On Art and Empathy

About two hours into Edward Yang’s heartrending, slow-burning drama Yi Yi, a skinny, emotional teenage boy known only as Fatty boldly claims: "Since the dawn of film we have lived three times as long." The kid has a point. Movies allow people to explore faraway places and novel situations almost in the first person, to …

Pascal’s Wager: The Initial Setup

Think you’re rational? If are not a devout worshipper of the Catholic God, then a certain mathematician-physicist-writer-inventor-theologan (whew!) Blaise Pascal would respectfully disagree. In §233 of his Pensées, he lays out the decision to be or not to worship as a wager, of the sort one might engage in over a coin-flip or card-game. Normally …

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Dir. Wes Anderson, Cin. Robert Yeoman; in English; 109 minutes. Kitschy, cutesy, full of corners and muted pastels, daddy-issues, and whip-pans, this Wes Anderson picaresque contemplates forgiveness in a quirky and not altogether unsatisfying way. The distinctive style made empathizing with the characters hard at times: much of the drama felt so stilted as to …

V for Vendetta (2005)

Dir. James McTeigue, Cin. Adrian Biddle; in English; 132 minutes. Moore protested that the film supplanted his 90s-flavored anarchism-versus-fascism political caper with a sanitized debacle between "American liberalism" and "American neo-conservatism." More apposite, the film pits V as a generic left-liberal freedom-fighter-turned-radical battling a fascist state. This swap results in a feel-good action movie that …

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

Dir. Russo brothers, Cin. Trent Opaloch; in English; 149 minutes. The memory of too little of this generic genre-film lingers; rarely did I (though I still occasionally did!) find myself immersed enough to feel the stakes in any given event. It also attempts to make an empathetic villain out of a terroristic crusader out to …

Isle of Dogs (2018)

Dir. Wes Anderson, Cin. Tristan Oliver; in English and Japanese; 108 minutes. I thoroughly enjoyed this Japanified, children's-story variation on Wes Anderson's core style: wide-angled close-ups, whip pans, static shots of meticulously rendered typographics, a disaffected young male protagonist whose family-adjacent problems prompt a quest, and a pleasantly restricted color pallet. The film charmed me, especially with its …

Yi Yi (2000)

Dir. Edward Yang, Cin. Wei-han Yang in Taiwanese Mandarin, Japanese, and English; 173 minutes. Yi Yi shows, with brilliantly composed shots that linger on screen and in my the mind's eye, all of life in so many of its stages all at once. It overflows with truistic wisdom and emotional depth that is at once obvious …

Goodfellas (1990)

Dir. Martin Scorcese, Cin. Michael Ballhaus; in English; 145 minutes. Scorsese has said that Goodfellas is a two-and-a-half-hour trailer that opens with a gunshot, replete with fast, dramatic editing and voiceover. It's so much more, though: the movie chronicles the way that a person's need to belong, ambition, and existential dread can converge to justify …

Rear Window (1954)

Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Cin. Robert Burks; in English; 112 minutes. I came expecting suspense; I left in awe of the cinematography, both for its psychological delivery (a sense of antsy claustrophobia) and aesthetics (beautifully framed frames-within-frames). I can't help but think that I was supposed to view Jeffries's obsessive voyeurism badly, and yet the film …

Hero (2002)

Dir. Zhang Yimou; Cin. Christopher Doyle; In Mandarin; 99 minutes. Rashomon-style storytelling meets gorgeous visuals, though seems to give carte-blanche support to authoritarian control and monocultural reforms. Given that the film is Chinese, and given some of Zhang's other works, these thematic tendencies have a certain uncritical patriotic patina about them that made this film hard …