35 Shots of Rum

Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum may be the warmest depiction of an Electra complex ever put to film. In fact, it's such a minutely layered, understated work that to pigeonhole it with such a lazy bit of Freudian explanation does a great disservice to its subtlety. Denis' film is not elliptical, merely unspoken, relying on the faces and slightest action to tell the story. As captured by Agnès Godard's quiet but expressive color palette, 35 Shots of Rum makes cinema of the trace elements of life.

Immediately, the director delves into the dynamic between Lionel (Alex Descas), a widower who conducts RER trains in Paris and its suburbs, and his daughter, Joséphine (Mati Dop), a beautiful graduate student working as a teaching assistant at a local school. Jo spots a rice cooker in a shop window and notes how she wants it, coming home later that day after purchasing one only for her dad to surprise her with the exact same thing. "I didn't think you'd remember," she says gratefully as she keeps her own copy out of sight. One naturally assumes that she doesn't tell her father about the cooker she bought out of consideration, not wishing to hurt his pride, but Denis leaves so much hanging in the air that the audience can think about the nature of the father-daughter relationship. As more pieces fall into place, we can better see that moment as a reflection of the intimate but increasingly impersonal bond that links the two: clearly, the death of the mother brought father and child together, and they care so much for each other that no one else seems to register. Yet that is a relationship based upon convenience and proximity. It's only natural that a family should find comfort in each other following a tragedy, but instead of moving on, Jo and Lionel got used to their bond and do not seek anything that might shake up their lives. Dating is hard; not growing up is easy.

Yet there are several hints that the two do not understand and appreciate how close they are. Jo doesn't expect her dad to remember about the cooker when she is the only woman in his life. In turn, Lionel doesn't even have to play the role of the stern dad when boys come calling because Jo turns them all down on her own. A bouncy, middle-aged cab driver, Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue), lives in the same apartment complex and clearly has feelings for Lionel, but when she comes looking for her beau, Joséphine turns frigid and lightly confrontational. Whether they realize it or not, father and daughter have created a matrimonial relationship, and they subconsciously act to maintain that thread by edging out any other force.

Slowly, however, the pair come to terms with their existence. Lionel attends a retirement party for his friend René, who smiles good-naturedly at his friends' toasts and gifts but looks slightly troubled. He pops up throughout the film, not saying much with his voice but speaking volumes about the predicament in which Lionel might find himself in a few years: by devoting his life to his job, René has nothing left when he retires. If he ever had a family, his offspring moved on, just as all children, even Jo, must. When he reappears every so often, he hangs in the background, a specter in tiny cafés and bars that Lionel sees in his peripheral vision and cannot shake. Denis intended the film as a loose homage to Ozu Yasujiro (it particularly borrows some elements from Late Spring, and René reflects Ozu's solemn musings on the existentialist nature of industrial livelihood: the man retires in good health, but because he defined himself as a train conductor, his life is over.

Also hanging over Lionel as a dark portent is Gabrielle, whose lovesick longing not only gives the man a chance to change his life path but also shows him the danger of pining for something until it's too late. Gabrielle wants to be with Lionel, and Lionel wants to stay with Jo. But once the young woman can no longer fight the nagging urge to make her own life, what will Lionel have?

Denis' camera moves more than Ozu's, but she displays the same eye for body language and the power of a look. Descas has one of those masterful faces, seemingly chiseled from obsidian and filled with dramatic weight. His is a Stoic look, breaking his poker face only to let the slightest hint of deep pain out from behind those eyes. Dogue, on the other hand, is brilliantly convincing as a lovelorn fool awkwardly attempting to hang around the object of her affection until maybe he accepts her. So convincing is she that I thought less of a middle-aged person trying to find love than a hopeless romantic of a teenager hanging around the school halls doing anything to impress the cool boy or girl. Dogue constantly arcs her back and neck, leaning with all her might to stay in Lionel's sight even as he turns away. Even her smile, radiant and wide, carries a hint of desperation, and she may be more heartbreaking when at her most outwardly cheery than she is when that smile fades.

The film's centerpiece occurs about halfway through the film, as Lionel, Joséphine, Jo's sort-of boyfriend Noé (Grégoire Colin) and Gabrielle pile in Gabby's car to head to a concert. It's a stiflingly uncomfortable ride, with cautious looks exchanged all around and Gabrielle breaking the tension only to add even more awkward silence by saying, "We haven't gone out as a family in years." In the middle of a pouring rainstorm, the cab breaks down, and the four of them all look more relieved to be standing outside pushing the Mercedes minivan down the road than to be back in the car.

When they stop in a bar to dry off, something magical happens. The Commodores' "Night Shift" strikes up on the jukebox, and Denis' camera, formerly the same mix of intimate and detached as the characters themselves, suddenly becomes so sensual your toes will curl. She lingers on Gabrielle's back as revealed in her low-cut dress, the look of nervous, budding love on Noé's face and the self-awareness mounting in Lionel's. Not a single word is spoken, but as partners change hands for friendly but revealing dances, the entire structure of the characters' social order rearranges. From that moment, the inevitability of Jo's progression is made plain, while Lionel continues to swim in circles despite seeing his options clearly for the first time.

Fundamentally, 35 Shots of Rum is about the necessity of living life. When Noé invites Gabrielle and Joséphine to his flat, he discovers his 17-year-old cat dead. Without shedding a tear, he grabs the poor thing by the neck and stuffs it into a trash bag along with toys and all the cat's other "effects." The women, speaking for the audience in this situation, simply gaze in horror and ask sensible questions like "A trash bag?" (which would have been exactly the way I phrased that question, too), but Noé's action shows an exaggerated model for moving on from grief. Buried in Noé's rushed attempt to throw everything away is the desire to not be reminded of his cat's death, but he also frees himself by placing the reminders in the bin. As soon as he finishes, he mentions taking a job overseas, which he can now more easily accept because he does not need to worry about his old, sick cat anymore. It's a bit callous, yes, but Jo understands the deeper meaning, and when she gets home she obsessively cleans the flat of her mother's stuff, trying to throw out the shackles that keep her and Lionel chained to their lives. Lionel, of course, intervenes.

Rarely does the film do anything wrong, but two extraneous scenes do drag the more subtle and evocative story. A scene in Jo's class serves only to bring up Denis' usual attention to race and class dynamics, but it's the only moment of the movie to do so, making the academic arguments of the students regarding international development seem even more stilted and rehearsed. Late in the film, Jo and Lionel head to Germany to visit the dead wife's sister, Jo's aunt. Played by Fassbinder regular Ingrid Caven, the aunt has a monologue that is not so obvious that it detracts from the visually-oriented mood but makes the mistake of trying to put into words what has already been bountifully expressed through the camera.

But these are fleeting moments, hiccups in an eloquent and insightful look at familiar and familial relationships. Much subtler is the symbolism of Lionel's job, always moving but trapped on the same circuit, that small but key distinction from Gabrielle's own status as a public transporter (and is Lionel's name a reference to those train sets that let us play conductor as kids?). Jo's own, part-time job, a music shop clerk, comes right out of adolescence and is as demonstrative of her trapping herself in young adult years. These are symbols handled with a deft hand, open enough to be guessed on a first viewing but left in the hands of the viewer to work out. Thankfully, it is material like this that defines Denis' film, not the minuscule broad moments.

The film ends with Joséphine set to finally move out into her own life, and to commemorate the event, Lionel downs the titular 35 shots in a personal ceremony that looks as much a wake as it does a wedding reception. The final shot shows Lionel coming home with a new rice cooker, one that appears to be made for one, not two. It's a moving moment, but also a hopeful one. We are spared trite epilogues, left instead to ponder whether the man has processed the various clues sent to him about the state of his life and whether he can alter it before the window of opportunity closes. As with everything else in 35 Shots of Rum, these final moments are as haunting as they are affirming. And compared to the films that sandwich it in Denis' canon, it's proof that she is capable of absolutely anything. Americans tend to outdo each other with spectacle; Denis proves her mettle by stripping all away but the essence, and what is left is overwhelming.

Twins: Comparatives of Nouns, Adjectives and Quantity

This is an unforgettable classic, perfect to practice the use of comparatives.






GRAMMAR NOTE:

More/Fewer (Count nouns) or More/Less (Non Count nouns)

I. Complete the blanks with the words above, comparing quantities:




1. Julius has __________ fathers than ordinary people. He has 6 fathers.


2. He spent ____________ time on one island than anywhere else.


3. Julius's brother had _________ opportunities in life than Julius did.


4. Most people can speak _________ languages than Julius can.


5. Julius's brother showed _______ respect to people than Julius did.


6. Julius faced __________ problems living isolated on an island than his brother living in a big city.


7. Julius had ___________ information about the world than we probably do.




II. Now compare Julius and his brother. Use the adjectives below.




FAT - TALL - STRONG - HANDSOME - INTELLIGENT - NAIVE - RESPECTFUL


1 ...........................................................

2 ..........................................................

3 ..........................................................

4 ..........................................................

5 ...........................................................

6 ...........................................................

7 ...........................................................

WORKSHEET






Answer Key:

I. 1. more, 2. more, 3. fewer, 4. fewer, 5. less, 6. fewer, 7. less

II. Answers may vary.

Sonic Youth — Daydream Nation

The opening chords of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation lurch, dissipate and echo as if reaching through the murk of the '80s underground, searching for that vein of emotional and sociopolitical gold that ran through the rough of cocaine-fueled hyper-gloss. Sonic Youth, having honed their craft from a messy, highly experimental yet tame no-wave sound into something unique and formidable with previous albums EVOL and Sister, were on the precipice of launching themselves to the top of the budding indie rock heap. In Kim Gordon's drifting prologue, the band at last sees the path to glory, and they break through to it with as much majesty as rock 'n roll has ever contained.

When the riff for "Teen Age Riot" flies out of the speaker as soon as Gordon's prose fades, you know the band has crossed a threshold. An anthem worthy of placement with "Like a Rolling Stone," "Born to Run" and "My Generation," "Teen Age Riot" manages to cement the noise side of the band after it developed over the last two albums even as the group blended it with their first dose of pure, unadulterated pop. Unlike those aforementioned odes to defiance, "Teen Age Riot" is not a call to arms, instead capturing the feelings of youth in all their ennui. By not presenting adolescence as an "us vs. them" struggle with the outside forces of the establishment and elders but a tug-of-war within teenagers' own ranks for a sense of clarity, "Teen Age Riot" achieves the purity of an anthem with the complexity of a more realized composition.

From there, Daydream Nation combines the heightened songwriting ability the band displayed on their previous two albums with their propensity for elongating tunes into noise jams in a live setting. Songs easily stretch past the six- and seven-minute marks, elongating the band's most developed pop hooks into its most successful art-noise jams yet. "Cross the Breeze" opens with jangling, blissful chords before morphing into a fast-paced freak-fest that might pass for a thrash metal song. When Kim Gordon, at her most intensely stand-offish, enters the mix several minutes in, she leads the Youth through a song too long and disoriented to be considered punk but so righteous and furious that it's impossible to view it as anything but. "The Sprawl" is even looser, propelled by a tight beat that pits the band against each other as if in a battle royale. Both songs shouldn't stay together; you expect them to take off in a thousand different directions, either in reckless abandon or mathematical precision. Instead, the group always finds their way, always keeps the beat and always finds just the right balance between considerable ability and free-form, emotional playing.

When the lengths of the songs are tighter, as they are on "Silver Rocket" and most of the second LP, Sonic Youth attains a ferocity they occasionally displayed but never fully developed. The echoing clang of Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore's guitars, the buzz and hum of Gordon's bass and the carefully modulated sloppiness of Steve Shelley form a white-hot focal point on the shorter numbers, melting through whatever surface they touch. The raucous "Kissability" shows off Gordon's dry wit, while the three-part finale pays homage to the band that pointed the way for Sonic Youth's growth into the ultimate teen band, Dinosaur Jr.

Daydream Nation, despite being released the year before I was born, always sends me back to visions of high school, slamming lockers and idly doodling in binders. Like all teenagers, Daydream Nation mumbles, moves around uncertainly and self-consciously. But it also has the bravado of youth, the brash confidence of its crashing punk sound. Beneath it all, though, is the sincerity that marks the best of adolescence: we may not have a damn clue how the world works, but we mean well and want to change things for the better. And that's a damn sight more appealing than selling out for greater popularity and wealth (right Boomers?).

I actually have less to say about Daydream Nation than other Youth albums, such as Sister or the magnificent late-career masterpiece Murray Street. But the simplicity is what I most admire about the album. On its surface, it's just a blend of songwriting hooks and post-Krautrock electronic wash, but that doesn't get at its appeal. After all, Krautrock itself was, in the best cases, a mixture of pop hooks and sonic wash. What makes Daydream Nation so transcendent of time is the subtle, almost indescribable manner in which the band marries that sound to an undercurrent of shared emotion. Nearly everyone can relate to the feeling expressed by the record, even though the lyrics themselves border on nonsense (or, given how rarely anything approaches logic in the words, perhaps it's more accurate to say they border on sense).

One of the few enduring classics of the 1980s, Daydream Nation is all the proof one would ever need of Sonic Youth's greatness. Fortunately, they decided to pad their resumé with at least three or four other classics, just in case. Dinosaur Jr. inspired Sonic Youth with their seminal You're Living All Over Me, but Moore, Gordon and co. replaced J. Mascis' sludge with a sort of industrial twang; yes, there is a hint of country sorrow under the punk and no-wave influences, and maybe that's the aspect that makes Daydream Nation so gripping. That trace of a genre built upon self-pity, however justified, fits seamlessly with the crafting of the ultimate teenage anthem. It took numerous listens to glean that from the record, to hear in the echo of ringing guitars the sound of outlaws. Most of the country rebels weren't really that dangerous, and they peddled an angst not too dissimilar from the sort that alt.rockers sell. The only difference is that country aims years down the road, once the doubt of youth reveals itself to be a correct foreshadowing of a broken life. Because that sound, whether the band intended it or not, moves through the cascading mix of sounds and moods, Daydream Nation not only survives for each new generation of teenagers, it can be equally affecting as one moves out of that age range. It's as forward-thinking as it is nostalgic. Not bad for an album that contains the lines "To the extent that I wear skirts/and cheap nylon slips/I've gone native/I wanted to know the exact dimension of hell."

What Time is It There?

When someone describes a film as minimalistic, he usually refers to the aesthetic quality, a sparsity of construction and mise-en-scène that leaves a chill in the air. What so many, including myself, fail to adequately convey is that minimalist film, when done well, tends to be richer, more painterly and more evocative than more complicated work. Perhaps it's because the removal of classical elements of mise-en-scène take away the intellectualism of the cinema. Rather than give us symbols to toil over, directors pull back and leave emotions to fill the gap. Thus, it's harder to talk about these movies, because even when shots are deliberately arranged and edited and you see what the director is saying, you cannot fully discuss the picture without investing in it emotionally. For those who believe criticism should strive for objective verisimilitude, meaningful criticism of such works is impossible. It's easy to talk about someone's creative and emotional vision when it comes caged in unlockable elements. It's much harder when you have to expose yourself to talk about someone else's bared chest.

From a conceptual standpoint, Tsai Ming-liang's films suggest minimalism taken to an extreme. Not only is he a master of the long, static take, he reuses the same actors in essentially the same roles. Lee Kang-sheng plays the protagonist in all of Tsai's films, and he even carries the same character name, Hsiao-kang, across more than one feature. Lu Yi-ching tends to play the mother figure, Miao Tien the father. Chen Shiang-chyi plays the young woman, be she a love interest or something else. Tsai even reuses the fish from The River. Plenty of directors work with actors multiple times, but by assigning the same cast to roughly the same parts each time, Tsai expands upon his ideas of dissociation and conformity before a film even starts: though he leaves open the possibility that the feelings of disconnect and ennui in his characters are rooted in the same people, the recycling of casts allows him to make the case that we're all becoming the same. Modern thinking coined the term "nuclear family," and it also made that unit into its own prison. No longer about community, now all we have is our immediate relatives, and we cannot even communicate with them.

The first shot of What Time is It There? hangs outside the kitchen of a humble Taiwanese home as an old man finishes preparing dinner. He walks into the room where the camera rests and sets down his plate on a table, but he doesn't eat, restlessly reaching for a cigarette and fidgeting. Though he sets a plate for no one else, he gets out of his chair and calls for Hsiao-kang, then he steps outside on the back porch and rearranges a plant. His disquiet, though calm, introduces an anxious mood, and the look of emptiness in Miao's face when he sits closer to the camera is haunting but understated. The only dialogue of the entire scene is the father shouting "Hsiao-kang!" The rest unfolds in near silence, only the rustling of the rearranged plant and the creak of the wooden chair putting something in the audio track.

In the next shot, Tsai relocates to a car with the young Hsiao-kang, now cradling a container with his father's ashes. He and his mother head to an interment, located in what almost looks like a reference library, filled with shelves of fine oak cabinets in which to store remains. Instead of the unique and differentiated headstones in Western cemeteries (one of which Tsai later shows), this place literalizes the idea that we are all equal in death, and it also suggests that we are equal and unoriginal in life. As I watched this scene, I thought of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that horrific obsidian wall that reduces the meaningless sacrifice of so many thousands to simply their names, at once an admission of our shame and a final attempt by the powers that be to minimize the disgust by removing all humanity from the equation. We know as little about Hsiao-kang's father in death as we did in the brief amount of life we saw.

Tsai complicates the shot further by introducing the first of many tragicomic elements in the film. As the camera sits in the narrow corridor of this modernized, efficient form of interment, a Buddhist priest performs a funeral ritual, clanging chimes and chanting centuries-old prayers in the middle of this clinical room. The sight of the priest, in his bright orange robe, standing among the polished, nondescript, dark wood paneling is inherently funny, but the sorrow it communicates, of committed Buddhists trying to ensure their beloved will return, is rending. At the same time, the way that the rows of ashes resemble a kind of reference section, a place of storage, also implies that these wee cupboards might actually aid the Buddhist idea of reincarnation: they might merely be places where one's former body is stored while the spirit seeks a new host.

It's impossible to feel optimistic about that line of thought, though, when you follow the reactions of the son and wife left behind. The mother continues to hold Buddhist rituals in the hopes of bringing her husband back, constantly setting his plate for dinner and interpreting anything remotely suspicious as her husband's ghost floating around. Hsiao-kang, who does not seem as if he was ever that sociable, retreats into his room, not even leaving to urinate. Instead, he pees in plastic containers -- bags, bottles -- like Howard Hughes. During the day, he leaves the room only to go sell watches on the street, where a woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) approaches him looking for a watch that can keep two times as she is leaving for Paris soon. Unimpressed by any of the watches he's flogging, Shiang-ciyi asks if she can buy the one Hsiao-kang is wearing. Having received the watch from his father, Hsiao-kang feels not only an emotional connection to the timepiece but a superstitious one, fearing that he would give away a piece of his dad. But he relents, and the woman goes on her way.

After this brief encounter, Hsiao-kang's behavior begins to shift. On a whim, he begins to set the watches in his case to Parisian time, then any clock he can find. He visits a bootleg stand and asks for French films, taking home François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (Tsai's favorite movie). At night, he sits awake, watching this scratchy, panned and scanned version of the movie that lops off 2/3 of the original frame. Later in the film, Tsai shows the woman in Paris sitting on a bench when the star of Truffaut's masterpiece, Jean-Pierre Léaud, sits beside her and attempts to make small talk.

These tendrils snake and wave, directionless as the tentacles of a sea anemone, but they never converge or brush against each other. The vague connection that tugs at Hsiao-kang is perhaps not romantically motivated so much as the outgrowth of his increasing hollowness. No one else who stops to buy the boy's watches makes any impression, as they do the usual: they scan over Hsiao-kang's wares, maybe haggle a bit and move on. Shiang-ciyi stood out, and whether he feels any attraction to her is secondary to the mere fact that she broke the routine.

When Tsai takes his camera to Paris to follow the woman, though, he does not resort to portraying her as some free spirit to extend her unorthodox actions with Hsiao-kang. Rather, she seems as lost and without purpose as the man whose watch she purchased, if not more so. In Paris, she is naturally alienated from the domestic population, and she does not make clear why she even came. She nurses a piece of paper with a phone number but never calls the mysterious person, leaving her isolated in France. Listlessly, she wanders Paris, not even taking in the sights as she uncomfortably sits coffee in cafés as if she heard that's what Parisians do and just repeats the action over and over in an attempt to fit in. A sense of displacement pervades the film, but Shiang-chyi literalizes it, having traveled to another part of the world to find somewhere she might belong, only to be even more lost.

Compared to the ragged howl of pain in Wong Kar-wai's films, loneliness and loss in Tsai Ming-liang's movies are more contained, held behind a dam that holds back the flood until cracks appear. He denies us the catharsis of full release, achieving a pain even greater than that of Wong. Where his previous film, The River, was more explicitly about modernity and the threat of interpersonal loss in a world that now functioned on a global scale, What Time is It There? approaches the same general subject in a way that complicates and deepens it.

The problem Tsai finds in the modern world here is not that we lose all sense of connection but that there are so many possibilities opened up to us that we experience sensory overload and shut down. The mise-en-scène in Tsai's shots is always static and angled, not in mathematical precision but to ensure that no one faces horizontally, where they might make eye contact with someone to their side, nor directly at the camera, where they might at least feel us watching and caring about them. They have options, but in their confusion they wind up stuck in the middle, facing diagonally to nothing.

Numerous moments of the film speak to this disconnect. At a subway station in Paris, Shiang-chyi sees an Asian man, perhaps Taiwanese, across the gap, but when he board the train that fills the space between them, she does not move to make conversation despite the longing for communication that's plain on her face. Hsiao-kang and his mother cannot relate to each other, but if they could just sit down and talk about their emotions over the patriarch's death, they might move forward. Instead, the mother is reduced to sobbing and begging for answers from the family fish as she grips the tank desperately. Later, Hsiao-kang listens to a frothy, lightweight radio show that recounts silly news stories as a chirpy but disengaged female voice bounces through titillating nuggets. One of the stories concerns a dog running around a highway, and the woman on the radio goes through a series of awful jokes about it trying to get a suntan, only for someone to call in and say the poor thing got run over. After the slightest pause and downturn in the host's voice, she returns to business as usual, masking a sense of pain with the same hollow façade Hsiao-kang and the others use, even if they're not as bubbly.

In the film's most tragicomic moment, Hsiao-kang sits in a theater after leaving a store where he rearranged the time on the clocks. The other customer who watched him do it comes in, sits next to Hsiao-kang in a nearly empty theater, takes the kid's giant clock and walks off. Hsiao-kang follows him, ending up in a bathroom where the man opens a stall to reveal dropped pants with the clock covering his penis. It's quietly absurd, but it suggests that the man was snapped out of his own ennui and disconnect by watching Hsiao-kang. Just as the boy felt an imperceptible tug toward the woman, so too does this man to Hsiao-kang, and while it's funny when he casually knocks the stall door closed on the man and walks out with a sigh, it's also sad because Hsiao-kang cannot see his own pain in others.

There are casualties in Tsai's view of the modern world, however. The director sees the irony of his fears of cultural loss in a homogenized world when his own cinephilia sprang from European cinema, and he rather reluctantly places the New Wave on the chopping block. The hissing, snowy bootleg of The 400 Blows casts the young Jean-Pierre Léaud as a ghost, and when Shiang-chyi meets the aged Léaud, they sit in a cemetery (itself contrasting classical Western interment, ornate and influenced by Christian social values, with the crematory policy of Taiwan). Shiang-chyi has no clue who he is, both a result of generational gap and cultural separation, and Tsai clear mourns the New Wave even as he makes clear that if the final nail had not been put in the movement's coffin, he is going to be the one to do it.

The title of the film is What Time is It There?, but 'where' is a relative term dependent on 'here.' Nothing makes time more disjunctive than the cinema, which can cross space and time in a single cut. For a film that uses clocks as a central symbol, the movie wryly has a non-linear progression even though it does not seem to ever double back. The structure of the film becomes as displaced as its characters, always moving forward but never really going anywhere, never recognizing what's happening.

The climax of the film is among the most haunting I've ever seen, similar in its culminating expression of directionless ennui and existentialist doubt to the ending of Tokyo Sonata. Each of the three primary characters engages in a sexual activity that only separates them further from others. In Paris, Shiang-chyi meets a woman in a restaurant and comes back to her hotel room. They sleep together, in a literal sense, but Shiang-chyi leans over and kisses the woman as if repaying the favor of talking to someone. The woman is unresponsive. Back in Taiwan, Hsiao-kang has sex with a prostitute, while the mother vents her sorrow and her fantasies of her husband returning by masturbating with the container of her husband's ashes. The awkwardness of this and Shiang-chyi's moments might be funny, but they are intensely affecting. The mother in particular seems to think that this perverse act with bring her closer once more with her husband, that his ghost might return and pleasure her. In the end, she seals herself off, reduced to isolated self-love she envisions as reconnection instead of finding someone else. (And what Western actress would sob noiselessly, avoiding histrionics and awards-baiting monologues, while still letting snot run down her face?)

The film's final scene does not bring these people together, because that's not the point. Where so many of the "network narrative" try to link people, the only thing the characters in What Time is It There? have in common with each other, even the relatives, is how alone they are. Tsai moves at last to Paris, unable to bring mother and son together, to close on Shiang-chyi. She sits by a pool, lounging uncomfortably and meditatively in a chair built always to lean back. Behind her is an empty chair. Some children play with her suitcase, throwing it into the pool, only for Hsiao-kang's father to walk by and fish it out. What does this mean? I cannot say on a first watch, but it spoke to me about those tendrils that connect even the loneliest of people, and that perhaps all that we saw was Hsiao-kang's projection of the woman he obsessed over, looking to her to get over the pain of his father's loss. In his mind, maybe she actually did take a piece of his father with her to Paris, where he now lives. It's a magical moment, reminiscent of the end of Being There, but it also has its bleaker side. The woman who made an impression on Hsiao-kang is stuck in Paris, and his father is there too. But he remains in Taiwan, possibly imagining all this but never going there himself. Some part of him knows Paris won't really be like that, and that he will just become as alienated as Shiang-chyi there. It's the final joke in a dryly comic film, the prospect that a third of the story, as depressing as it was, was actually someone's most hopeful fantasy. But like all the other gags, it's rooted in a deep sadness that turns laughter into tears.

Four Lions

Chris Morris, the most ingenious and darkly savage man in British television comedy (which places him high in the running for most ruthless comedian period), is no stranger to controversy, but he pulls no punches for his debut feature. Four Lions is a jihadist comedy, focusing on a group of British-born Muslims planning a fundamentalist uprising in England. What is most surprising , and rewarding, about it is the manner in which the film manages not only to avoid cheaply offending Muslims but to deliver a scathing blow to fundamentalism of all stripes.


The nature of terrorism makes the enemy a nebulously defined other that lives as a specter in the minds of those who fear it. Recently, it has taken root in the Western consciousness as nothing more specific than Arabs or those of Arab ethnicity. What Morris recognizes, especially in the wake of the 7/7 bombings on the London Underground, is that even if Muslims are the ones primarily targeting Western infrastructure at the moment, many of those involved have been raised at least partially with a connection to the West, either benefiting from Western financial cooperation, as Osama bin Laden did until the royal family broke contact with him, or like those responsible for the London bombings, having grown up in the Western world.

Morris could all too easily have fallen into the trap of making his natural-born Muslim characters symbolic of a perceived need for post-9/11 or 7/7 constant vigilance concerning all Muslims. Instead, he portrays the group of five British Muslims yearning for jihad as the result of the extremities of a religion they haven't outpaced and a society that essentially views them as terrorists anyway. Far from crazed fundamentalists, these men appear stuck in millennial ennui, so unable to find their place in this hypermodern world that they return to their roots.

The only problem is that they are all magnificently stupid. Omar (Rix Ahmed), the de facto ringleader, is the sharpest of the bunch but still naïve and childish. When his son, who may not be as erudite as dad but has the same ignorance, asks his father about holy war, Omar likens it to the plot of The Lion King, and one wonders if that's not how he actually envisions the role of fundamentalist Islam against Western oppression. His closest friend, Taj (Kayvan Novak), is hapless and often confused, to the point that he even knows he makes a specific face when bewildered and continues to irrationally until he starts making that face and takes a step back. He believes heaven to be a place not unlike the theme park Alton Towers, specifically the "rubber-dinghy rapids" ride. Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), who attempts to train crows to carry tiny bombs into targets, to no avail.

Then, there's Barry (veteran actor Nigel Lindsay), a convert who, as the old saying goes, is more devout than any of the men raised Muslims. He speaks of bombing a mosque in a Watchmen-esque double-blind to rally the moderate Muslims to jihad, but in that plan is also a hint of self-righteousness against the mosques that are starting to soften as they enter the 21st century. He speaks of women "talking back" and mosques playing music with stringed instruments, horrifying changes that must, of course, be swiftly eradicated. "I'm the most al-Qaeda one here," the hysterically white, well-fed man whines when Omar and Taj head off to Pakistan to join a training camp, but the absurdity of the moment doesn't disguise the fact that's he not wrong. Barry reminded me of John Goodman's character in The Big Lebowski, save for the fact that he converted to Islam instead of Judaism. Both are portly, loud, inept yet unstoppably confident, and their zeal makes for as many moments of fearful discomfort as laughs.

Morris, whose programs The Day Today and Brass Eye precipitated The Daily Show's format under Jon Stewart (albeit much, much darker), is familiar with the media's role in society. In the advent of 24-hour news channels, much less the Internet, the media serves less to inform the public than it does to do anything in its power to grab ratings. As such, these men seem to view suicide bombing not only as a path to heaven but to fame. Hassan, a prankster who makes himself known as Barry speaks at a panel discussion on Islam in the UK, loves to rhyme everything, acting as if he might become the next 2pac on his path to salvation. Never mind that no one ever remembers those who carry out the bombings, only the ones who planned attacks in secrecy and safety; the constant recording of home-video tapes à la Osama's video messages only rams the idea home. These guys probably got their picked and chosen Qur'an quotes and their fame-hungry approach from the same place: YouTube.

After all, they all display a total lack of Islamic knowledge. In Pakistan, Taj faces east to pray, having faced east his whole life, and he even argues when one of the Pakistanis berates him because Mecca is the other way. Taj has clearly never had to truly face Mecca, only a vague direction that someone told him to face in England. Omar is enlightened enough to treat his wife with respect and equality, but his mockery of some friends' outdated ways falls flat when he returns to cherry-picking other fundamentalist quotes from his holy text. And when the Muslims say something terrible is always "God's plan, they sound as fatalistic and unbelieving as the Christians who utter it." When Taj somehow corrals some hostages in the film's climax, he notes that they are Muslim but asks Omar, "I still get points for taking them with me, right? Like Nectar card?"

No one escapes unscathed from Morris' withering eye. At the panel discussion where Hassan reveals himself, he sets off fake explosives after scaring everyone, only to yell police brutality when security escorts him out calmly. As the audience is mostly bourgeois college students, there are actually boos when cops gently take him outside. A liberal MP on the panel rightly separates extremists from the rest of the pack, but he wrongly takes such a soft, PC view on the matter that he neglects to issue the proper response to those who do commit terrorism: unforgiving punishment carried out in due process. Police come off as inept at the wannabe terrorists, chasing them around in the climax and firing at the wrong Muslims in an unspoken demonstration of the "they all look alike" racial view; Morris then undercuts this more scathing attack with a more riotous argument over whether a man in a marathon dressed as Chewbacca are with the other costumed terrorists, leading to an argument over whether Chewie is the "bear" being targeted.

Four Lions is funny. It's damned funny. I haven't laughed so hard since...oh dear, since Morris' Day Today cohort Armando Iannucci put out In the Loop last year. We learn that Barry tried to order silver nitrate on Amazon, and he constantly blames his dilapidated car's breakdowns on "Jewish parts" (mainly spark plugs, natch). Omar and Waj have fun discussing how they'd kill each other for Islam, describing in graphic detail how they would destroy each other but making it sound like the "Do you know how I know you're gay" scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. And just like those two idiots, Omar and Taj come off as so vapid that it's impressive they still know how to breathe.

Near the end, Four Lions loses its way a bit, with Morris looking for a way out that maintains his attack on the various targets of the film -- blinding liberal guilt, incompetent (and possibly racist) police force, religious fundamentalism -- without coming to any too-definite conclusions that might reduce everything to oversimplified points. But the problem is that Four Lions lacks any real climactic punch because of it. In the end, it becomes unexpectedly tragic, but if the last 15 minutes were tighter that peek of emotion at the end could have been much more poignant.

Nevertheless, Four Lions is as good a comedy as I've seen in some time, a well-researched, well-measured study of a prickly labyrinth of controversy and the endless double-back of religious and social hypocrisy that maintains a tight hold until the last 20 minutes and rallying again at the end. It may not measure up to the heights of either In the Loop or Morris' own television work, but it's more than a worthy debut feature for its creator and a hopeful sign of more blistering cinema to come from one of the UK's best talents. Being as used as I am to the typical American approach to social and ethnic comedy, I was deathly afraid that Four Lions would take the easy, race-baiting way out despite the best efforts of those involved. That'll teach me to underestimate the British.

House

From the opening title card, featuring the "O" in the film's title turning into a cartoon mouth with pointy teeth, House more or less guarantees you're going to have a good time. A broad mixture of slapstick humor, late-'60s existentialist/stoner road movie and cabin-in-the-woods supernatural horror, House serves as a meeting of matter and antimatter between Eastern and Western pop culture that explodes upon contact. The only thing more bewildering than the madness of what director Nobuhiko Obayashi puts on-screen is the obvious skill with which he works. The Room this is not; here is a midnight movie that throws together the best (and worst) that pop culture had to offer in 1977, and the glorious mess that follows may inspire hoots and hollers that make it perfect for showing past curfew on a Wednesday night in an art house, but it's also genuinely and unironically enjoyable.

Obayashi made the film in a dark spot of Japanese film history, after most of the postwar giants were dead or in decline. Even the Japanese New Wave had faded from the public consciousness. Toho, that great studio that had bankrolled Kurosawa's masterpieces before casting him out, must have felt it a sign of the times that someone working for them even financed Obayashi, and even the desperate studio felt a pang of revulsion when House proved a hit. But how couldn't it have been? It's just too weird, even for the most stereotypical opinion of Japanese pop culture and its oddities, to ignore. Hell, Janus Films only acquired the rights last year and it's already proved to be one of its more popular grabs, playing to packed art houses around the country.

House opens properly on a vision of Japanese schoolgirls, that most overplayed of fetishes, and Obayashi makes sure to emphasize the creepy adoration grown men fawn on these Lolitas even more by using soft, white lighting and lilting music whenever he shoots the main schoolgirl, a young lady named Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami). Later, when everything goes somewhere just south of Hell, he continues to use softer lighting for Gorgeous.

Gorgeous and her friends are excited for summer vacation, and Gorgeous in particular cannot wait to head off to her usual vacation spot with her loving father, who just got back from scoring films in Italy ("Leone said my music was better than Morricone's," he boasts). All is well, until the father introduces Ryoko, his new bride-to-be. Before the poor man can even get into how lonely he's felt all these years without her mom, Gorgeous flies into a petulant rage and flees, canceling her plans to go off with her father and stepmother. Instead, she writes to her dead mother's sister to announce a visit, and she even brings five of her friends.

Obayashi does the audience the favor of preparing them in advance for what's about to come by setting up wild mise-en-scène and bizarre editing techniques from the start. The use of painted skies for backgrounds recalls the inexplicable CGI backdrops in The Room or, to stop forcing comparisons to midnight movies and instead place House with contemporary Japanese cinema -- the oneiric kaleidoscope of the dream sequences in Kurosawa's 1980 Kagemusha. Obayashi also uses overlapping images, different film speeds, even rewind and replay to draw out some actions with deliberate artifice. It's overwhelming and more than a little annoying, but the style is so unique that it hooks you from the start, long before the film itself matches up to the madness of the framing.

After a surreal ride through the country by train and car that resembles Yellow Submarine on acid -- sorry, more acid -- the young women find themselves at "Auntie's" house. Auntie, seemingly confined to a wheelchair, welcomes them with open arms, so glad to have company at last. Yet objects in her home move slightly but forcibly, and she has a habit of speaking in faintly ominous lines. When one of the girls (a pudgy lady by the name of "Mac," an unfortunate shortening of "stomach") goes to retrieve the watermelon the young women got for Auntie as a gift, no one hears from her again until her decapitated head floats over a terrified schoolgirl and bites her on the bum. Oh, I'm sorry, you were expecting transitions?

At this moment, House flips the switch from lightly surreal teen comedy with thinly veiled undertones of ephebophilic lust into balls-to-the-wall horror-comedy. It amazes me to think that House never got shown in the States until last year, because otherwise I would have to retroactively accuse Sam Raimi of rampant plagiarism in his own frenetic take on the Evil Dead films. Obayashi uses sped-up footage and ingenuity to pull off some of the haunted house's effects, such as windows slamming and shuttering of their own accord and a suspended lamp falling down to eat one hapless girl. And the climactic bloodbath makes the spray of red stuff from the cellar in Evil Dead II look tame in comparison. It might even outdo the flooding elevators in The Shining. Before that, he turns the Lolita aspect of the film on its ear, presenting the stereotypically arousing sight of a young woman in a pillow fight, only for the poor thing to be smothered to death by possessed pillows.

Beneath all this insanity, however, are some deeper and more affecting thoughts. It is revealed that Auntie died some years ago, but that her ghost remains because she waits for her lover to return from World War II. In an early flashback, Auntie poses at her sister's wedding day, looking anxious in photos about one day being the one in the bridal gown. When the photographer snaps off a picture, Obayashi contrasts his bulb flash with the detonation of an atomic bomb. Obayashi, born in Hiroshima and sent to live with his grandparents when his father went to the battlefront, lost all his friends on Aug. 6, 1945, and he vents some of that pain and rage here. By eating unmarried girls, Auntie not only forces others to feel her pain, she targets the young, meaning those who grew up without the baggage of World War II and Hiroshima/Nagasaki. How easily they might forget without a reminder, and what better reminder than being themselves consumed for their giddy appropriation of Western ideas?

That is not to say that House is some anti-Western screed, mind you. Its soundtrack is blatantly Western, with a combination of pop and light funk playing in all the places not occupied by the gentle piano motif that announces Gorgeous. American pop culture has as much to do with the aesthetic as the Japanese variety. Ultimately, this more complex line of thought is just another part of House's puzzle, a gloriously incoherent off-masterpiece that never lets any one idea last long enough for anything to make sense. I've gotten into the midnight movie craze recently, attending my share of bad film showings -- I've seen The Room more than any of my 10 favorite films by this point -- but what we ignore when latching onto "so-bad-it's-good" is that there are out-there, cult films that are just plain good. It makes them so much easier to watch.

The Beach: Prepositions in a Relative Clause

Although many people didn't like this movie, I appreciated it. The plot is original and the circumstances the characters have to face can be very intriguing. The setting is beautiful Thailand, so we can always enjoy the landscape and photography. I took advantage of the dialogs in the scene to practice writing relative clauses with prepositions. It made the class much more interesting, since this grammar point is unattractive to most of the students. I hope you like it.


A.Rewrite the clauses below, using who, whom, which, where or that. Pay attention to the position of the preposition. Remember that when a relative pronoun is the object of a preposition, the preposition appears in the beginning of the clause in formal English. In informal English, the preposition usually appears in the end. Write both formal and informal versions of your answers.

1. Keaty only cared about cricket and Christianity.


The only thing ...


2. There were the Swedes, Christo, Sten and Karl. They only care about fishing and skiing.


The two things ...


3. The cook worries about rinsing his hands with soap and water because of the smell of fish.


One thing ...


4. Tourists are interested in visiting the beaches in Thailand.


One thing ...


5. Etienne is good at soccer.


One sport ...


6. He didn't like Bugs. He has disagreements with this person.


One person...


Answer Key:


1.
F - the only thing about which Keaty ...

I - The only thing which Keaty cared about was ...


2.
F - The two things about which the Swedes cared were ...

I - The two things which the Swedes cared about were ...

3.
F - The is one thing about which the cook worries is...

I - The one thing which the cook worries about is ...


4.
F - One thing in which tourists are interested is ...

I - One thing which tourists are interested in is ...


5.
F - One sport at which Etienne is good is ...

I _ One sport which Etienne is good at is ...


6.
F - One person with whom he has disagreements is ...

I - One person whom (who) he has disagreements with is ...

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