Read Good Shit On Musings: musings

By Yasmina Tawil

No Exit to ‘Brooklyn’ by Ryan Wu

By Yasmina Tawil

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In the opening scene of Westminster, Trinh, a Vietnamese shopgirl, tells her boss that she’s moving to California to work at a nail salon. She explains that her prospects in Vietnam are bleak, and that however despondent she is to leave her beloved mom and sister behind, she has their blessing to seek a better life. Then, after enduring an arduous journey across the Pacific aboard a container ship, she settles in a cramped boarding house above the nail salon. She makes fitful efforts to befriend the vicious gossips who perform mani-pedis alongside her, but mostly she feels alienated and alone. Then, while in line at a boba shop, Trinh meets Joon, an earnest Korean-American dental student. In the midst of their cross-ethnic courtship, Trinh is summoned back to Vietnam… 

Westminster, of course, doesn’t exist. However, the Irish version of the same story, Brooklyn, found purchase with critics and arthouse audiences alike, grossing $61 million in North America (on an $11 million budget) and nabbing three Oscar nominations. If success begets imitators in the movie business, why does a 200-screen release of Westminster—or Pico-Union, another hypothetic feature but about an El Salvadorian naïf’s struggles in urban America—seem so improbable?  

And what does it say about America in Annus Trumpilis that the only migrant story widely screened over the past year features a blonde Irish lass? After all, only 11% of American emigres in 2014 hail from Europe. A far greater number of new immigrants, representing 30% of the total in 2014, come from Asia, with another 24% from Central and South America. If the upcoming election supposedly pits an emerging diverse America against the “Make America Great Again” crowd of white nostalgia, Hollywood—or maybe the moviegoing public—wears a red cap.  

For all the noise of #oscarsowhite, the discordant note struck by feting Brooklyn slipped completely under identity activists’ radar. To be sure, we shouldn’t expect (or want) art to speak directly to the topic du jour, no matter how hotly debated. It would be churlish to begrudge the existence of a lovely, if imperfect, film like Brooklyn that graced us with Saoirse Ronan’s radiant Eilis. But it’s striking that Eilis’s core dilemma—the agonizing choice between a young, confident America of infinite possibility and the comfort and joy of the old country—speaks primarily to contemporary viewers who look nothing like her. As a child of immigrants, it’s hard not to conclude that the yearning and struggles of my parents only make it on screen when they’re embodied by a young blonde.  

But what I found most disappointing about Brooklyn, at least on a first viewing, isn’t so much its whiteness as its conventionality. Aside from Eilis’s bracing opacity—she seems at once precisely drawn and fundamental unknowable—the film had the feel of a prestige product by the numbers.

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By Yasmina Tawil

The Bittersweet Gags of Pierre taix by Kevin Tran

By Yasmina Tawil

Throughout his heyday in the ‘60s, French filmmaker, gag-writer, and clown Pierre taix added to a tradition of meticulous, melancholic screen comedy that began with silent masters like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. The video that follows pays tribute to his unique and oft-overlooked contribution to the medium.

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By Yasmina Tawil

The Bittersweet Gags of Pierre Étaix by Kevin Tran

By Yasmina Tawil

Throughout his heyday in the ‘60s, French filmmaker, gag-writer, and clown Pierre Étaix added to a tradition of meticulous, melancholic screen comedy that began with silent masters like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. The video that follows pays tribute to his unique and oft-overlooked contribution to the medium.

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By Yasmina Tawil

Sing It the Way You Feel It: Forgiveness and Faith in Tender Mercies by Daniel Carlson

By Yasmina Tawil

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Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Epistle to the Hebrews

///

Tender Mercies looks like nothing on paper. The script by Horton Foote is spare and direct, and the dialogue seems to sit damply on the page: How long have I been here? Two days. How far is it to the nearest town? Four miles. Conversations are short, stripped of any color or imagery, and scenes are brief and focused. The film itself, released in March 1983, initially comes across that way, too. Director Bruce Beresford steadfastly refuses to do anything showy, turning the Texas desert of the storys setting into an empty, desolate place devoid of anything attractive. Playing out in elliptical bursts, the film starts quietly and stays that way throughout, ambling through its story of a washed-up country singer, Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall), who finds himself broke and hungover at a tiny motel run by Rosa Lee (Tess Harper) and begins working at the property to pay off his debt before sticking around and becoming a part of her life.

Any given scene in the film doesnt look like much, and it probably wouldnt feel like much viewed out of context. Yet theres a fragile beauty in the way the film adds up to be so much more than the sum of its dusty parts, and the work as a whole is a powerful, earnest, lovely film about redemption, forgiveness, andin a manner more honest than almost any other American film of the modern erafaith. Tender Mercies belongs to that rare class of film that directly addresses religious faith not as a talking point or as a weapon to be used on the audience, but as a genuine component of the lives of its characters, without attempting to ignite that faith in the viewer or resorting to the extremes of piety or bitterness to make its spiritual point. It is, in every manner and method, honest, and its examinations of the small acts that define love and compassion are among the most insightful ever put to film.

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Its not surprising, though, that it looks so ordinary. Film can be an amazing medium for so many things, but its often terrible at exploring the micrometers of nuance that make up a change of heart. Its a medium of action, and belief is invisible. A film can communicate the aftermath of conversion, or convey relationships through conversations and acts, but the silent work of contemplation and kindling is harder to show. One of the reasons so many faith-based films feel so cheap and thin is that they ignore thisor worse, think that talking about belief is the same as showing it. They wind up delivering hollow homilies. Theyre also designed to do the very thing Tender Mercies never once attempts: proselytize.

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By Yasmina Tawil

“Sing It the Way You Feel It”: Forgiveness and Faith in ‘Tender Mercies’ by Daniel Carlson

By Yasmina Tawil

image

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
— Epistle to the Hebrews

///

Tender Mercies looks like nothing on paper. The script by Horton Foote is spare and direct, and the dialogue seems to sit damply on the page: “How long have I been here?” “Two days.” “How far is it to the nearest town?” “Four miles.” Conversations are short, stripped of any color or imagery, and scenes are brief and focused. The film itself, released in March 1983, initially comes across that way, too. Director Bruce Beresford steadfastly refuses to do anything showy, turning the Texas desert of the story’s setting into an empty, desolate place devoid of anything attractive. Playing out in elliptical bursts, the film starts quietly and stays that way throughout, ambling through its story of a washed-up country singer, Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall), who finds himself broke and hungover at a tiny motel run by Rosa Lee (Tess Harper) and begins working at the property to pay off his debt before sticking around and becoming a part of her life.

Any given scene in the film doesn’t look like much, and it probably wouldn’t feel like much viewed out of context. Yet there’s a fragile beauty in the way the film adds up to be so much more than the sum of its dusty parts, and the work as a whole is a powerful, earnest, lovely film about redemption, forgiveness, and—in a manner more honest than almost any other American film of the modern era—faith. Tender Mercies belongs to that rare class of film that directly addresses religious faith not as a talking point or as a weapon to be used on the audience, but as a genuine component of the lives of its characters, without attempting to ignite that faith in the viewer or resorting to the extremes of piety or bitterness to make its spiritual point. It is, in every manner and method, honest, and its examinations of the small acts that define love and compassion are among the most insightful ever put to film.

image

It’s not surprising, though, that it looks so ordinary. Film can be an amazing medium for so many things, but it’s often terrible at exploring the micrometers of nuance that make up a change of heart. It’s a medium of action, and belief is invisible. A film can communicate the aftermath of conversion, or convey relationships through conversations and acts, but the silent work of contemplation and kindling is harder to show. One of the reasons so many “faith-based” films feel so cheap and thin is that they ignore this—or worse, think that talking about belief is the same as showing it. They wind up delivering hollow homilies. They’re also designed to do the very thing Tender Mercies never once attempts: proselytize.

Read more

By Yasmina Tawil

One Man, One Bullet: The Politics of Lindsay Andersonby Judy Berman

By Yasmina Tawil

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Mick Travis sits alone in his study, his back against a wall plastered with war photos, shooting a dart gun at images hung up on the opposite wall: a womans naked body pasted atop a line of police in riot gear, a sleeping family, Big Ben, the queen in her carriage. Though he never says as much, these are all symbols of institutions that wield power over him. The upper-crust boarding school where Mick is a student is another; in the next scene, his younger classmates are whipped into a subtly terrifying frenzy over an athletic victory. Back in the study, Mick and his friends Johnny and Wallace drain a bottle of vodka and take a blood oath to each other, before Mick utters his famous line: One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place.

These four minutes of Lindsay Andersons 1968 film if. provide a concise, if intentionally provocative, summation of the British directors politics. Like so many other filmmakers who came to prominence in the 60s, Anderson thought in revolutionary terms. What set him apart was a wariness towards ideological regimes of all kindsand the masses who subscribe to themthat transcended the decades defining right vs. left, old guard vs. young avant-garde split. If you want a continuity of theme, I think this is one, Anderson wrote in a diary entry his lifelong friend, the writer Gavin Lambert, quoted in his book Mainly About Lindsay Anderson:

a mistrust of institutions and an anarchistic belief in the importance of the individual to make his or her decisions about liferather than simply accept tradition and the institutional philosophy.

Its a worldview Anderson developed most effectively in a trilogy of films starring Malcolm McDowell as the protean Mick Travisa character who changes so drastically and inexplicably from if.to O Lucky Man! (1973) to Britannia Hospital (1982), he might as well be a different person in each one. More than Micks personality, what connects these works is their evolving assessments of the state of Britain at three points on a 14-year timeline.

Their pointed social commentary has earned the films (and their director) a reputation for being very British and exceedingly of their time, but thats a superficial judgment. In our current age of economic strife and malignant populism, Andersons satire feels far less dated than the idealism of his 60s contemporaries. Watching the trilogy now, in the US, it couldnt be clearer that in pointing out the absurdity of one place and period, they captured a brand of political absurdity that couldnt be more contemporary.

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Perhaps this is a strange thing to say about a movie that ends with a massacre, but if. is the most optimistic of the three films. Mick Travis, in his original incarnation, is the archetypal teenage rebel. In his first big-screen appearance, 24-year-old McDowell earned his Clockwork Orange role by tempering youthful anger with a magnetic grin and icy blue eyes so alert, they make everyone else in the frame look half-asleep.

As the ringleader of a trio of outcast Crusaders, Mick is targeted by a band of older boys known as Whips who constitute the schools lowest but cruelest layer of authority. Though the Crusaders do break rules, from drinking to taking a joyride on a stolen motorcycle, its their iconoclastic attitude that poses the greatest threat to the school and ultimately leads the Whips to exact corporal punishment on them. Its a humiliating enough experience that when they stumble upon some guns, Mick, Johnny (David Wood), Wallace (Richard Warwick), and Micks fiery love interest (Christine Noonan, playing a character known only as The Girl) decide to put his philosophy into action. if. culminates with a Founders Day fire that forces a parade of parents, administrators, clergy, and a visiting military official out of the school building and into the Crusaders crosshairs. Perched on the roof, these heavily armed individuals finally have an advantage over the sea of conformists on the ground.

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By Yasmina Tawil

One Man, One Bullet: The Politics of Lindsay Anderson by Judy Berman

By Yasmina Tawil

image

Mick Travis sits alone in his study, his back against a wall plastered with war photos, shooting a dart gun at images hung up on the opposite wall: a woman’s naked body pasted atop a line of police in riot gear, a sleeping family, Big Ben, the queen in her carriage. Though he never says as much, these are all symbols of institutions that wield power over him. The upper-crust boarding school where Mick is a student is another; in the next scene, his younger classmates are whipped into a subtly terrifying frenzy over an athletic victory. Back in the study, Mick and his friends Johnny and Wallace drain a bottle of vodka and take a blood oath to each other, before Mick utters his famous line: “One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place.”

These four minutes of Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film if…. provide a concise, if intentionally provocative, summation of the British director’s politics. Like so many other filmmakers who came to prominence in the ‘60s, Anderson thought in revolutionary terms. What set him apart was a wariness towards ideological regimes of all kinds—and the masses who subscribe to them—that transcended the decade’s defining right vs. left, old guard vs. young avant-garde split. “If you want a continuity of theme, I think this is one,” Anderson wrote in a diary entry his lifelong friend, the writer Gavin Lambert, quoted in his book Mainly About Lindsay Anderson:

“a mistrust of institutions and an anarchistic belief in the importance of the individual to make his or her decisions about life—rather than simply accept tradition and the institutional philosophy.”

It’s a worldview Anderson developed most effectively in a trilogy of films starring Malcolm McDowell as the protean Mick Travis—a character who changes so drastically and inexplicably from if…. to O Lucky Man! (1973) to Britannia Hospital (1982), he might as well be a different person in each one. More than Mick’s personality, what connects these works is their evolving assessments of the state of Britain at three points on a 14-year timeline.

Their pointed social commentary has earned the films (and their director) a reputation for being very British and exceedingly of their time, but that’s a superficial judgment. In our current age of economic strife and malignant populism, Anderson’s satire feels far less dated than the idealism of his ‘60s contemporaries. Watching the trilogy now, in the US, it couldn’t be clearer that in pointing out the absurdity of one place and period, they captured a brand of political absurdity that couldn’t be more contemporary.

image

Perhaps this is a strange thing to say about a movie that ends with a massacre, but if…. is the most optimistic of the three films. Mick Travis, in his original incarnation, is the archetypal teenage rebel. In his first big-screen appearance, 24-year-old McDowell earned his Clockwork Orange role by tempering youthful anger with a magnetic grin and icy blue eyes so alert, they make everyone else in the frame look half-asleep.

As the ringleader of a trio of outcast “Crusaders,” Mick is targeted by a band of older boys known as “Whips” who constitute the school’s lowest but cruelest layer of authority. Though the Crusaders do break rules, from drinking to taking a joyride on a stolen motorcycle, it’s their iconoclastic attitude that poses the greatest threat to the school and ultimately leads the Whips to exact corporal punishment on them. It’s a humiliating enough experience that when they stumble upon some guns, Mick, Johnny (David Wood), Wallace (Richard Warwick), and Mick’s fiery love interest (Christine Noonan, playing a character known only as “The Girl”) decide to put his philosophy into action. if…. culminates with a Founders’ Day fire that forces a parade of parents, administrators, clergy, and a visiting military official out of the school building and into the Crusaders’ crosshairs. Perched on the roof, these heavily armed individuals finally have an advantage over the sea of conformists on the ground.

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By Yasmina Tawil

Portrait of the Artist: Magic Mike XXL By K. Austin Collins

By Yasmina Tawil

To start his day, Jerry Mulligan, the hero of Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 musical An American in Paris, does a curious thing. He’s an ex-G.I. in Paris who lives in a studio above a restaurant and café. It’s a cheap spot—small, like his income, with what little room there is being overwhelmed by clustered bouquets of old paint brushes and studious stacks of better artists’ books. Starting the day at home means, first, giving himself a little room to maneuver.

And so, in order to work, he hoists his bed up to the ceiling with a pulley, grabs a towel from the clothesline above his bed, kicks a stool aside to make way for a fold-out table, corners an overlarge den chair to replace it with one smaller. He opens the patio doors and, taking in the sun for a moment, greets the day—then he hops back to business, setting the table, picking an outfit, setting out the coffee pot. This all happens in a matter of seconds, an automatic series of kicks, spins, and slaps, nimbly matched to the cosmopolitan orchestral swing of George Gershwin’s eponymous jazz suite. Mulligan does it without thinking. And Minnelli’s amused, astonished camera gently pans to and fro, eager to capture what happens in one long and, despite the cluttered setting, spacious image.

It is a ritual: practiced, well-worn and precisely choreographed, with no pretensions to appear otherwise. But Mulligan’s body goes through these motions with refreshed spontaneity, subsuming the practical need to get ready beneath his wary joy at the prospect of a new day and the unlikely possibilities it might provide. It seems he cannot help but infuse the ritual with feeling.

Mulligan may be a failed painter, but he is nevertheless, in the film’s view, an artist, a man who naturally inflects a routine as banal as tidying up his apartment with a sense of complex expression. He’s an artist by virtue of being played and designed by one: the dance-auteur Gene Kelly, whose peculiar talent as a choreographer and performer was for fashioning the everyday into an excuse for his characters’ creative impulses to run amok. That was his genius—he could make a dance, or a prop, out of anything.

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