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bironicJust watched "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" ("De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté," France, 2005). Based on a 1978 movie called "Fingers" with Harvey Keitel, "The Beat..." was about a high-strung, conflicted young thug (though that's really too harsh a word), Tom, who suddenly has the opportunity to give up his "real estate" job for the chance to become a concert pianist like his deceased mother. "Real estate" in quotes because what he actually does is rough up squatters with rats and baseball bats along with his two buddies, make a profit off questionable property deals, and get into bar fights. His father raised him into it, only now he's aging so he relies more and more on Tom to settle the trickier disputes he gets himself tangled in. Having watched his friend Sami weep in the opening scene as he (Sami) spoke about how he had to go from being a son to being a parent to his father as his father got older, Tom sees the balance shifting in his relationship with his own father and starts to distance himself from him.
The perfect escape comes when Tom glimpses and chases after his mother's former concert manager, who offers him an audition; equal parts thrilled, worried and distracted, he returns to the piano after a ten-year hiatus, taking preparatory lessons from a young woman who only speaks Chinese and a little English and drifting away from his established life just when it seems his partners and father need him most.
The tension of course heightens -- Tom has an affair with the wife of his unfaithful best friend, his father hounds a Russian debtor way out of his league, his partners complain that he isn't on the ball lately, the audition date looms -- which fuels his passion for the piano at the same time it intensifies his already volatile emotions. Tom is a good pianist but not a prodigy, his anger both an inspiration and an obstacle, and it's never clear whether he'll ace the audition and get out of his suddenly hateful life, or only earn a shrug and a polite rejection. It's also not clear whether he really wants to be a pianist or is sabotaging himself.
Paragraph in white text for spoilers: And then he loses all three of the things he cares about. He no longer derives any joy from his "job" or "friends." He flubs the audition, and it's heartbreaking. And then he finds his father dead in his bedroom. Two years but barely two scenes later he achieves his greatest catharsis/victory, not at the piano as we're led to believe but instead in attacking Minskov, the man who almost certainly had his father murdered, in a hotel stairwell (Side note: Anton Yakovlev was kind of hot as Minskov.), after which he breaks down, washes the blood off his tuxedo and sits among concert-goers while his teacher-turned-uncomfortably-subservient-girlfriend plays piano. Like the best French films, this one ends on a moment that seems insignificant until the shot lingers just long enough that you realize that's all you're going to get -- and then it sort of makes sense.
Romain Duris played Tom. I hadn't seen him in anything before, but a check on IMDB shows he's been in a bunch of notable movies including "Arsène Lupin," "Le Divorce" and "L'Auberge espagnole." He was best when he got to act with more than just his face -- his hands especially, restless, jittery, occasionally elegant, sometimes shaking with frustration or the aftereffects of adrenaline. He was the embodiment of anxiety, managing to make it palpable but not off-putting. A couple of times he made me think of a young Sirius Black, only with thicker skin (I mean that literally -- the skin of his face, especially his chin and nose, just looked... thick) and a heavier brow. I liked the moments where he fazed out in the middle of conversations or sat in reverie and all we heard was a piano or symphony; maybe it's just that I readily sympathize with characters whose minds are miles away from what's in front of them. Linh Dan Pham was also good as the piano teacher, Miao Lin, especially considering that most of her lines are delivered in Chinese without subtitles, so we're left as clueless as Tom about the words, although her meaning and emotions are clear. That was another thing I liked about the movie: Almost every scene with Tom and Miao Lin takes place either in silence, in outbursts of two incommunicable languages, or in broken pieces of music-Italian, English and French. Language barrier within language barrier.
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In addition, finally finished the audio book of On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony. Mediocre. The premise was pretty good: pathetic young man in a magic-infused future world tries to commit suicide but ends up killing Death by accident, and finds himself in Death's role instead. The other "incarnations of immortality" -- Fate, War, Time, Nature -- give him as little information as they can about his new position, because, as it turns out, Death is to play a pivotal role in Satan's plan to kill a woman destined to thwart him from taking over the world. (Follow that?) Trouble is, we spend all this time waiting for Satan to appear for the showdown and then he turns out to be kind of boring; and while we get to take a tour with Death down into the underworld, there isn't much to see there. The best parts are occasional moments of humor, pathos or Deep Thoughts as Death goes about learning his new job, taking souls from dying people whose good and evil are more or less in balance, and insisting on following his conscience rather than predetermined rules of the office. There are a few good images. Anthony probably has better books than this one.
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Am also making my way through loaned graphic novels from Joe at work: "Stray Toasters" by Bill Sienkiewicz and "Tell Me Dark" by Karl Edward Wagner/John Ney Rieber/Kent Williams last week, "Night Cries" by Archie Goodwin/Scott Hampton and "Arkham Asylum" by Grant Morrison/Dave McKean (the latter titles both Batmans) this week. "Toasters" was a wild ride, one of its narrators psychotic -- his word-boxes (bow down to my jargon knowledge!) tumbled over one another as his thoughts overlapped and overran themselves -- and another drunk and recently released from a sanitarium, and featuring two other characters who were demons (one of whom was vacationing). It took almost halfway through to figure out what was going on and settle into the style, in the sense of "relax and let the insanity invade you," but after that it was a smooth, if crazy, trip. "Tell Me Dark" was calmer and much easier to follow: an American returns to London after a bizarre accident only to discover that his drug-addicted girlfriend has been inducted into a supernatural cannibalistic underground cult. Both were pretty in their dark, twisted, bloody, naked-women kind of way.
As I told Joe when I swapped those two for the new pair, being a writerly type untrained in art or art criticism, I've had to make an effort to not just read the words or pay attention to the story, because these are graphic novels and half the point is the art -- which is lovely; hence him owning them -- or rather the intersection, the integration of art and text. As a graphic designer he's coming from the other end of the spectrum, so it makes for interesting discussions afterwards. It gets a little easier with each book to see everything at once, not text-and-then-pictures. So on Friday "Night Cries" was pretty much a breeze. The art in this one, I noticed, had quite a range of styles, to great effect: from children's colored-pencil sketches to grotesque flabby limbs like a Dali painting. I wish I knew media and techniques to understand what the artists are doing and appreciate why. Less profoundly, has anyone read Batman comics before? Does Jim Gordon always look like Mark Twain?
The perfect escape comes when Tom glimpses and chases after his mother's former concert manager, who offers him an audition; equal parts thrilled, worried and distracted, he returns to the piano after a ten-year hiatus, taking preparatory lessons from a young woman who only speaks Chinese and a little English and drifting away from his established life just when it seems his partners and father need him most.
The tension of course heightens -- Tom has an affair with the wife of his unfaithful best friend, his father hounds a Russian debtor way out of his league, his partners complain that he isn't on the ball lately, the audition date looms -- which fuels his passion for the piano at the same time it intensifies his already volatile emotions. Tom is a good pianist but not a prodigy, his anger both an inspiration and an obstacle, and it's never clear whether he'll ace the audition and get out of his suddenly hateful life, or only earn a shrug and a polite rejection. It's also not clear whether he really wants to be a pianist or is sabotaging himself.
Paragraph in white text for spoilers: And then he loses all three of the things he cares about. He no longer derives any joy from his "job" or "friends." He flubs the audition, and it's heartbreaking. And then he finds his father dead in his bedroom. Two years but barely two scenes later he achieves his greatest catharsis/victory, not at the piano as we're led to believe but instead in attacking Minskov, the man who almost certainly had his father murdered, in a hotel stairwell (Side note: Anton Yakovlev was kind of hot as Minskov.), after which he breaks down, washes the blood off his tuxedo and sits among concert-goers while his teacher-turned-uncomfortably-subservient-girlfriend plays piano. Like the best French films, this one ends on a moment that seems insignificant until the shot lingers just long enough that you realize that's all you're going to get -- and then it sort of makes sense.
Romain Duris played Tom. I hadn't seen him in anything before, but a check on IMDB shows he's been in a bunch of notable movies including "Arsène Lupin," "Le Divorce" and "L'Auberge espagnole." He was best when he got to act with more than just his face -- his hands especially, restless, jittery, occasionally elegant, sometimes shaking with frustration or the aftereffects of adrenaline. He was the embodiment of anxiety, managing to make it palpable but not off-putting. A couple of times he made me think of a young Sirius Black, only with thicker skin (I mean that literally -- the skin of his face, especially his chin and nose, just looked... thick) and a heavier brow. I liked the moments where he fazed out in the middle of conversations or sat in reverie and all we heard was a piano or symphony; maybe it's just that I readily sympathize with characters whose minds are miles away from what's in front of them. Linh Dan Pham was also good as the piano teacher, Miao Lin, especially considering that most of her lines are delivered in Chinese without subtitles, so we're left as clueless as Tom about the words, although her meaning and emotions are clear. That was another thing I liked about the movie: Almost every scene with Tom and Miao Lin takes place either in silence, in outbursts of two incommunicable languages, or in broken pieces of music-Italian, English and French. Language barrier within language barrier.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In addition, finally finished the audio book of On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony. Mediocre. The premise was pretty good: pathetic young man in a magic-infused future world tries to commit suicide but ends up killing Death by accident, and finds himself in Death's role instead. The other "incarnations of immortality" -- Fate, War, Time, Nature -- give him as little information as they can about his new position, because, as it turns out, Death is to play a pivotal role in Satan's plan to kill a woman destined to thwart him from taking over the world. (Follow that?) Trouble is, we spend all this time waiting for Satan to appear for the showdown and then he turns out to be kind of boring; and while we get to take a tour with Death down into the underworld, there isn't much to see there. The best parts are occasional moments of humor, pathos or Deep Thoughts as Death goes about learning his new job, taking souls from dying people whose good and evil are more or less in balance, and insisting on following his conscience rather than predetermined rules of the office. There are a few good images. Anthony probably has better books than this one.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Am also making my way through loaned graphic novels from Joe at work: "Stray Toasters" by Bill Sienkiewicz and "Tell Me Dark" by Karl Edward Wagner/John Ney Rieber/Kent Williams last week, "Night Cries" by Archie Goodwin/Scott Hampton and "Arkham Asylum" by Grant Morrison/Dave McKean (the latter titles both Batmans) this week. "Toasters" was a wild ride, one of its narrators psychotic -- his word-boxes (bow down to my jargon knowledge!) tumbled over one another as his thoughts overlapped and overran themselves -- and another drunk and recently released from a sanitarium, and featuring two other characters who were demons (one of whom was vacationing). It took almost halfway through to figure out what was going on and settle into the style, in the sense of "relax and let the insanity invade you," but after that it was a smooth, if crazy, trip. "Tell Me Dark" was calmer and much easier to follow: an American returns to London after a bizarre accident only to discover that his drug-addicted girlfriend has been inducted into a supernatural cannibalistic underground cult. Both were pretty in their dark, twisted, bloody, naked-women kind of way.
As I told Joe when I swapped those two for the new pair, being a writerly type untrained in art or art criticism, I've had to make an effort to not just read the words or pay attention to the story, because these are graphic novels and half the point is the art -- which is lovely; hence him owning them -- or rather the intersection, the integration of art and text. As a graphic designer he's coming from the other end of the spectrum, so it makes for interesting discussions afterwards. It gets a little easier with each book to see everything at once, not text-and-then-pictures. So on Friday "Night Cries" was pretty much a breeze. The art in this one, I noticed, had quite a range of styles, to great effect: from children's colored-pencil sketches to grotesque flabby limbs like a Dali painting. I wish I knew media and techniques to understand what the artists are doing and appreciate why. Less profoundly, has anyone read Batman comics before? Does Jim Gordon always look like Mark Twain?
