal and societal consequences. David’s uncontrolled lust has ruined his personal honor and communal respect. Lucy’s choice to escape the privilege of urban living in white Cape Town to a simpler life style in the barren plains of East Cape has its own risks. Apartheid has reaped what it sowed. Much of the violence in the movie is off screen (in contrast to the novel’s graphic details), as if to suggest that we can look away but not avoid. It does not negate the personal and social consequences of being an inhumane humanity before God. The psalmist acknowledges that God has made us a little lower than angels and has crowned us with glory and honor (Psalm 8). With that glory and honor comes moral responsibility.
Quiet Chaos
Review by John L. Ng
March, 2010
While browsing my local library for a DVD to spend a quiet evening, I came across a little Italian film by Antonello Grimaldi. Its oxymoronic title, Quiet Chaos, caught my attention. It is a quiet study of how a man grieves. Two closely knit brothers, Pietro (Nanni Moretti) and Carlo are nurturing their relationship on the beach when two drowning women yell for help. The brothers in synchronized courage brave the ocean to save them. When they return to Pietro’s villa, they discover that Pietro’s wife has suddenly fallen and died in their absence. His distraught ten year old daughter Claudia (BluYoshimi) laments why her father was not there to save her mother. Such is the brutal irony of being human – Pietro saves a stranger on the beach but is not able to save someone close at home.
After the funeral, Pietro re-enters his quiet world to grieve. As summer turns to autumn, he re-dedicates his care of Claudia. Pietro takes a leave from work to take her to school every day and to stay at a park across the street to be close to her. He spends his days sitting on a bench waiting for her. Death is a rude reminder that when something we treasure is lost, we instinctively hold more closely what remains. Away from his high executive office and in the midst of many distractions from pedestrians, family and colleagues, Pietro grieves in quiet chaos, waving to Claudia when she looks out the school window.
These daily distractions, humorous and serious, form a kind of chaotic environment as he copes with grief. He coordinates his car beep to catch the hand of a spirited Down’s syndrome boy walking with his mother. He long glances at an attractive woman walking her dog. Bickering colleagues take turns coming by to seek his counsel regarding their company’s merger. A neurotic and insensitive sister-in-law invades his quiet space with disconcerting quips. He engages in soul searching conversations with his brother. In moments of quietness, he silently makes mental lists – of airlines he has flown, of houses he has lived in – to give himself a sense of order.
When grieving, we all want to be alone but we also want the world to stand still and wait for us. But the world won’t stand still and it certainly is not very quiet. The people in Pietro’s life go about their chores. Outwardly some are sympathetic, some show their hospitality and some know. There is no ideal place to grieve. In each passing day Pietro has to steal a few fleeting moments to deal with what he has lost.
That quiet chaos can also describe Pietro’s grief itself. He is apparently mourning. But we are not so sure. There are no overt signs of the five classic stages of coping with death – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. There is no rancorous weeping or self loathing. If there are clashes of emotions, they are safely confined inside. Even when he is conflicted with those whose distractions irk him, he shows tolerance and restrain. You may suspect that Pietro’s grief is repressed. I think not. It is submerged in quiet chaos but not repressed.
As autumn becomes winter, can spring be too far behind Claudia, who seems unperturbed by it all (can a ten year old feel death her father feels), at last releases her father to move on in life with others and with her. Quiet Chaos impassively shows us how a man grieves, or perhaps how a man ought to grieve
March, 2010
While browsing my local library for a DVD to spend a quiet evening, I came across a little Italian film by Antonello Grimaldi. Its oxymoronic title, Quiet Chaos, caught my attention. It is a quiet study of how a man grieves. Two closely knit brothers, Pietro (Nanni Moretti) and Carlo are nurturing their relationship on the beach when two drowning women yell for help. The brothers in synchronized courage brave the ocean to save them. When they return to Pietro’s villa, they discover that Pietro’s wife has suddenly fallen and died in their absence. His distraught ten year old daughter Claudia (BluYoshimi) laments why her father was not there to save her mother. Such is the brutal irony of being human – Pietro saves a stranger on the beach but is not able to save someone close at home.
After the funeral, Pietro re-enters his quiet world to grieve. As summer turns to autumn, he re-dedicates his care of Claudia. Pietro takes a leave from work to take her to school every day and to stay at a park across the street to be close to her. He spends his days sitting on a bench waiting for her. Death is a rude reminder that when something we treasure is lost, we instinctively hold more closely what remains. Away from his high executive office and in the midst of many distractions from pedestrians, family and colleagues, Pietro grieves in quiet chaos, waving to Claudia when she looks out the school window.
These daily distractions, humorous and serious, form a kind of chaotic environment as he copes with grief. He coordinates his car beep to catch the hand of a spirited Down’s syndrome boy walking with his mother. He long glances at an attractive woman walking her dog. Bickering colleagues take turns coming by to seek his counsel regarding their company’s merger. A neurotic and insensitive sister-in-law invades his quiet space with disconcerting quips. He engages in soul searching conversations with his brother. In moments of quietness, he silently makes mental lists – of airlines he has flown, of houses he has lived in – to give himself a sense of order.
When grieving, we all want to be alone but we also want the world to stand still and wait for us. But the world won’t stand still and it certainly is not very quiet. The people in Pietro’s life go about their chores. Outwardly some are sympathetic, some show their hospitality and some know. There is no ideal place to grieve. In each passing day Pietro has to steal a few fleeting moments to deal with what he has lost.
That quiet chaos can also describe Pietro’s grief itself. He is apparently mourning. But we are not so sure. There are no overt signs of the five classic stages of coping with death – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. There is no rancorous weeping or self loathing. If there are clashes of emotions, they are safely confined inside. Even when he is conflicted with those whose distractions irk him, he shows tolerance and restrain. You may suspect that Pietro’s grief is repressed. I think not. It is submerged in quiet chaos but not repressed.
As autumn becomes winter, can spring be too far behind Claudia, who seems unperturbed by it all (can a ten year old feel death her father feels), at last releases her father to move on in life with others and with her. Quiet Chaos impassively shows us how a man grieves, or perhaps how a man ought to grieve
Up In The Air
Review by John L. Ng
January, 2010
Up In The Air is about homelessness and our innate human desire to be home with family. Loosely based on Walter Kirn’s novel, the movie follows Ryan Binghan (George Clooney) crisscrossing the continent as a hired gun to fire employees whose employers are too timid to pull the trigger themselves. Ryan thrives on the road. When asked where he is from, he responds, I’m from here. He travels light and is detached of meaningful human contacts. When someone accuses him of living in isolation, he retorts, I’m surrounded.
Seemingly he is having fun doing what he does. To showcase his homeless joy, he frequents the motivational talk circuit. The speech and the prop are the same at every hotel conference room. He walks up to the podium with a backpack and talks about traveling light, with no roots, no meaningful relationships and no lasting commitment to bog him down. He confesses that relationships are the heaviest components in your backpack. To travel light, you have to discard everything, including relationships. His prized goal is to rack up ten million frequent flyer miles.
Then two women enter his homeless space and throw him off his delusional self confidence. While nursing a drink at an airport lounge, he spies Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) massaging her glass while waiting for her flight. They each turn on the other bantering in corporate syntax with double entendres. A one night stand evolves into a vulnerable need to see each other more. They coordinate their travels to spend time together. Call me when you are lonely, she purrs while walking to her gate. Immediately he pleads, I’m lonely. Not unexpected, their chance encounter exposes his innate need for companionship.
The other woman is a fresh out of ivy league, MBA graduate who has been hired by Ryan’s company to maximize corporate efficiency. Natalie (Anna Kendrick) is as naively ferocious as she is meekly needy. Ryan is assigned to take her on the road for a crash orientation. Reluctantly he plays along. Soon they nurture a paternal-child relationship where she questions everything Ryan lives for as he begins to question everything he believes in.
When his estranged sisters insist that Ryan come home to attend his younger sister’s wedding, on a whim, he drags Alex along to smooth the rough week’s end. While in his hometown, they revert back to their adolescence. They throw snowballs at building windows, break into his old high school and ransack its hallways, and sneak into a basketball game in the school gym. As if they regress into a teenager date. A family crisis demands Ryan’s hesitant attention. When he somehow manages to resolve the crisis, his older sister in gratitude declares, welcome home.
Up In The Air is fun to watch but not fun to digest. The script is clever and breezy but it hurts to laugh, or it hurts more if we don’t laugh. The tone is light but the textural layers are dark. Every one seem to talk in family vernaculars – roof over one’s head, having babies, making a home homey, coming home, having a wedding. But hardly any one has a family except those who are being fired. The intermittent images of fired employees lament their family’s well being scream that we all are in need of family to go home to. At one point, Ryan blurs out, we’re not swans, we’re sharks. He’s in denial. In his detached self, he does look like a graceful swan gliding along from airport to airport. But underneath that quiet facade, his feet are frantically paddling to go home, settle down and find joy with the ones he loves.
January, 2010
Up In The Air is about homelessness and our innate human desire to be home with family. Loosely based on Walter Kirn’s novel, the movie follows Ryan Binghan (George Clooney) crisscrossing the continent as a hired gun to fire employees whose employers are too timid to pull the trigger themselves. Ryan thrives on the road. When asked where he is from, he responds, I’m from here. He travels light and is detached of meaningful human contacts. When someone accuses him of living in isolation, he retorts, I’m surrounded.
Seemingly he is having fun doing what he does. To showcase his homeless joy, he frequents the motivational talk circuit. The speech and the prop are the same at every hotel conference room. He walks up to the podium with a backpack and talks about traveling light, with no roots, no meaningful relationships and no lasting commitment to bog him down. He confesses that relationships are the heaviest components in your backpack. To travel light, you have to discard everything, including relationships. His prized goal is to rack up ten million frequent flyer miles.
Then two women enter his homeless space and throw him off his delusional self confidence. While nursing a drink at an airport lounge, he spies Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) massaging her glass while waiting for her flight. They each turn on the other bantering in corporate syntax with double entendres. A one night stand evolves into a vulnerable need to see each other more. They coordinate their travels to spend time together. Call me when you are lonely, she purrs while walking to her gate. Immediately he pleads, I’m lonely. Not unexpected, their chance encounter exposes his innate need for companionship.
The other woman is a fresh out of ivy league, MBA graduate who has been hired by Ryan’s company to maximize corporate efficiency. Natalie (Anna Kendrick) is as naively ferocious as she is meekly needy. Ryan is assigned to take her on the road for a crash orientation. Reluctantly he plays along. Soon they nurture a paternal-child relationship where she questions everything Ryan lives for as he begins to question everything he believes in.
When his estranged sisters insist that Ryan come home to attend his younger sister’s wedding, on a whim, he drags Alex along to smooth the rough week’s end. While in his hometown, they revert back to their adolescence. They throw snowballs at building windows, break into his old high school and ransack its hallways, and sneak into a basketball game in the school gym. As if they regress into a teenager date. A family crisis demands Ryan’s hesitant attention. When he somehow manages to resolve the crisis, his older sister in gratitude declares, welcome home.
Up In The Air is fun to watch but not fun to digest. The script is clever and breezy but it hurts to laugh, or it hurts more if we don’t laugh. The tone is light but the textural layers are dark. Every one seem to talk in family vernaculars – roof over one’s head, having babies, making a home homey, coming home, having a wedding. But hardly any one has a family except those who are being fired. The intermittent images of fired employees lament their family’s well being scream that we all are in need of family to go home to. At one point, Ryan blurs out, we’re not swans, we’re sharks. He’s in denial. In his detached self, he does look like a graceful swan gliding along from airport to airport. But underneath that quiet facade, his feet are frantically paddling to go home, settle down and find joy with the ones he loves.