Barton Fink

"I'm a writer, you monsters! I CREATE!"- Barton Fink

What a bizarre film. A hellish hotel and its resident fallen angel, bigshot Hollywood tycoons, bourgeois dreams masked poorly as proletariat sentiments. I cannot decide whether or not I liked Fink's character but that could well be the genius of the acting. Everyone is a caricature of a caricacture of themselves. How do I mean this? Everyone is larger than life, over-the-top, exaggerated: the good-cop-bad-cop routine is collapsed into an only-bad-cop routine; Chet, the hotel bellboy-cum-receptionist, is alarmingly friendly while the old elevator man is alarmingly silent; Fink is earnest and awkward but also pretentious, morally uptight and "does not listen"; Lipnick is a boisterous, bossy movie mogul typically more interested in the classical hollywood narrative (he kisses Fink's feet as a sign of his deep regret for offending him) than any sort of artistic value; Charlie is the madman next door with a conscience - he could've been bad but he turns out good and then becomes very very bad. There is certainly an element of stageishness here, the whole movie moves about like a dreamish nightmare, thick with symbolism, nudging the audience every few minutes about some underhand remark you've got to be quick enough to catch. German nazis and the Dutch ("Heil Hitler", Charlie says before putting a bullet between a cop's eyes; the Coens show how one man's madness can become another's political rally), World War II, artistic integrity and the large, looming discrepancy between Fink's idea of the common man's struggles and the reality of the backstage curtain-puller who'd rather read his newspaper than take audience with highbrow art.

Yup, it certainly is quite brilliant. Moody and dark, it moves at an almost sluggish pace. Scenes, objects and sequences that are at first disconnected eventually take on an evocative form of a larger, looming idea (but what kind of idea is this elusive and shadowy?). Part-fantasy, part-ghoulish, part-satire - I can't believe it took me this long to get around to Barton Fink.

movieing along

50 greatest fictional villains according to the UK Telegraph. So it seems, unsurprisingly, that a good handful of memorable fictional characters are villains. Iago, Patrick Bateman, O'Brien, The Joker, Mr. Hyde, Hannibal Lecter, Milton's Satan - I've had obsessive crushes on the everyone except O'Brien. Also, notice there are no females. Again, unsurprising.

I'm on some kind of crazy movie frenzy. I've finally seen Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights. Norah Jones is not bad an actress; she's awfully photogenic and incredibly cute. Natalie Portman does a great job although she balances on a precarious line between honestly selling her character and becoming a caricature of it. I thought the plot was terribly boring and the only reason I kept though it was because the entire movie was visually stunning.

Also Frank Oz's Death at a Funeral was a bag of laughs. Kris Marshall is one of my favourite faces to see in a British film so no complaints. It's one of those comedies that starts with one small disaster - in this case, a bottle of suspect Valium - and avalanches into a crazy fucking funeral.

The Coen Brothers' Fargo, which was long long overdue but was well worth the wait. They're one of those unbeatable combinations. I haven't seen many movies but I can safely say that they are one of the few people who can take a movie about a bunch of incompetent idiots trying to stage a kidnapping and make it rich with nuances. I love the way it starts with 'Based on a true story' and ends with 'All characters and events are fictional'.

Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone is another visually stunning gothic horror movie. I've got a huge soft spot for directors with an aesthetic eye. But unlike My Blueberry Nights, this one has some great substance and symbolically rich characters/scenes. The movie is set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War; the orphanage becomes a nice microcosm for the horror unfolding in the rest of Spain. del Toro said, also, that Pan's Labyrinth is the "spiritual sequel" to The Devil's Backbone. It's fanatstic, the idea of a sequel in spirit.

I like The Darjeeling Limited mostly because India is one of those places that's so easy to film in. The colors come out great, it's a land of such rich character and almost always ends up getting romanticized in most works of fiction (literary and filmic). To Anderson's credit, he exploited the country, so to speak, very minimally; he had a great script and actors to work with and the location did nothing more than to compliment the movie. Three estranged brothers meet a year after their father's funeral in a train that will take them to the foot of the Himalayas. Very self-consciously, this movie showed exactly what's so wrong and so funny about the West's approach of Eastern spiritualism. The only problem I had was regarding one of the reviews I'd read, which said (and I'm paraphrasing) "Anderson does not engage in Orientalism. Even the waitress in the train speaks in an American accent and smokes a cigarette." This comment kept me up until indecent hours of the morning. In the wake of the world post Edward Said, is it ever possible to accurately represent a culture without necessarily Orientalizing it? Is an Indian speaking in a local accent guilty of exoticizing the culture? Why is Asianness immediately put under the Oriental microscope when it comes out of Hollywood? Very bothersome. But Adrien Brody looked so hot in his pink boxers and 80's sunglasses that I eventually couldn't help but forget about the whole Said jazz.

Oh, and The Man From Earth was such a fucking mind trip! I absolutely have to watch it again. The dialogue starts awfully but eventually works up to great brilliance!

Also, first two seasons of Sex in the City made me feel terribly nauseous, what with the countless tongues down countless throats and massive amounts of sex and tits and ass. But it's great time pass.