The Blog of Jason “Jayce” Olshefsky

I headed out to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) for a last-minute addition: The Visitor, a film by Thomas McCarthy who was there to discuss it and answer questions. In short, it’s about a rather emotionally-closed college professor who visits his apartment in Manhattan only to find that there are two illegal immigrants living there. As McCarthy pointed out, it’s not really an illegal immigration “issue film”; I found it to be superbly warm with a bittersweet ending full of hope and possibility.

Overall, it reminded me of a time when I was at Burning Man in 2006 which I wrote about before. I was riding far past the edge of the main city one night, headed toward a light way off in the distance when I suddenly came upon the trash fence (and outer boundary) of the festival. On the one hand, I knew the entire event was bounded, but I had a much deeper and different understanding when I actually touched the gilded cage around me.

Likewise with The Visitor, it points out the same thing about America — in some ways a magical land of freedom, but in others, just a gilded cage no different from anywhere else.

Today I went to The Rochester Optical Factory Outlet (400 Jefferson Rd., in Hen-Jeff Plaza) and picked up my new glasses (with the lowest price in town — and honestly priced to boot). Last month I went to The Ocu Sight Eye Care Center (1580 Elmwood Ave.) for an eye appointment: partly for issues with near-sightedness, and partly to get those eye disease checks that I don’t get without owning glasses. Everyone who has glasses sneers when I say I have better than 20/20 vision, but damn it: I can’t read street signs at night! Accordingly , my prescription was pretty weak, but now I can see far-away things. It may not be perfect (I’m still working on figuring out if it’s honestly wrong or if it’s just confined by the granularity of a weak prescription) but hundreds of yards better than what it was.

So one of the first things I got to do was to go with Ali to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) where we saw JCVD — Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Tree’s Lounge … er … sort-of. Ali didn’t intend on seeing it, but I suggested we walk from her house to double-up a little physical activity, but she didn’t feel at all like walking back home alone afterward so begrudgingly stayed (and actually thought the film was okay).

I thought the film was very good overall. I remember from film class in college something about film genres taking a turn at some point — when the formula used is somehow tweaked so the film is still recognizable by its pedigree, but is significantly unique as well. In this case, it’s the action genre: where the bad guys establish a sophisticated upper-hand, the good guys are embarrassingly disorganized save for the few heroes, and good wins in the end. Plus there’s a showcase for special effects and a reinforced apathy for the loss of lives of the unknown.

In JCVD, Van Damme plays himself — an action star tired of constantly being personally associated with the attributes of the characters he plays and the films they are in, and pretty much the only guy who could possibly fit the role. He returns to his hometown of Brussels and quickly becomes the central figure in a heist gone awry. From there it’s action-movie anarchy: mobs of people surround the bank to cheer on the most famous Belgian outside Belgium, Van Damme’s role in the heist is not as it first appears, and, of course, he’s not some ass-kicking, bulletproof hero.

In a jarring foil to the climax, Van Damme steps out of his film-self to deliver a monologue directly to the audience. He ends up coming across closer to Jesus Christ than to his own JC moniker (Jean-Claude, that is — far more closely associated with bad acting and terrible movies). Practically a classic Catholic confession, he reveals that he’s conflicted: for after having traveled the world and experienced all the different kinds of people he’s met, he cannot see how each and every one of them shouldn’t be adored for who they are. Yet his films — the entire action genre — broadly categorizes everyone in the world to one-of-two, black-or-white categories.

So in its own way, JCVD is incredibly powerful. For it has forever tainted any future viewing of an action movie for me. It’s really where my own philosophy led anyway, but JCVD accelerated my progression to a fully new mind-space.

Ali and I went to The Little (240 East Ave.) to catch a couple movies. She had read the book and wanted to see the film The Reader, and I’ve been meaning to catch Vals Im Bashir (Waltz With Bashir). They both started about the same time — although the shorter Waltz started 10 minutes earlier, so I got out some 45 minutes earlier. I headed to Spot Coffee (200 East Ave.) but couldn’t figure out how to get on the Internets with their wireless Internet [assuming "Spot on WIFI" was the SSID of their network.]

Anyway, Waltz With Bashir is a rather interesting movie. It’s an animated film about a man who had fought in Israel’s war with Lebanon 20 years ago. He can’t remember anything of his involvement in the war until one of the people he fought with reveals a recurring dream. The man then seeks others who fought in the war by his side to help him get his memories back — particularly about a massacre he has the most trouble remembering.

The scenes of war were particularly surreal. Not because of the unreal aspects of the animation, though, but from the insanity inherent in war itself: particularly those aspects that bridge peaceful life with war life. The soldiers are expected to behave a certain way, but their humanity draws their attention to commonplace things: sounds and silence for example, or the benign apathy of plants to politics, borders, and war.

I look at this whole war thing like I must be crazy. I mean, I can’t see how it makes anything any better. It’s a deliberate act of malice that changes the course of people’s lives, justified in future retrospect that it will have been seen as unavoidable and written in history as a good thing by the victors.

So I see these films that portray war as this absurd exercise and it seems true through the rich approximation of emotions. But then I’ll talk with some guy returning from Iraq and they all say it was such a rewarding experience. On the one hand I feel like my fellow fairly-trade-coffee-chewing aristocracy, proud of our nuanced and clearly superior understanding of war. Yet it’s a much more filtered view than those who are actually at war.

Unassailable logic dictates that to really get an answer, I’d need to go to war myself. But aside from gaining more knowledge about the world, I otherwise find the idea, well, bad.

I think I might just leave this one unknown.

Since Ali had other plans, Christina and I decided to head to City Hall (30 Church St.) for the city’s Standing Tall…Standing Strong Black History Month celebration.  Well, actually we went because we knew there would be a food tasting featuring homemade dishes from City employees.  As in past years, there’s a huge line … and since we got there late, all the [presumably heavenly] macaroni and cheese was gone.  We were both very impressed by the Firehouse Meatballs by Carlos Manns and the Lasagna with Turkey Meat by Jeffrey Medford.  Everything was great, though.  Plus you can’t beat the price.

Unfortunately we had to leave early to get to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see The Thing by 7. We got there a little bit late, but there was a huge line. Christina suggested we just watch it off her housemate’s Netflix box so we did that instead.

She maintains the film as one of her favorites, but I was not particularly impressed. I guess the whole futile, frenetic activity against an unstoppable force was just too much. I mean, what was the point of watching these people run around killing one another and stuff when their plight was beyond hope? Perhaps as a parable: how can you fight an enemy that can look and act exactly like you do? In that sense, I think the original version, The Thing from Another World, made more sense in the context of McCarthyism when your otherwise unsuspecting neighbor could be your sworn enemy.

So Ali and I went with Christina in her recently-formed couplehood with Dominic to see Trouble the Water at the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) As it happened, my Palm Pilot [Palm Pilot Vx from 2001, thanks for asking] decided to wipe its memory earlier that weekend, presumably from my pocket trying to hack into its password protection. While it was in memory therapy on its cradle at my house, I didn’t have access to it or its wealth of information that includes the events from JayceLand. So we went at 7 p.m. which is when I though the movie was to be shown.

Well, as Jim Healy began introducing the film, it became slowly clear that this was not that movie. “What does he mean, ‘characters’?” “I had no idea this was filmed in India.” “I wonder if he means ‘pool’ as some kind of metaphor.” Indeed, we had arrived in time to see The Pool instead.

As it turned out, the movie is very very good. It’s about a couple kids from Goa, India who eek out a living in odd jobs on the street. The elder Venkatesh is fascinated by an unused swimming pool at what appears to be the home of someone unimaginably wealthy. He weasels his way in to helping the owner with his garden. Then he befriends the man’s daughter and the three youngsters spend the pre-monsoon afternoons together. Ever so gradually — with the editorial precision of a surgeon — the film reveals why the pool stays unused.

In retrospect I found it to be a brilliantly paced film. Ali was enchanted by it — much to our surprise, as it could very well have been the kind of Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Celine and Julie Go Boating) experience culminating in a “when are they going to get on the fucking boat?” somewhere around the 3-hour mark. But it was very warmly received … I guess I’ll have to get Ali to write up a summary one way or another.

As Ali wasn’t interested in the plot, I went by myself to The Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see Los cronocrímenes (Timecrimes). By this time, I was starting to feel like I was in one of Dayna Papaleo’s bad weeks: a continuous stream of movies, one after another, that just become a blur.

Anyway, as time-travel stories go, this one was rather unusual in that the ramifications of going back in time are seemingly completely resolved, if at great expense. The protagonist, Hector, starts out the film in an (apparently) satisfactory relationship with his wife at (apparently) a house they just moved into. Hector is perusing the landscape with his binoculars when his wife leaves to run a few errands. In a nearby clearing, he spies a woman undressing so (naturally?) he goes to investigate. Once he finds the girl, he’s attacked by a man with a fully bandaged head. He escapes to the shelter of a facility of some kind, and finds the sole weekend occupant who inexplicably ushers him into a chamber that sends him back an hour-or-so into the past.

He again meets the technician — who’s naturally surprised to meet him for the first time — and the technician explains that he must not do anything until he gets back to the point where he left from earlier … er … later. Hector, however, has other plans: he wants to stop himself from getting attacked. In the process, though, he ends up with quite a head injury and realizes he’s the guy who attacked himself.

Well, things go from bad to worse, to worse again. Just one Hector was clumsy enough, but having three of them exist in the same hour just leads to disaster. He thankfully figures out how to get all the events to play out without need for further trips back in time.

So what’s the point? I’m not sure. Maybe a tale about not being malicious. Maybe it’s just a clever story. And maybe it’s as simple as this: if you’ve got a wife and see a sexy young woman undressing, just stay away.

In our second attempt, Ali and I succeeded in catching The Wrestler at The Little (240 East Ave.) The basic story is that of a wrestler named Randy “The Ram” Robinson 20 years after his prime, and showing it.

Anyone who has a single calling that requires the physical attributes of youth faces a crisis when those attributes fade, be it an athlete or a roofer. The film’s documentary style lingers on the desperate and sobering moments in Randy’s life and I’m having trouble articulating my reaction to that. I guess at the core is pity and hopelessness: that I could see no way to help the character out of his present downward spiral, and I had no idea what would work for him.

Obviously, if he had planned ahead 20 years ago, perhaps saving some money or building other skills, he wouldn’t be in this position. But once the train of your life gets momentum on tracks that don’t lead anywhere good, what do you do? I guess making money where you can, hanging out with a stripper at the end of her career, and waiting to die might just be the only thing to do.

Overall we both enjoyed the film quite a bit.  It’s a parable to the dangers of nostalgia — of lingering on the past just a little too long.  As such, I kind of left with a melancholic heart … with the tainted promise of past joy.

Ali and I went to The Little (240 East Ave.) to see The Wrestler. Unfortunately, I had collected show-times from several weeks prior and didn’t realize the Little changed them every week — we were a bit early as it was, and we’d have to wait about an hour. Instead, we opted to see Slumdog Millionaire.

The movie was quite good. In case you’ve been on a media vacation for the last 6 months, it’s about a young man named Jamal who grew up in the slums of Mumbai, India. He has attained the position of serving tea at (if I remember correctly) a call center for-hire and gets his way onto the show Kaun Banega Crorepati?, the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.

The host of the show openly mocks his past — being a tea-server and growing up in the slums — and he is surprised that Jamal begins answering questions right. Every question, in fact. He’s so surprised that he has Jamal taken to the police and interrogated. And here is where most of the film takes place: through flashback to events in his life to explain how he learned the answers.

In a way, it calls to the triviality of knowing trivia — that knowing the answers to arbitrary fact-based questions is not correlated with one’s class, job, or past. Also, if someone has a wide breadth of experiences in their life, they will necessarily fare pretty well on such a contest, while those who typically excel have deliberately dedicated effort to the act of learning facts.

As the movie goes, the first act is full of the horrors of the slums, the second shows the ingenuity of Jamal, his brother, and another girl as they struggle to survive: all having lost their parents. The third act is sweet confection for the audience as it turns into a John Hughes film (his good ones in the 1980’s, at least), complete with a musical montage (and with the added bonus of a Bollywood dance number over the credits).

Overall, I thought it was a good movie: enough substance to make it thought-provoking, all the while with an eye to entertainment.

Ali and I went to The Little (240 East Ave.) to see Doubt. It’s a fascinating film which, although obviously different from the play (which neither of us saw), is extremely strong. I suppose it could only help that the film was written and directed by the original playwright, John Patrick Shanley. The story primarily follows Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the minister of St. Nicholas in the Bronx in 1964, and Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), the principal of the affiliated school. Flynn takes an interest in one of the students: Donald Muller — a black boy in an otherwise all-white school. Sister Aloysius fully believes Flynn molested Donald and intends to ensure he [Flynn — duh] is punished.

The audience is left to their own beliefs to ascertain whether Flynn molested Donald. I found this fascinating, as I maintained his innocence throughout the film but realized afterward that I could experience the film again completely differently by believing he was guilty.

Sister Aloysius is someone who would act to destroy based on their beliefs. I think it’s a particular kind of logic that permits this: believing that one’s belief alone is more true than having no factual basis — perhaps a manifestation of the nature of faith (although in the case of religious faith, it’s more about filling a gap in that which is knowable). The trouble is, there is an element of circular justification: if she succeeds in destroying Flynn’s reputation, she feels justified, but by putting her own reputation on the line in making such an accusation, she has no choice but to fight to destroy Flynn’s reputation no matter whether he was guilty or not.

Sister James, meanwhile, acts as a foil to Sister Aloysius by believing in the kindness of others. Sister Aloysius’ long-time experience as disciplinarian provides her only with evidence of sin and wrongdoing. So is it Sister James’ naiveté or Sister Aloysius’ limited perspective that is at fault?

For myself, I find that when factual evidence is not available, belief in kindness is the more fruitful path. As is the case with Sister Aloysius, believing more in evil makes you a destructive force in the world whereas believing more in good opens up the possibility of being constructive.

But equally important is that it makes you happier to believe that people are generally kind.

Ali and I went to the Dryden Theater at George Eastman House (900 East Ave.) to see The Exiles. The description given in the Eastman House calendar was tantalizing, as the film has almost never been screened for 50 years, and it documents Native Americans living in Los Angeles in the 1960’s. Sprinkle in phrases like, “seamlessly mixes documentary and narrative techniques” and “deeply emotional and personal achievement”, and I’m sold.

Our reaction to the film, however, was one of grand disappointment. It’s an arduous film to watch full of interchangeably unlikeable, apathetic characters. In addition, the dialog was dubbed in the studio and loses all of its emotional expression in the process — in fact, according to the program notes authored by K. A. Westphal, the entire soundtrack was meticulously recreated long after shooting was completed [definitely read it for some unbelievable trivia]. In total, though, the film completely neglects the audience and instead slowly stews in its own world.

As such, the film is considered a masterpiece — in part because it deliberately rejects a serviceable narrative, and simply documents the lives of people who are essentially unremarkable jerks. As other reviewers noted, this undesirability of the characters seems to work against the cause of helping Native Americans. However, I took away the point that it was far too late — even in the 1960’s — for the Native American cause. The people depicted on screen are the walking dead of a lost civilization. They drift from heartbeat to heartbeat, resigned to a purposeless fate: their entire culture having been wiped from the earth in what amounts to a mass genocide.

So in a way, I agree that it is a masterpiece. It spoke of the situation of recently-displaced Native Americans (who have been generationally displaced to boot) and what happens when you do that to someone. However, it’s akin to experiencing the beauty of a sword by having someone slice your arm open with it. You can appreciate the workmanship and detail, but its true function is to cut and to kill, so what better way to truly immerse yourself in its beauty than by taking part in its primary function? The amoral, artistic side of me understands that that would be the pinnacle of sword examination, but the rest of me, well, doesn’t really want to get cut.

And so, with my mighty blog and website and stuff, I set forth a demand to appeal to the audience. [And by that, I mean that I know that there are some Eastman House employees who will read this, and might consider bringing it up at a programming meeting, if the mood suits them.] My friends and I have had this kind of experience many times before: when a film is considered “great” or “important” for reasons other than how well it is appreciated by the average audience, but is noted for being altogether brilliant in its cinematic quality. I, personally, tend to enjoy these films too, but I need to be mentally prepared for them, and when I’m unprepared and end up getting blindsided, I find myself alienating the Dryden. I seek other avenues for entertainment … at least for a while. And I always end up coming back, and hopefully sooner than later.

I propose, therefore, that the Dryden begin offering “audience appreciation” films. This is different from “popcorn movies” which offer purely an experience of entertainment; rather a delineation of cinematic masterpieces that overlaps the “popcorn” genre. It’s movies where the filmmakers consider the audience to be the most important part of the process.

Understandably, it’s a difficult aspect to divine — after all, The Exiles had the audience at the forefront of its production as much as any other movie, and perhaps even more for respecting their knowledge and wisdom. Consider how different it is from Encounters At the End of the World, though: it’s as if the audience is a cherished friend invited to explore something new and fascinating rather than colleagues already insatiably interested in the topic at hand.

Put simply, there’s a difference between “cinematically important” and “enjoyable”.