Sunday Roundup – 12/5/10
On Friday, I played soccer with a bunch of friends for the first time in six years. The tendonitis in my left knee swelled up, my legs hurt from all the sprinting, and I kept tripping over myself because I wore running shoes instead of cleats. Today, I watched Black Swan even though I ended up being a row away from the screen, and on the side of the theater for the matter (which I will likely be writing a long article on in the near future).
In short: life is good!
In other news, some of you may remember I wrote a bit about Steve Li about a month ago on how he was on the verge of being deported from his family and friends. Well good news to everyone who saw and petitioned to get him help – he’s back in San Francisco!
While his stay is still temporary it’s definitely a step forward in helping him overcome this ordeal. I’m especially glad that his predicament became widespread enough to garner sufficient legislative support to prevent him from becoming another deportee :)
So, here are some recommended links of the week:
• Composers find new playgrounds in video games – a very interesting look into how a soundtrack is composed for a video game versus film and television. This NPR article also has a corresponding radio interview of Jim Dooley, composer of the game Epic Mickey and of Pushing Daisies (RIP).
• Somewhere (film), behind the scenes featurette – Sofia Coppola, director and writer of the exemplary Lost in Translation, directs a new film featuring Stephen Dorff and Elle Fanning (Dakota Fanning’s younger sister). The film Somewhere is about a hollywood celebrity (Dorff) who begins to recover his own sense of meaning when his pre-teenage daughter Chloe (Fanning) comes into his life. Coppola has stated that the relationship between Dorff and Fanning’s characters is very reminiscent of that between her and her father, Francis Coppola (The Godfather trilogy). I look forward to seeing this in the future! (December 22nd, to be exact :)
• Coyote Falls, Warner Bros short – it’s nice to see Warner Brothers getting back to their animation/cartoon roots, especially to old school Looney Tunes style. I do miss the traditional 2D animation but they’ve definitely got something going with this CG style!
Now, on to Q&A!
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Subject: On Inception (and other topics)
I think that brain in a vat or other solipsistic stories wherein “reality” ( using the double quotes of Nabokov) is changed or induced has the inherent problem that there’s no compelling or cogent reason for a person to escape a utopian world or a world where one’s hedonistic pleasures are attained especially when his two “realities” can be compared. If the person can only experience one reality then hime escaping his reality is reasonable even if that reality is already perfect. This problem is similar to the causality problem in time travel stories. I think Inception is a lot better in than the Matrix. One may argue that the dreamer must wake up to eat and do other mundane body functions but the dreamer only needs to go to deeper levels or the limbo (the leaf reality) to dilate time and escape the effects of time on his body in the root “reality”. Dark City on the other hand avoids the problem with the brain in a vat stories by showing a world that is film noirish/ that is a dark cave already. Also the dreamers in Dark City needs to deal with the residual memories that are not erased when they are loaded with new memories (I like to compare this to quick formatting a hard drive)
On Anna Karenina
I remember you posted about reading Anna Karenina. Since it is considered as the pinnacle of realist fiction and even of literature, I am now reading it (next is Ulysses which is said the pinnacle of Modernist Literature, I wonder what is the equivalent in postmodern literature Lolita, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight’s Children, Slaughterhouse-Five, A Wind-up Bird Chronicle? ). I initially planned to read Anna Karenina in ebook form since I want to get rid of my personal preference of reading in paper (which is getting expensive) but the only ebook available is a translation by Constance Garnett and I read in Wikipedia that Nabokov was critical of her translations. So I bought the Signet Centennial edition. Last night I was looking for Anna Karenina editions in Amazon and I saw that currently popular edition is the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky award-wiining translation. Which translation have you read?
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This should be written on a different thread but anyway to add to my last email I just want to also ask if you have read a Dostoevsky? I read that Nabokov was not a fan of his but his Brothers Karamazov is always placed highly in book lists and even alluded to by Vonnegut.
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And add to that. I recently realized that I can’t recall a Murakami story wherein a character is poor. In the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Turo has money problems but he is still living comfortably. That thought started to decrease my admiration for Murakami. I used to be a Coelho fan but I now skipped reading him since I now see his novels as like candied self-help books but I remember that he has wrote stories where the characters are poor.
– Allan Estrella
On Inception
One of the bigger issues too with whether or not one wants to escape a hedonistic/utopian world is what sort of reality they’re willing to believe in, and whether or not they’re willing to deal with something that says otherwise. This is the stark contrast between Dom and his deceased Mal: while they initially were content with living with one another in limbo, Dom was still stuck on the idea that they both needed to get back to reality; Mal, for whatever personal reasons, was not intent on returning, and began to merge her previous reality with her reality in limbo. We could say that an unwillingness to return back to reality is pure denial – but then again, who are we to judge someone who wishes to indulge in such denial for whatever reasons they may have?
This sort of issue happens a lot with addict gamers, where a lot of time the very experience of performing tasks and stunts in a virtual, “alternative” reality is a means to get away from some personal issue present in the real world. Of course, I won’t take issue with the fact that they want to continue experiencing something in a virtual environment, but then comes the issue of responsibility tied in with the immediate, practical reality at hand – how can one hope to continue existing in an alternate reality if they fail to account for the reality that they physically inhabit?
It really does boil down to a level of responsibility one has, and to what extent they’re willing to fulfill that if they can simultaneously occupy an alternative, “utopian” reality at the same time. We could interpret Inception as a look into escapism, and how the ability to construct your world becomes an addition to constantly escape and deny the root reality their body is physically tied to.
On Anna Karenina, Dostoevky, Murakami and Coelho
Shoot… I actually don’t know what edition of the book I have (I don’t have it with me right now) but I have a feeling it may be the traslation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volohkonsky (I’ll get back to you on that!) I also started Crime and Punishment awhile ago but work caught up with me so that’s put on a reading hiatus for now.
I think Murakami likes having well-off characters because it allows him to explore the psychology of a person amidst of a society now engulfed by extreme consumerism (it may also be because Japan has one of the lowest percentages of a low SES demographic, so a poor character in Japan may not be as relatable to many Japanese readers).
I’ve read Coelho’s The Alchemist after being recommended by an old teacher and enjoyed it. It’s been awhile so I can’t remember all the details but your description of his story taking a “self-help” style doesn’t seem inaccurate.
Subject: On HP and Adaptation
I have never read an HP book because of a stubborn reason but I have followed the film series. I remember a friend who is an HP fan commenting that the director of Y Tu Mama Tambien ruined The Prisoner of Azkaban.
– Allan Estrella
I’ve heard that sentiment too, mostly from people who felt that a literal adaptation of the book was the only way to keep in vein with the “true” spirit of Harry Potter. I don’t agree with this primarily because I find it pointless if you’re going to adapt everything word for word without your own interpretation or even bringing something new to the material: everyone has their own interpretation of the source material, and while I may not agree with artistic liberty to the extreme (David Yates has repeatedly streamlined the material to be Harry Potter fan exclusive) I think it’s a necessary part of the creative process when film looks to literature for presentational inspiration.
