San Francisco Movie Critics Mick LaSalle on "Star Wars"

San Francisco Chronicle Movie Critics Mick LaSalle has a column Ask Mick LaSalle. I read a fantastic reply he gave to a reader regarding introducing Star Wars to his child. I felt that I really need to publicize his reply:

Dear Jedi Master Mick LaSalle: As someone who grew up with the first "Star Wars" trilogy, I'm not sure how to best introduce a child to the series. Would you start with Episode I or Episode IV? Any thoughts?

David Swope, Sausalito

Dear Jedi Master David Swope: My honest thought is to skip "Star Wars" altogether and avoid introducing a child to a lifetime of bad movies and a pattern of bad movie taste. Instead, get a child interested in Shakespeare. Show the child masterpieces of cinema. Get the child used to black and white.

If the child is old enough to read, get the child used to subtitles. Boys and girls have their whole lives to develop lousy pop culture taste, just through contact with other boys and girls. While their minds are still open and they still think you know a thing or two (as opposed to when they're teenagers and beyond the reach of reason), give them at least a grounding in the good stuff. It might work and it might not, but that grounding will be something for them to build on - and will be an amazing advantage over kids brought up on a steady diet of garbage.

However, if you really want to introduce a child to "Star Wars," start with "The Phantom Menace." It's so absolutely awful that the child might rebel against the whole project 20 minutes into the first movie.

Bravo, Mick!

Jane Campion's Movie "Bright Star" and John Keats

I just saw Jane Campion's movie Bright Star about "the three-year romance between 19th century poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, which was cut short by Keats' untimely death at age 25" (quoted from IMDB.com). The movie was romantic yet devoid of sentimentality. The performances were hard to forget.

I must confess that I don't know much about John Keats and his work. I browsed a little bit his poetry and like this one very much:

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

My Spirit is too weak — mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old time — with a billowy main —
A sun — a shadow of a magnitude.

"Like a sick eagle looking at the sky." Perhaps, a painting or a drawing will come out of this?

"Flame and Citron" and Other War Movies

Summer time, we were usually treated with crappy blockbuster movies. However, this summer is rather different. I just saw an outstanding Danish war-time movie "Flammen & Citronen" which depict the demoralizing effect of war on human kind, particularly on those so called good guys. Watching it was a tense and somber experience but richly rewarding.

The other war-time movies in my radar are "Inglourious Basterds" and "Anonyma - Eine Frau in Berlin (A Woman in Berlin)". Stretching further, we'll have "District 9" which again, shows the effect of war, its absurdity and cruelty and the resilience of men.

Where Was the Great Depression?

I saw movie Public Enemies last week and was impressed by the ensemble performance. However, it was not clear to me at all why John Dillinger became such a folklore hero (legend, yes). The absent element was the lacking of portrayal of the historic background. I had no sense that people were living in an economic depression. All the people were calm, composed, and serene, except for a brutal police investigator. Without that piece of information, I came away with puzzlement in my mind. The stature of the story and the movie diminished a bit.

Another squirming factor: the quiver rich music. The abundance of its emotional tugging cue took away much thunder from the utterances and facial acting of the actors. Most time, less really is more.

Lost in Translation

The memory of telling our English teacher in Ohio that that the only American musicians we, mostly-Chinese students, could easily call to mind were Michael Jackson and Madonna [Last blog entry: Remembering a Pop Icon], brought other memories to me.

In the early nineties, I was a university undergraduate in Northeastern China. When the Student Union announced a screening of video Gone With The Wind, the university administration got nervous and eventually ordered or persuaded the Student Union to switch to The Blue Lagoon for the disappointed students.

Pressed to explain why that happened, my guess is that Gone With The Wind, when introduced to Chinese audiences in the 30s or 40s, the Chinese title, 乱世佳人, could mean either The Beauty in Troubled Time, or The Beauty Who Made the World Upside Down. Rather risqué, wasn't it? It was further stigmatized during Cultural Revolution in the 60s, by being branded as "poisonous weed." Perhaps it was never officially banned, naturally, the "ban" was never officially lifted. Therefore, the students were treated with the lesser known, never banned for sure and apparently less dangerous The Blue Lagoon, in all its soft-pornographic glory. The occasion of that screening was International Women's Day, no less!

More on these ironic memories: I had the honor of viewing the video of The Killing Field (a movie about the cruelty of Khmer Rouge) in the same university (for English study), and read a Chinese translation of George Orwell's 1984, borrowed from the library in the same university. Apparently, the Chinese authorities were either too ignorant or too oblivious to see any connection between the Khmer Rouge or Big Brother and themselves.

Because of those experiences, I cheer for the occasional losses in translation.

"Gomorra"

Last Saturday, I saw an Italian movie "Gomorra," (Gomorrah) directed by Matteo Garrone, based on book by Roberto Saviano. The screenplay was credited to Maurizio Braucci, et al.

It contained a series of brutal and heart wrenching tales in gangster- and drug-infested Naples, Italy, concentrated on a housing project compound that had the character of a human dump. Watching people trapped in the hopeless situations was difficult and sobering experience. The movie was brutal but not nauseating. Violence was portrayed as a matter of fact, not depicted as sensual experience as Hollywood might have done, or pornographic sadism, à la Mel Gibson.

Such a hard life, trapped in eternal hopelessness reminded me a Romanian movie: "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," written and directed by Cristian Mungiu, which told a story that takes place in Romania in 1987. Different culture, different class of people, different variety of trap, yet the same bleakness. Inevitably, I also think about the many human tragedies happening everywhere.

Humankind is damned, but some people are more damned than others.