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Into Great Silence

The thick of summer is undoubtedly the province of the blockbuster. Fast-paced editing, amped-up music, explosive pyrotechnics, death-defying stunts, excessive CGI and throwaway plots beckon the masses. I, myself, am not immune to its siren call. Last weekend, my weakness for comic book heroes and desire for escapist entertainment lured me to the theater where I watched "The Incredible Hulk" and "Wanted" back to back. Both were entertaining, fun, and action-packed—but, let's face it, the pleasures of the summer blockbuster are like eating a Big Mac and fries. Flavor is high, obviously enhanced, but as food usually lacks nutrition and the subtle complexities in taste. Wanting to balance my filmic diet, I decided to seek out the very antithesis of the summer blockbuster: something slow-moving, lengthy, with no music, minimal dialogue, and a subject matter completely devoid of drama. What I found was a documentary about the preternaturally silent lives of Carthusian monks...

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The Fountainhead

Since high school people have recommended that I read Ayn Rand. In eleventh grade, and later in college, I remember friends reading "The Fountainhead"--actually, I remember friends carrying around a copy of the book because now that I think about it I can't actually recall anyone sitting and reading that hefty tome. Mind you, I'm not averse to reading long books; one of my favorites is Haruki Murakami's amazing novel, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." But "The Fountainhead" never seemed inviting; the cheap paperback version reminded me more of a brick than a book, and Rand's dry, repetitively dull writing didn't even make me want to turn the first page. Writing, for me, is as much about the way a writer uses language as it is about what he or she says. A good writer has a strong sense of rhythm, pacing, word choice; a great writer shows wit and lyricism, writes in a way that's emotionally honest, and couples intelligence with imagination. With Rand, language seems secondary, a mere tool used didactically to get across a point. Since I couldn't make it through her book, I figured why not a movie. After all, two hours trumps 752 boring pages anytime...

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Nixon

"Nixon" is a long, lumbering ox of a film that, though tedious and muddled at times, is ambitious in its exploration of the life and undoing of the infamous president. Far from being the character assassination one might expect, Oliver Stone's film is a surprisingly fair portrayal of Nixon (played brilliantly by Anthony Hopkins) and a complex examination of his rise and, ultimately, tragic political demise...

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My Dinner with Andre Royo, Part III: From Nothing to Something

What does it mean to start at the very beginning? For that matter, what does the concept of "beginning" mean? And how exactly does a beginner "begin"? These are the questions I now began to contemplate as my understanding of things was shattered by the concept of "beginner's mind"...

Asides

• "Perhaps the future of cinema is in the hands of a few youngsters who'll make films with the little money in their pockets without shackling themselves to an industrial mindset." --Robert Bresson #
• "I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of filmmaking. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit." --Stanley Kubrick #
• "With a good script a good director can produce a masterpiece. With the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film. But with a bad script even a good director can't possibly make a good film. For truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross both fire and water. The script must be something that has the power to do this." --Akira Kurosawa #
• "Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul." --Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern #