A clever demonstration of why what appears to be a rusty nail could also be considered a stone.
Tag Archives: Philosophical
168. MR. NOBODY (2009)
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“Oh, my God, and when you got up in the morning, there was the sun in the same position you saw it the day before—beginning to rise from the graveyard back of the street, as though its nightly custodians were the fleshless dead—seen through the town’s invariable smoke haze, it was a ruddy biscuit, round and red, when it just might as well have been square or shaped like a worm—anything might have been anything else and had just as much meaning to it…”–Tennessee Williams, The Malediction
DIRECTED BY: Jaco Van Dormael
FEATURING: Jared Leto, Toby Regbo, Sarah Polley, Natasha Little, Rhys Ifans, Juno Temple, Diane Kruger, Linh Dan Pham
PLOT: In 2092, after all disease has been conquered through cellular regeneration technology, 119-year old Nemo Nobody is the last mortal man left in the world. He recounts his life story to a psychiatrist and a reporter, but his memories are wildly inconsistent and incompatible, and at times fantastic and impossible. In his confused recollections he is married to three different women, with multiple outcomes depending on choices that he makes in the course of his life; but which is his real story?
BACKGROUND:
- The genesis of this story came from Jaco Van Dormael’s 1982 short film “È pericoloso sporgersi,” about a boy who must make an “impossible” choice between living with his mother or with his father.
- According to Van Dormael the script took seven years to write, working about five and a half hours a day, every day.
- Van Dormael published the Mr. Nobodoy screenplay
(in French) in 2006, one year before production began and three years before the film was completed.
- Despite being made in 2009, the movie was not released in the U.S. until 2013, and then only in an attempt to capitalize on the Oscar buzz surrounding Jared Leto’s performance in Dallas Buyers Club.
- Leto temporarily retired from acting after Mr. Nobody, spending the next four years focusing on his band Thirty Seconds to Mars.
- Mr. Nobody’s first name, Nemo, means “nobody” in Latin.
- The movie is full of visual tricks and illusions, some of which are so subtle that they’re easy to miss. For example, watch for a scene where Nemo enters a bathroom then focuses on his own image in a mirror. When he turns around and the camera follows him back out of the room, we now see the perspective as if we had passed through the mirror; the reflection seamlessly swaps places with the real world.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Mr. Nobody‘s essential image is of branching, criss-crossing railroad tracks; if you want something with a little more surreal zip, however, check out the scenes of a fleet of helicopters delivering slices of ocean, slowly lowering them into place on the horizon.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Essentially an experimental narrative film disguised as a big-budget science fiction extravaganza, Mr. Nobody, an epic fantasia in which the protagonist lives a dozen different lives and a dozen different realities, was doomed to be a cult film from its inception. Even with a healthy dose of romantic sentimentality and whimsy a la Jean-Pierre Jeunet, it is far too rare and peculiar a dish for mainstream tastes. The opening is confusing, the moral ambiguous, and reality won’t sit still; it’s got unicorns, godlike children, helicopters delivering the ocean, a future world where everyone has their own genetic pig and psychiatrists are known by their facial tattoos, and a malformed sub-reality where everyone wears argyle sweaters. It’s unique, unforgettable, and utterly marvelous.
Original trailer for Mr Nobody
COMMENTS: One of the enigmatic Nemo Nobody’s many possible past identities is a TV science lecturer who explains such esoteric concepts as Continue reading 168. MR. NOBODY (2009)
CAPSULE: COMPUTER CHESS (2013)
DIRECTED BY: Andrew Bujalski
FEATURING: Patrick Reister, Robin Schwartz, Myles Paige, Gerald Peary
PLOT: In the early 1980’s, computer programmers gather in a hotel to compete in a computer chess tournament.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Computer Chess has a few bizarre moments and boasts oddly creative editing techniques that make it worth mentioning on this site. However, the weirdness is too mild to be seriously considered for the List.
COMMENTS: Witness the birth of the cyborg, the collision of man and machine. The 1980’s were the decade that saw the explosion of the tech industry. With the acceleration of hardware design and subsequent rapid development of more efficient calculations by programmers, the initial platform of humble computers created during this time period blossomed exponentially within a very short time frame. The movie Computer Chess, which takes place in this era, is as close an analysis as we are going to get about the rise of modern tech-culture and the consequences that we may face (or already face) because of it. Computer Chess presents its take with exuberant humor and smudges of dark trippiness. In other words, welcome to geek heaven!
The movie’s minimal plot concerns a group of early techies competing in a chess tournament for a cash prize, only the moves are determined by computer programs and not the players themselves. Besides the tournament action, scenes are filled with philosophical conversations about programming, the future of computers, and human nature. The artful editing (cracks and glitches), set design (Lynchian hallways full of cats), and the physical appearance of the participants are some of the movie’s strengths in the weird department, offering a balanced tone of subtle eeriness and quirky humor. The on-screen font signifying the different stages of the event gives the picture a retro-technological vibe, while the programmers wear thick-rimmed glasses and consume drinks like Scotch and red wine.
Peter (Patrick Reister), the central protagonist, acts as a sort of human calculator, staying up for days at a time trying to debug the flaws in his computer program, while his mentor, a seemingly stable family man who has brought his wife and kid along to the tournament, guides him through the fiasco while reminding him not to let his own personal ideas interfere with the process of fixing the problems. Peter remains completely focused, obsessing to the point where each consecutive scene makes him appear less human. The sole female participant in the tournament shows him considerably more attention than she does the others, and this seems to have no effect on him at all; his face is expressionless and contemplative at all times. Sharing the same space as the tournament competitors is a spiritual marriage counseling group led by a soulful and charismatic African man. The group represents the purely humanist side of the scenario, as the aging and uncomfortably erotic couples avoid scientific notions of progress, standing opposite the nerdy and repressed machine fetishists competing for mathematical dominance. One scene shows the couples fondling warm loaves of bread while they moan together in ecstasy: a starkly humanistic counterpoint to the exacting and calculated behavior of the chess competitors. A sense of unity is developed between these two paradigms through a metaphor likening the movements of people to the movements of pieces on a chess board, signifying the absurdity of the vast and chaotic mathematical outcomes within the two.
From an early point in the movie, there is a central message given about the definition of human consciousness and how it translates to the creation of artificial intelligence, and it’s precisely during the resulting conversational junctions between characters when vague but powerful feelings of unease begin to surface. This hyper-modern anxiety is fully embodied by Peter, who is competing in the tournament but having trouble getting his computer to work properly. The black and white picture and utterly bizarre snippets of alien-synthesizer can sometimes recall other computer/science films such as Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, but instead of giving us a manic character study about obsession we are given a series of quiet, somewhat dark suggestions that these calculating machines we depend on for all sorts of human needs are actually entities. Luckily, the heaviness of these concepts is delightfully balanced with oddball humor and ample substance abuse. The movie even dips into meta-fiction a few times, making references to the conceptual dynamics between digital and analog technologies (the guy in charge of filming the tournament tells the cameraman not to point it at the sun), and it is effective because we already know where the technology is headed—to a place where boundaries between people and machines appear to grow thinner by the second. Today, one doesn’t have to be geeky to have a deep relationship with a computer, or a camera for that matter.
A single scene is shown in color, in which the compellingly off-putting (albeit humorous) moocher/programmer Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige) searches his mother’s home for money that he owes some of the other programmers. The picture abruptly changes back to black and white, triggered by the vocals of Pat Henderson (Gerald Peary), who recites the phrase, “lost in a loop.” The theme of looping, previously mentioned in a stoned conversation between the team members in a hotel room, could be seen as a convergence of human cognition and mechanical calculation. Key philosophical questions are raised about the nature of the human brain and its relationship to computer technology—thinking machines. The relevance of these kinds of philosophical inquiries is powerful in an age where technology has come to define what a person is, whether it’s through the use of cell phone apps or social networking profiles.
The ending is pleasantly funny and wickedly surprising with an insane punchline that has miles of implications, both about the main character and about the future of humanity. It’s almost creepy in its quietly dry delivery, but is outrageous enough to remind the viewer not to take everything they just saw too seriously.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
FOR EVER MOZART (1996)
DIRECTED BY: Jean-Luc Godard
FEATURING: Vicky Messica, Madeleine Assas
PLOT: Although there are many digressions, the two main plotlines involve a group of actors traveling to Sarajevo to put on a play and a movie director trying to make a film called Fatal Bolero.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It feels like assigned homework for Professor Godard’s graduate-level “Advanced Semiotics in Cinema” course.
COMMENTS: A woman, the granddaughter of Albert Camus, wants to stage a play in war-torn Sarajevo (for reasons that are never made completely clear). Her uncle (I believe) is casting a movie called The Fatal Bolero, and she convinces him to fund their expedition. They set off for Sarajevo (in Camus’ car), but the director ditches them along the way. The three actors are captured by soldiers, who plan to commit war atrocities on them while running around slapstick-style dodging shells lobbed from unknown destinations. We then return to France to follow the director, who is struggling to make his movie on a tight budget. The crew discovers two bodies in a burnt-out building—either sleeping derelicts, or corpses—and puts a red dress on the female, who later awakens and plays the lead role. The ending is a cute self-referential bit where audiences lined up to see Bolero ask if there will be nudity; when they’re told the answer is no, they threaten to leave to go see an American film, and the desperate producers spontaneously change the movie. It takes some work for the viewer to figure out those basic outlines. That plot, per se, is not of much concern to Godard; what he is interested in, as his directorial stand-in directly proclaims, is the “a saturation of glorious signs bathing in the light of absent explanation.” By design, the characters aren’t well-defined or established (it’s not even clear what their names are, and there are a lot of “who’s that guy again?” moments). There are gaps in the action, non-sequiturs, and scenes that begin suddenly without orienting the viewer. Everyone in the movie talks like an off-duty philosophy professor waxing poetic after two glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon. “There is no death. There’s only me, who is going to die,” muses a young actress while staring out of a train window. Later, sitting around a campfire, her sister responds, “the sensation I have of existence is not yet a ‘me.'” Godard glancingly addresses a multitude of issues, from the existential to the cinematic/theoretical, and sometimes his almost absentminded reflections are brilliant: his thesis that cinema has a greater mystery and dignity than literature because film incorporates actors and props that have a separate existence outside the imagination of the author, uttered by the movie’s director while the camera focuses on the face of an actress huddling against a cold beach wind, is fascinating to consider. But the absence of humanity exhibited by the nearly anonymous characters makes the movie too cold to be involving, and the lack of rigor in its intellectual musings means many of its tossed-off insights come off as hot air. It’s vintage late Godard: brainy, but boring, too thoughtful to be totally dismissed, but too flighty to be embraced.
Spoken phonetically, the title For Ever Mozart sounds like “faut rêver Mozart” (“dream, Mozart”) in French.
The previous New Yorker DVD of For Ever Mozart contained no extra features; the 2014 Cohen Media Group release includes a commentary by film critic James Quandt and an interview with Godard.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
READER RECOMMENDATION: WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964)
Woman in the Dunes was promoted onto the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies of All Time. Read the Certified Weird entry.
Reader Recommendation by Fredrik Allenmark
DIRECTED BY: Hiroshi Teshigahara
FEATURING: Eiji Okada, Kyôko Kishida
PLOT: An entomologist ends up trapped together with a woman in a house at the bottom of a sand pit in the desert, where they are forced to spend their nights shoveling sand.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Freud introduced the concept of the uncanny (“Unheimlich” in German) for the particular, often uncomfortable, Continue reading READER RECOMMENDATION: WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964)