Cats, Vets, and Movie anecdotes

[shadowkat]

After going through countless forms and reading a lengthy manual on ethics, Wales called me in a fit of panic to help her put her cat, Oscar the Grouch, inside a cat box in order to lug him to the vet. Being Wales, she called me five minutes before she was supposed to be at her appointment. I grab a bite to eat for energy, then dash six blocks to her apartment, which is on the fourth floor, and somehow manage to push a very reluctant cat into a small carry box. At one point he hid from us in a hole in Wales' spring-board mattress. We coaxed him out with food. Then using a towel (he'd almost bitten my hand off the first round), I managed to shove him and the towel head first into the box. Together we lugged him there, watched the vet take his blood, which was interesting in of itself. Turns out Oscar has very tiny vienes. The vet had to poke him at least twice in each leg and switch to a butterfly needle to get any blood. When I asked if this was a problem, the nurse said no, cats are individuals like humans, they have different veines. Some big. Some tiny. Some roll. Some pop up. Some cats are well-behaved, some freak. You never know. Everyone is completely different. After they were done, we lugged him home and grabbed a bite to eat at a local middle eastern restaurant. A little worried about Wales.

Wales:"So do you think I should put Oscar to sleep?"

Me:"I think you should wait until you hear what the vet has to say first."

Wales:"But he's been peeing all over my apartment. And ruined a good blouse, you have no idea what that is like. I know I sound cruel..."

Me:"Uhm, if you kill Oscar because he's peeing all over your apartment, you'll never forgive yourself. I know you. Besides the vet wouldn't let you."

Wales:"True. But he's so expensive.."

Sigh. Hence the reason I don't own pets. Wales got him on a whim twelve years ago. She had a mice problem. Then when he seemed lonely? She got another cat to keep him company.
Wales tends to be on the spontaneous side.



"Flaws in art...or beauty in the imperfections"

After I watched the film 21 Grams, I had a conversation with Wales about how the film was flawed. You couldn't quite connect to the characters emotionally, because the story is told in such a jumbled manner, scenes are out-of-synch, that was its flaw. Yet, at the same time, I argued, its greatest strength and point. The idea of seeing a tale inside the heads of the characters or how the characters remember it - non-linear, a jumble of memories, imperfect, messy, not neat. The story haunts you because of how it is told, the jumble, the fact that certain scenes seem forced, because you as the viewer came to them from out of the blue, you have to use your head to fill in the gaps. And once you start doing it, start putting those pieces of the puzzel together, start filling in the gaps with your own imagination - whoa. The tale takes on a whole different meaning and shape.

This got me to thinking about how we want things to be perfect.
Stories with tight, neat plots, wrapped in bows. A friend of mine is struggling with story, he keeps picking at it, feels it isn't quite right, the characters are flat, and time moves on while he picks. Making certain everything makes sense. There are no flaws. I wanted to shake him and say "Sooner or later, you have to let the story go. Stop picking. Realize there can be beauty in the imperfection. Beauty in the flaws. Trust your reader."

When my grandmother learned how to bead jewlry from an ARAPHO (sp?) Woman, the woman told her to always leave a flaw in the bead-work. The Native Americans always did. It's bad luck not to. You can always tell Native American jewelry from copy-cats, by that one flaw. The flaw, she told my grandmother, enhances the design - and is always hidden. It's a game to find it.

While reading a recent series of posts in rahael's live journal, it struck me that the greatest strength of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the reason people obsess over it, may in fact be what some consider it's greatest flaw. BTVS was an interesting series - in that it left a lot to the viewers' imagination. It did not tell us everything. It did not wrap everything up in a nice neat bow. The plots were not tight. There were lots of gaps. Lots open to interpretation. Lots happened off-stage, requiring viewers to fill in the action. To use their own imaginations to come up with what happened next. Think about it. After Beneath You - Same Time Same Place, we never saw how Spike got out of the church or how Buffy reacted to him burning himself on the cross. This was left to our imaginations. Or the episode Get it Done where so much imagery is thrown at us, and not really explained. The audience is left to its own interpretation.
Maggot could be a reference to solider movies, or a reference to the slayer and the idea of death. The author doesn't say.
Angel The Series was the same way. We aren't told everything.
A good portion of the story is left to our imagination - hence the online battles between online viewers imaginations. Since we of course, do not all have the same imagination.

It's like the vet was explaining to me today about cats. Each cat is individual. It's vienes are different. Some have big veines. Some tiny. Some roll. And each responds to needles differently. Same with people. Everyone has different vienes. If we have different veines, doesn't it stand to reason, we think differently? How we imagine or view a piece of art will vary. One person will be offended by a piece of art, while another will marvel at its beauty. The best thing about movies or tv shows or works of art that leave things to the imagination is every single person who interacts with that art, will take something different from it, will share a different experience, making the work more interesting, more vital, more real and more lasting. The works of art that last are the ones that trigger imagination.

Of the films I saw this week, only two triggered my imagination, 21 Grams, with its' odd jumble of increasingly tragic scenes, and Random Harvest, a 1942 Mervyn LeRoy film about an amensiac who falls for a chorus girl. (Stars Ronald Coleman and Greer Garson and takes place in the 1920s after the First World War, saw it on TCM tonight). Both films were directed in such a way as to play with my imagination. They didn't tell me everything, yet I knew and felt the characters. I could hear them in my mind and I felt myself filling in the gaps between scenes naturally, piecing together their lives, until these characters became as real to me as family or friends. I'd allowed them to enter my mind, and once they did, they remain unforgettable. That's the trick. Random Harvest of the two films, is the less flawed, far tighter, straight-forward, yet it leaves things to the imagination, showing passage of time with simple camera devices - such as focusing on a changing photograph of a young woman, or focusing on a small cluster of fish, pulling back to show a lake, further to show a bicycle rider, and then close again to show a man under a tree. 21 Grams similarly uses devices to show time - birds flying, a pool covered with snow, leaves blowing. Both focus on character, up close and personal, telling us just enough to be interested, to wonder, giving a bit more to build interest, and just enough to fill in the gaps. BTVS did the same thing. We felt we knew everything there was to know about those characters, yet if you look closely, or even spend time watching a heated debate on a discussion board, you'll realize how much the writer left to the viewer's imagination. So that the viewer felt he/she owned the character just as much as the writer did, because the viewer added their own bits and pieces to the story, making it theirs and as a result more real and more valid to the viewer's own experience. Now that is magic. And it is hard to do, I think.

Laws of Attraction certainly didn't succeed in it. I left that film with a vague sense of who the two people were, actually I left thinking I'd just watched a film with Julianne Moore and Pierce Bronsan. The actors were more real than their characters. Paycheck was the same way, well directed, but, I had no real sense of who the people were nor did I leave feeling I knew them. Making the film, outside of some cool sci-fi ideas, largely forgettable. But Hero? Yes, it did resonate. I remember Broken Sword and Flying Snow, and Broken Sword's passionate assistant, in their dance about love, country, and patriotism. A dance that left a lot unsaid and a lot to the imagination. I also remember being curious about the Nameless One, who seemed to be almost a cipher for everyone elses' tale. That story haunts me. I remember. I have replayed scenes from it in my head and I saw it a week ago. Why? From a writing stand-point, I can't help but wonder what it was that LeRoy, Whedon, and the director/writer of 21 Grams and Hero did right that the writers of Paycheck and LAws of Attraction did wrong? How do you make a character resonate? How do you trigger someone else's imagination in such a way, that they ponder your tale and your characters long after you've left the arena?

Comments

Fiction is all discovery..*

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

That's a wonderful description of cat catching! The breaking of the funhouse mirrors into fragments and then reassembling that's meant to break down the preconceptions? I'm asking not saying.

Like dream sequences or the phrase "once upon a time" and I'm coming off a reading of _Into the Looking Glass Wood_ and Manguel's saying near the end in "The Age of Revenge" about the creation of the ability to see the different POVs and how he feels that "our task (as writers)is to keep proposing new points of view, so that the presences and absences from which we now suffer can be more clearly seen.."**

I haven't read anything on _Hero_. We saw it last weekend, and although again, I really wished I had the language, the way it was developed spoke beyond the gorgeous imagery to the creation of multiple points of view, and the tragedy of lovers ending also juxtaposition against the survival of of young one, and the sacrifice of the Nameless One (I think Manguel would like that although Naming and Remmebering the Lost Ones is something he wrote on) but the sacrifice of the hero was read by me as in pursuit of the epiphany and education of the one who had the power, the breaking of his vision to admit the possibility of a different way. My reading, I guess.

We throw a mirror upon the world, and the "reality" we see although most cannot argue that there are real things to be felt and interpreted through that lens we create can be shattered by a good artist, and I guess I define that at least in part as the magician who has not just the skills, the tricks, the craft, who can break through the viewers or readers mirror of reality to cause them to reconsider, to ask the the question.

"I don't think that I would be capable. If someone did anything to one of my children, I can very easily see myself turning into a murderer, literature or no literature, and I can't imagine an argument that would disssuade me. But there _was_ an an argument. And these women put it forward. And in the case of Gelman, it achieved something better than mere revenge. And that I believe is another possible reading."

*Cynthia Ozick _Art and Ardor_
**Alberto Manguel _Into the looking Glass Wood_ it got mixed reviews but there were ceratin pieces of it I liked very much, and I am also a little amused that by accident I seem to be reading all transplants this week (manguale from Argentina eventually to Canada who are talking, in essence, about perception. Amused but it just seems that case that occasionally everything I look at or pick up seems to speak to the same thing. I understand why people felt the need to create mythologies at times to explain such strangeness.

Re: Fiction is all discovery..*

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

That's a wonderful description of cat catching!

Ah. Thank you. Took at least two renderings to get it down to three or four sentences.

We throw a mirror upon the world, and the "reality" we see although most cannot argue that there are real things to be felt and interpreted through that lens we create can be shattered by a good artist, and I guess I define that at least in part as the magician who has not just the skills, the tricks, the craft, who can break through the viewers or readers mirror of reality to cause them to reconsider, to ask the the question.

"I don't think that I would be capable. If someone did anything to one of my children, I can very easily see myself turning into a murderer, literature or no literature, and I can't imagine an argument that would disssuade me. But there _was_ an an argument. And these women put it forward. And in the case of Gelman, it achieved something better than mere revenge. And that I believe is another possible reading."

Ah. Have you seen the film 21 Grams?
You should rent it sometime, it is very much like The breaking of the funhouse mirrors into fragments and then reassembling that's meant to break down the preconceptions?

The story is a revenge story on the surface, yet so much more. If you hear the plot synopsis, you think, much as I did, I've seen this before or heard this tale before. But how they render it breaks down your perceptions of it. No longer do you see it from one or two perspectives, but actually three or four.

It is about a woman losing her family in a car accident and asking the man who got her husband's heart to kill the driver who did it.
That's the surface tale. But the director/writer throughs it inside a funhouse mirror and breaks it.

I haven't read anything on _Hero_.

I've read a couple of reviews. And seen reactions to it online. Decided it depends on the viewer or the viewer's lense. If you are a *visual* person and love metaphor, you may have gotten more out of the movie than someone who is more into dialogue or literal meanings.
Not sure. I know the person I saw it with, did *not* like it at all. In fact as time wears on, he likes it less and less. While I, in contrast, did like it, and find as time wears on, enjoy it more and more. At first I wished I had the language...now, I'm not so certain.
So much of the movie is told with visuals, not words. Words are conveyed through pictures in the film. And movement. Watching Hero to me, felt like watching a series of colorful dances,
each conveying new perspectives and meanings.

but the sacrifice of the hero was read by me as in pursuit of the epiphany and education of the one who had the power, the breaking of his vision to admit the possibility of a different way

Yes, that was my reading of it as well. The one who had the power may not do anything about that "new way" off the bat, but perhaps in time...once he processes it, the hero's sacrifice will have had a purpose. And perhaps the reason the hero is left nameless, with the barest sketch of a background, is so symbolically he can represent all those the one with power has hurt in his quest to unite the country, the terrible price, the terrible pain, and the need for retribution - the wound, such violence leaves behind, which may be nameless to the one with power until he recognizes it?

Re: Fiction is all discovery..*

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

And on this piece also. It crossed my mind yesterday that my perceptions may be coloured too much by the manguel book. Frex I am equating this story with the Revenge sessay and also the nameless with an everyman type of character and more discretely the many nameless victims in power struggles, and the different responses to that. Would you have any interest in that chapter? Let me now and I'll send it. But in particualr mangual speaks to the absence of these people and the effect that had after. And I was remnided of the scene at the end of the shape defined by the arrows.

The other thing I am musing this morning is the role of the female characters in the movie and wondering if that's indicative of the director's work, and what else he has done. I should Google later.

What are the negative reactions?

Re: Fiction is all discovery..*

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

My apologies on the typos. My typing is always very bad early in the morning.

Re: Fiction is all discovery..*

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Sorry haven't gotten back with you. Been tied up all week - mother arrived on Sunday and left early Thursday morning, plus new job started. (It was a good kind of tied up, I enjoyed spending time with Mom after work each day, and am enjoying work so far - more or less, hoping this continues.)

It crossed my mind yesterday that my perceptions may be coloured too much by the manguel book. Frex I am equating this story with the Revenge sessay and also the nameless with an everyman type of character and more discretely the many nameless victims in power struggles, and the different responses to that.

Ah. But, it occurs to me that all our perceptions colored by what we are reading or thinking or personally going through at the moment.I can't help but wonder how I would have viewed BTVS S6 if I hadn't had my world turned upside down at the same time. Or for that matter how I'd view Hero if I hadn't the experiences I've had? I'm not sure we can ever see anything with virgin eyes - at least not after the age of 1.

Would you have any interest in that chapter? Let me now and I'll send it. But in particualr mangual speaks to the absence of these people and the effect that had after. And I was remnided of the scene at the end of the shape defined by the arrows.

Yes, I'd like to see it. That scene at the end continues to haunt me - use of empty or negative space. Have you ever done that drawing exercise where you draw everything but the object - defining the negative space it occupies? Whedon used the concept in The Body, with Dawn's drawing class, and here we see it again with the arrows - in both cases representing death or loss.

The other thing I am musing this morning is the role of the female characters in the movie and wondering if that's indicative of the director's work, and what else he has done. I should Google later

Having seen Raise The Red Lantern - it is in a way. Women tend to be quietly forceful in his work, yet do not have the power to quite effect change. The best they can do, is make a dent. Yet, in a way...that's what the nameless one does make a dent. Odd.

What are the negative reactions?

I think cjlasky mentions his below. Haven't gotten a chance to read it yet. I know he mentioned it in an earlier review. As did oceyeter. Hate to put words into their mouths. ;-)

I know several offline friends didn't like Crouching Tiger either, possibly for the same reasons people may not like this film - and that is due to the style of the film - or wiux pian (sp?) martial art dance which is popular in China. Some people just don't like that.
I happen to adore it, find it absolutely breathtaking and it moves me every time I see it. While most of the violent scenes in Kill Bill Vol 1? Made me cringe or just become bored. Sort of a case of one person preferring an orange to a grapefruit and vice versa, I guess.

Re: Fiction is all discovery..*

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I haven't read anything on _Hero_.

Here's a link to an essay someone over at tea at the ford found:

http://www.chinesecinemas.org/hero.html

(It was published in cinema scope magazine in 2003, the movie first aired in China in 2001, I believe.)

Here's a blurb:

"Hero is a film about storytelling, or, to put it more abstractly, a film that puts narrativity itself into question. The tales its characters tell (recounted alternately by Nameless, and by the King of Qin) are mutually contradictory. Nameless arrives for an audience with the King and tells him a straightforward tale of chivalry: how he defeats the King’s enemies one by one. But the King discovers this to be a false tale, and offers an alternative story, in which Nameless and his adversaries become co-plotters against him. Once the cycle of story/counter-story has started, it’s difficult to stop. Nameless offers a new revision, more complex than either of the preceding two. One effect (salutary to me, but extremely frustrating to some of the audience) of this stream of mutually contradictory stories is to prevent the viewer from investing in the delights and comforts of narrative: a suspension of disbelief; a temporary surrender to the standard rhythms of tension, crisis, and release; a comforting though illusory satisfaction in being able to draw a line between what’s “real” and what’s “imagined” in the diegesis. "

I remember trying to convey to the friend I saw the film with, that you cannot compare Hero to the traditional martial arts film or the romantic splendor of Crouching Tiger. It's about something else. I struggled to find the right words to explain it - but I think this review does a wonderful job.

Here is what the reviewer says that I could not quite put into words myself:

Spectacle, rather than storytelling, teaches Hero’s philosophy. It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the filmmaker’s aesthetic achievement: the set-pieces crafted by Zhang Yimou, Christopher Doyle, and Ching Siu-tung are as ecstatically kinetic and as rapturously beautiful as any I’ve seen in a wuxia pian. The fight among the leaves; Nameless and Broken Sword’s pure crystalline standoff, suspended above a lake; Nameless and Flying Snow versus a blizzard of Qin arrows; Broken Sword and Flying Snow’s astonishingly convincing battle against 10,000 Qin soldiers guarding the King’s palace: all of these have the power and the beauty to thrill all but the most jaded filmgoer. But they also serve a specific function. They progress, more or less systematically, from closely pictured combat through abstracted jousting to ethereal non-combat, from the ground to the air, from physical conflict to spiritual opposition. As more and more of the material content of the fights/flights is pared away, absence, silence, space, and peace begin to predominate. The film’s most insistent visual motif is the empty circle; a zone of complete emptiness that a hero creates around him or herself, a zone whose authority leaves the hero, invulnerable, isolated, and, at least temporarily at peace.

The more I contemplate the film, the more I adore it. But I admit it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Re: Fiction is all discovery..*

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I ahven't had a chance to read it yet; but, I will try to do that and stop back later?

HERO: I think it's time "the friend" spoke up here.

[cjlasky.livejournal.com]

'kat:

C'mon. Most people on your LJ know it's me, anyway.

I have nothing against "Hero" as spectacle qua spectacle. I think the director, Zhang Zimou, did a remarkable job framing each sequence (the emperor's palace, the calligraphy school, the boarding house, the desert sequences) in its own color scheme and visual style. I've already said elsewhere that the battle between Moon and Snow amongst the yellow leaves--pardon the fanboyishness--kicked major ass.

But is spectacle enough in film? Can a movie be rapturously beautiful yet morally and emotionally empty at its center? Of course it can. We know that from Riefenstahl and D.W. Griffith and many other film-makers whose skill in presenting visual images was unassailable, but whose purpose for presenting these images was morally questionable at best.

Am I saying that Hero is the Chinese version of Birth of a Nation or the Triumph of the Will? No, I wouldn't go that far, in either direction. Number one, I don't think it stacked up in terms of sheer visual power to either of those other two movies. Number two, I think there was just a shade more moral ambiguity (thanks to the characters of Falling Snow and Broken Sword) in Hero than in those "classic" fascist spectacles.

But I did feel the pull of those old fascist spectacles nonetheless. I've mentioned in other LJ entries how disturbed I was at the bloodless, aesteticized violence. The entire film was designed as a "birth of a nation" myth, and the sole purpose of all the action of the movie was to provide moral justification for the would-be emperor to ravage the armies (and populations) of the other provinces and unite what would become China under his iron fist.

I want to make a distinction here, and it's an important distinction. If the movie was designed so that the tales of Jet Li's nameless warrior and the conflicting views of Broken Sword and Falling Snow were part of the emperor's interior conflict--i.e., the three warriors were symbols of the emperor's internal debate about the worthiness of his own cause--I don't think I would have had a problem with the movie. But the emperor never struck me as that vivid a character. He seemed as much a part of the rigid thematic structure as all the other characters. I guess what I'm saying is that the filmmaker wasn't interested in having the characters justify their actions to themselves. He wanted to justify the actions of the emperor TO THE AUDIENCE--and once I realized that, my antennae snapped up and I no longer trusted the movie.

Re: HERO: I think it's time "the friend" spoke up here.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I think all I can say here is what I said to angela above, we see through our own lense.
I didn't see that in the film. Nor did I see the film as similar to DW Grittif. What I saw was more similar to the review I linked above.

To each their own.

Didn't name names more out of politeness than anything else. ;-)