August 2010 Archives

• Kartina Richardson in New York City

There exist in this sometimes sad world, moments that remind you that you are alive.

You know these moments well. Blood rushes from your toes to your cheeks. Or from your cheeks to your toes. Either way you are made aware of its movement.

A great energy is felt in your jaw and in the ends of each strand of hair. Your fingers curl. Your hands turn into fists or claws. Everything is hot. You shudder violently (the energy must be flung off or you will be eaten alive).

• Grace Wang in Toronto, whose four-part video interview with Chung is below her essay.

Lucky life isn't one long string of horrors
and there are moments of peace, and pleasure, as I lie in between the blows.

- Lucky Life by Gerald Stern

Ringing true to the poem the film is inspired by, Lee Isaac Chung's "Lucky Life" avoids the typical horrors of cookie-cutter narratives, and belies itself to moments of peace and pleasure that lull within its memory-shaped form.

• Michael Mirasol in Manila

There is a point in Homer's "The Odyssey" where Odysseus is washed ashore from a shipwreck.A young woman comes to his aid, rescuing him from his end. She was Nausicaa, lover of nature, and eventually serving as a mother of his rebirth. In Hayao Miyazaki's first masterpiece "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind" he heralds a protagonist of similar inspiration, whose own odyssey and heroism would take on Homeric proportions.

• Michael Mirasol in Manila

The 60s were a rough transition for America. Major shifts seemed to be occurring in every fabric of society from civil rights to sexual mores. The worsening course of the Vietnam war fueled distrust in political institutions. Women's rights highlighted a breaking from oppressive traditions. The old seemed to be fading away more radically than ever before.

Like the era it was made in, "Hud" was a key shift. As film critic Emmanuel Levy correctly puts it, it is "a transitional film between the naive films of the early 60s and the more cynical ones later in the decade." Though it plays as a compelling drama of small town life and family tribulation, through its lens of father-son conflict, it also captures the angst in the loss of authority, the gap between of two different generations, and an elegy for the good ole' days.

• Gerardo Valero from Mexico City

Behind every great fortune there is a crime. - Balzac

So states the prologue of Mario Puzo's novel, "The Godfather," a debatable statement that rings true nonetheless. It certainly feels like "the truth" after visiting this world. Does it mean that the Corleone family was completely amoral? Not at all, and that is what separates this material from just about every previous gangster film. This family provided justice and protection to those who couldn't get it elsewhere. They also gave them gambling, women and liquor--but heck, they did draw a line at drugs. If there is one thing that Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola evidently were clear about, it's that black or white characters aren't particularly exciting.

The phenomenal success of the Godfather Trilogy can basically be attributed to the decision on the part of Paramount executives to put their helm in the hands of a master filmmaker at his very peak who also happened to be one of the few raised in a family with the precise sensibilities required to take the material from Mario Puzo's best-selling novel and make it feel absolutely real.