Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: movie review

  • Laboratory Conditions (2017) – short film

    Some believe in ghosts, a few see spirits, and many deny souls. How odd that this digital age is when it is, in fact, a kind of spectral age in which Alexa with no face exists without being seen!

    Laboratory Conditions is an engaging cinematic short story about a doctor who puts heart before reason. She also has a brilliant mind, but it’s not corrupted but cherished in her faith in the human spirit. It is an odd combination of sentiment and reason seen in someone like her, or so she may seem. Or is she so? Humans are dualistic and ambivalent anyway, so I can’t say she’s all good, but at least she is sensible and sympathetic.

    Her opposite is the head of medical searchers of the hospital by which she is employed, and she is the only Reason with a face despaired of humanity. She measures human worth by status and thinks those found on the low rungs of the social ladders are unworthy of decent treatment. A modern-day eugenist is on a par with a god deciding who will live or not. She is amoral and negates the existence of human souls, or is she deluded to believe so? Anyway, she doesn’t care about it, an iota. Or has she sold her soul to the devil?

    The film is about 17 minutes long and can be watched on YouTube. It also stars a surprisingly famous cast, such as Marissa Tomei and Minnie Driver, who are excellently cast to play the fitting roles. I have read the comments, an electric mix of kudos to the doctor’s humanity and criticism of her cruelty. But they are all missing the real evil wrapped in a human’s guise among the faces.

  • On Netflix’s “Making a Murderer”

    Brandan Dassey – “The place again. Where none. Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse” – Samuel Beckett

    Maybe I should not have watched it, but alas, I did, and with the afterimages of the faces and scenes still haunting the brain chambers, refusing to leave, I am writing about the Netflix documentary to cast them out to the wilderness of forgetfulness – but with a voice of the heart.

    The documentary revolves around the death of Teresa Halbach in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, who the county and the state justice believe was murdered by Steven Avery and Brandan Dassey. Since the stories about the accused are readily available online, I will not delve into whether they are innocent or guilty in this post. But I cannot help thinking this: Prejudice by social class prevails over the carriage of justice and the great cultural divide between rural and urban, working and middle classes, and state and federal governments in the States. America is arguably a country of no aristocrats, yet class distinctions are apparent, and stratification is broad. 

    In the case of Steven Avery and Brandan Dassey, although they were not poor, their parents were deemed fit to caricature characters of laborers equivalent to medieval serfs or pre-industrial European peasants speaking with the class jargon in heavy dialectical accents. Would the police and courts act differently toward the accused and their families were it not for their family backgrounds and social statuses? Hollywood celebrities and those with money and power can do anything and yet get away with their wrongdoings because they have the status and best lawyers who can make innocence of murderers, and vice versa. 

    That is why I’m not too fond of police profiling, which always seems to accuse those from unhappy childhoods tainted with physical and verbal abuse, especially and mostly from parents. It’s not only about sexual violence but, most of all, about parental verbal and physical abuses that bludgeon their children’s psychs. You can’t just typecast someone because they fit your profiling for a particular crime type. Where is the goddess of justice? Remember, even the goddess of fortune plays the Wheel of Fortune blindfolded to give everyone a fair chance of a lot because she can’t see who is rich, bright, or beautiful to look at. 

  • Weekely Movies Digest

    Ad Astra (2019) and The MArtian (2015) from L to R

    I know a thing about loneliness: willing and unwilling. It is lovely when it is mixed with white noise, like the sounds of raindrops or bells tolling afar. But too long quiet becoming dead silence unwanted is dreadful and miserable, as if I were forcibly cut off from the rest of humanity. That’s what happened to the spacemen on Neptune in Ad Astra (2019 film) or Mars in The Martian (2015 film) in their fated space odysseys.

    Fall from heaven and the man in search of life

    Ad Astra shows Major Roy McBride (played by Brad Pitt) is a cinematic version of Classical Greek drama. Roy is a hero because he has conquered his fear of not being true to his sensitive nature. It is also an epic tale of man’s voyage to the end of the world in the sense that he reaches his ideation of dream in truth. One of the most memorable scenes is when Roy falls from the ladders of the International Space Station’s spacecraft to the Earth, a spectacular rendering of the Fall of Man from high to low. Still, it also means an escape from darkness to light, which the Blue Marble symbolizes.

    Left Alone On Mars

    If Ad Astra is sentimental, the Martian is jovial in approaching a man in solitude. Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) is a resourceful botanist who makes the possible out of the impossible. His brilliant mind, blended with his adorable wit tipped in cheerful disposition, propels him to survive on Mars and never surrender to hopelessness. Watching Mark growing potatoes on Mars and telling jokes to the camera to cheer him up reminds me of Horace Walpole’s following quote: “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” Charlie Chaplin adapted thus: “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

    Miss Universe

    Man in space seems romanticly adventurous and mysteriously atmospheric. Still, it is a metaphor for being alone, the existential distress with no sense of direction in life with no one to speak to but the sound of silence that echoes loneliness aloud. Yet, those moments of darkness will pass if you let them go away with the will to live. Indeed, Matt Watney is brilliant in figuring out how to live in such an adverse environment, but he would perish soon without his will to live. So is Ron, who could have been lost in space had he given up to disappointment. They are Nietzschean superheroes who have whys to live and thus huddle through any hows. Also, nothing is more beautiful than Earth, sparkling like a gorgeous blue marble. Therefore, there is no point in war, conflict, or any unrest among ourselves because we are all family in Humankind in the universe.

  • All is Lost (2013) – Film essay

    Some movies should be noted, some memorized, but only a few should be applauded and taken by heart amid the luxurious streams of movies flowing from the screens. These movies chime the bell of your mind, enshrined in your dome of thought, and stay in your heart forever like beautiful memories that have become part of you, an inspirational lamp to give your life cheer and humor in times of need. In that light, All is Lost (2013), directed by J.C. Chandor, is such a movie that sheds light on your life when things are not going well for you, or you are lost in the middle of your voyage of life.

    The movie opens when a man (played by Robert Redford) wakes up, finding water in his quarter from a hall made by a collision with a stray container in the middle of the ocean. We don’t know the man’s name or where he comes from, except that he is somewhere in the Indian Ocean. We know that the man has the ambiance of a seasoned mariner whose demeanor is stoically calm and composed, rendering such an emergency look small and manageable. But it is the prelude to Nature’s test of Man’s Spirit, the beginning of his trial of hope when the damage to the yacht deteriorated due to storms to such a degree that he must abandon the yacht and sail on a lifeboat with a modicum of food and a navigational compass. But his will to survive and hope for rescue seems to be bludgeoned by the play of luck. He lights up rods to signal his location for rescue, but ships leave him alone on a vast ocean.

    Moreover, sharks steal his fish and cherish his flesh, swarming under his half-deflated lifeboat. These images immediately conjure up those of Santiago, a seasoned fisherman, and the formidable great shark from The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Or the bright-eyed mariner from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Their silence speaks volumes of the voice of their strong spirits that can be destroyed but never conquered. Their aspirations, ambitions, and arduousness may be bent, but their souls are always ready to be rekindled by a passion for triumph over the darkness and fear, aided by a ray of hope.

    All is lost is an illustrious image of life in which we are alone in each yacht, sailing on the uncharted seas until the tailwinds carry us to the East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Illustrious it may sound, but the movie is never flamboyant, and Robert Redford plays the role of the mariner as if he were playing himself in dignified silence, wonderfully emoted by his face and action alone without overtly elaborating gestures or soliloquy. It is a realist’s story and as real as our daily sailing in life’s voyage. He has lost all his possessions but not himself or his life. And even if hope seems to dissipate into the fathomless abyss, there’s still a chance of hope, and we’ve got to give ourselves a chance to hope because while we breathe, we hope. Dum spiro, spera.

  • ‘Buck and the Preacher’ (1971)

    Rousseau’s dictum of “Men are born free and are chains everywhere.” fittingly describes the condition of what it means to be free from slavery after the Civil War. Even so, freedom was recalcitrant to belong to them, and the hardships that came with the price of liberty from the carnage of the war still beset the newly freed along the trail of exodus to the new promised land in the west as articulated in Sidney Poitier’s classic western film “Buck and the Preacher” (1971).

    Buck (played by Sidney Poitier), a former Union sergeant turned scout, leads a wagon of freed blacks from Louisiana to the west, where they hope to start their new lives without a shadow of slavery. But alas, the shadow of slavery still haunts them. It is up for grabs in the form of renegade ex-soldiers, probably both of the Union and the Confederates, hired by the former enslavers to bring the migrants back to the chains of slavery. They attack the wagon, rape women, and kill the old and the young, constantly intimidating them to return to where they belong. But the pain of loss and death is even less painful than the thought of returning to the past, and the journey marches on. Buck protects the journey, and the self-proclaimed preacher conman artist (played by Harry Belafonte) a former slave, chimed in, despite his original ulterior motive of money-gaining. This unlikely dup proves to be something of Moses and Aaron, so to speak, in a way that they guide and protect the persecuted people from the sordid bondage to a new promised land even if it takes a nearly decimal lot.

    Then there are Indians across the wilderness as gatekeepers to the land of freedom. They are no outsiders to the persecution with their land taken away and their very beings threatened to decimate. The Indians live by the toll fees migrants have to pay when crossing their territories, not the least due to the paucity of livelihood resulting from the government’s confiscation of the land. When Buck implores the tribal chief to help them against the white attackers because they are all brothers, the chief retorts him by saying, “But black people also fought against us with the whites.” The mistrust is natural, as is the confrontation of the two peoples whose rights are put to contests orchestrated by the forfeiter of the rights. The class consciousness between the Indians and the blacks needs a manifestation of shared injustice and empathy, which both of them attest to an objective reality where they prove to be on the same side.

    This film is one of the great Sidney Poitier’s and finest as I have been watching as remembering this brilliant actor who has recently died. Always poised with a commending presence filled with natural confidence and will without being febrile and vociferous, Poitier exudes his irresistibly graceful charisma on screen in this memorable Western about blacks and Indians, who are often seen in the peripheral characters contributing to highlighting main white characters. But this is not a revisionist Western at all to polarize the thematic elements of the genre. Hardly so. Instead, “Buck and the Preacher” is an eye-opening Western film about the peoples who are likely to be cast as outsiders even if they also rightfully belong to, to quote Lincoln, “the family of freedom with a jewel of liberty” called Americans.

  • Hakuna Matata! ‘The Lion King’ (2019) – film review

    Whether animated or dubbed, good movies are conversant with more delicate tissues of conscience and spirit than others replete with vehement manifestos. I am talking about ‘The Lion King’ (2019 film),’ that is. It is a wholesome movie with simple adages of friendship, love, patience, and courage—only the more vividly alive and visually superb with the Cute factor. The film is also what Plato says in the Republic, a work of art that best imitates the objects and events of human life, a good entertainment.

    The a priori reasoning is sometimes apt, and so was the movie. I admit that had it not been for the cute Simba’s face in the movie’s advertisement on my newly subscribed Disney Plus channel, I would have passed it. Besides, living with nature in the form of thirteen-month-old tabby cat Toro at home perfected the inclination to watch it. What captured my eyes most was the realistic animals and landscape that rendered undoubtful verisimilitude of natural wildlife in Africa. It’s a hybrid of the 21st science and timeless imagination that created the world’s awe-inspiring symmetrical view of natural beauty in cinematography. Contrary to unwelcome and acerbic opinions about the movie for its lack of fluid emotions and spectacular action scenes, I find it genuine and honest. It illustrates the natural habitats and habits of the animals in the wild as authentically as possible, which may seem less than what today’s audience inured to gratuitous special effects and outpourings of dramatic gestures. However, nature is simple, and Leonardo da Vinci saw it as the ultimate sophistication of beauty.

    If Aesop’s Fables are the ancient Greek’s way of teaching morals or virtues to people of all ages, this film follows the tradition of teaching the good in the audience’s hearts. There are four types of love subtly construed as thematic subjects in the movie: (1) Eros – passions between lovers; (2) Philia – friendship; (3) Storge – love between parents and children; and (4) Agape – humanity. Furthermore, the Homerian code of honors that Simba and his father Mufasa possess and the eponymous virtue of arete consists of moral integrity and physical finesse. The goodness described above incarnates in the pride of the lions and alludes to human characteristics laid bare in the majestically untamed landscape of the Pristine Wild.

    ‘The Lion King’ (2019 film) is thought-provoking and entertaining. Plato, whose view on the best of art as the best imitation of the physical world, would approve of this film as a wholesome entertainment in the constellation of the great minds. But, notwithstanding his approval, the film is worth watching when you feel lonely and need some pick-me-up spirit with smiling cheer. After all, a good mood in the buoyancy of a cheerful soul with hope for an uncertain future is what makes our lives pleasant. Hakuna Matata!